Review of "Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom" by bell hooks

• Review of Teaching Critical Thinking by hooks.pdf (application/pdf Object)

This review is interesting in itself, but I am planning to read the book as well. 

• tags: elpcrithnk

 

More on Critcial Thinking

I've run across some interesting (at least to me) articles related to Critical Thinking in the last couple weeks.  I'd like to share some of them with you because, A) they might be instructive as we continue work on the curriculum reform, and B) they might help us better understand and deal with some of our internal communication problems.  I have tagged everything under "elpcrithnk", so all of this is in the helpicu Google Reader, as well as in Delicious, but I know that many of you never look at what is being tagged, so here are the links:

1. Ideas from Ryan Bretag  and Stephen Downes on the nature of Critical Thinking.  In the case of Bretag, he has compiled an amazing list of all the attributes of Critical Thinking that he has found so far from various sources.  Downes takes off from that with his own view of what makes up critical thinking.

2. An article by Barbara Fister, "In the Teeth of the Evidence", which comments on some of the difficulties in teaching CT to university students, "Maybe instead of teaching rigorous analysis that tests ideas to see if they break, we need to put a little more emphasis on understanding them better first. A little more empathy and lot more respect for evidence could go a long way."

3. A draft paper by Peter Elbow, (referenced in Fister's article) about The Believing Game,   In this paper he posits that in addition to "The Doubting Game", which is what he calls the kind of critical thinking that is the academic norm, we also need to develop the contrasting skills of looking for what is possibly good in ideas we aren't intuitively drawn to,

 "....critical thinking often helps us fend off criticisms of our ideas or ways of seeing. We see this problem in much academic and intellectual interchange. When smart people are trained only in the tradition of the doubting game, they get better and better at criticizing the ideas of others that they don’t like. They use this skill particularly well when they feel a threat to their ideas or unexamined assumptions. Yet they feel justified in fending-off what they don’t like because they feel they are engaged in "critical thinking." They take refuge in the feeling that they would be "unintellectual" if they said to an opponent what in fact they ought to say: "Your idea sounds really wrong to me. It must be alien to how I think. Let me try to enter into it and get a better perspective on my thinking--and see if there's something important that you can see that I can’t see.” In short, if we want to be good at finding flaws in our own thinking (a goal that doubters constantlytrumpet), we need the believing game."

4. Finally, a very interesting effort to create a (more or less) standardized test of critical thinking, which is being used by a number of US. liberal arts colleges and universities.    It is called the CLA Test, which stands for Collegiate Learning Assessment.  This 27 page pdf file explains the design of the test, gives examples of the question prompts, the evaluation rubrics, and samples of student responses. 

Testing as a good thing

Eide Neurolearning Blog: Hot Seat Learning - Why Testing is Not All Bad

How can we in the ELP/ELA apply this emerging wisdom?

The Role of the Educator in the Digital World ~ Stephen's Web

• The Role of the Educator in the Digital World ~ Stephen's Web
  Presentation by Stephen Downes which lists 23 roles and counting.  Interesting overview of the increasing complexity teaching in the digital age.
  tags: elpcurr fifthlearn

Eide Neurolearning Blog: Analogy as the Core of Cognition

• Eide Neurolearning Blog: Analogy as the Core of Cognition

  Good video of a Stanford Presidential lecture. "Hofstadter believes that analogy making is at the core of all cognition, and what is especially interesting is how frequently analogies seem to occur in everyday experiences and how complex the parallels can be when suddenly we have a flash of insight, "That's just like...(something else)"."

  tags: elpcrithnk

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Two kinds of knowledge

• Two Kinds of Knowledge ~ Stephen's Web

  One of the questions that is imbedded in this discussion of the nature of knowledge and learning is what kind of knowledge is represented by language itself -- is language tacit or explicit, or both?  I think that how we understand this is critical to language teaching.  This gets even more complicated when we mix language teaching with content teaching.

Communications & Society: Complexity and Personal Learning Environments

• Communications & Society: Complexity and Personal Learning Environments

  Very interesting blog post on the connection of complexity theories and learning with some suggestions for redefining critical thinking.

  tags: complexity ple elpcrithnk

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, Volume 1 | Writing Spaces

• Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, Volume 1 | Writing Spaces

  Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, Volume 1, is a collection of Creative Commons licensed essays for use in the first year writing classroom, all written by writing teachers for students. Because of the Creative Commons licensing, you can upload these texts to your personal website, share them with colleagues and students, or put them on your institutional learning management system class website. Topics in Volume 1 of the series include academic writing, how to interpret writing assignments, motives for writing, rhetorical analysis, revision, invention, writing centers, argumentation, narrative, reflective writing, Wikipedia, patchwriting, collaboration, and genres.

  tags: elptw

ELI Discovery Tool: Guide to Collaborative Learning | EDUCAUSE

• ELI Discovery Tool: Guide to Collaborative Learning | EDUCAUSE

  The Collaborative Learning Workshop Guide offers a set of action-oriented, modifiable, modular activities for use in faculty development, staff retreats, or institutional planning. Each of the modules contains topical guidelines, content, resources, and best practices, and each can be easily customized to fit the needs of your institution, department, or unit.

  tags: fifthlearn

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Think Differently!!: Google on Innovation

• Think Differently!!: Google on Innovation

  Link to a talk by Google's VP of Search Products given at Stanford on innovation. Nice summary of her main points as well.

  tags: innovation, google

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

The Cynefin Framework and (the Complexity of) Classroom Instruction | andrew j. cerniglia

• The Cynefin Framework and (the Complexity of) Classroom Instruction | andrew j. cerniglia

  tags: fithlearn, chaos

This is a specific application of this concept to education, which seems worthwhile.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Homeland Security Affairs: Article - Changing Homeland Security: Shape Patterns, Not Programs

• Homeland Security Affairs: Article - Changing Homeland Security: Shape Patterns, Not Programs

  An article that is attracting some attention because of its applicability to much more than homeland security. I think it has something to offer our curriculum development efforts.

  tags: elpcurr, fifthlearn

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Harold Jarche » Literacies

• Harold Jarche » Literacies

  Interesting questions about the past and future of what it means to be literate.

  tags: arwvof, rcavof, elpproc

What's the test of a good school? - Telegraph

• What's the test of a good school? - Telegraph

  Article with some strong connections to our current ELP curriculum reform efforts -- found and passed on by Chris Gallagher.

  tags: elpcurr

The New Writing Pedagogy

• The New Writing Pedagogy

  How writing and the teaching of writing appear to be undergoing a major change. "That change is spelled out clearly by the National Council of Teachers of English, which last year published “new literacies” for readers and writers in the 21st century. Among those literacies are the ability to “build relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and cross-culturally,” to “design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes,” and to “create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multi-media texts.” Very little of that kind of work is possible to achieve without expanding the way we think about writing instruction in the context of online social tools."

  tags: elparw, elprca, elptw, elpcm

Lyrics Training - Improving your foreign languages skills

• Lyrics Training - Improving your foreign languages skills

  Site that provides music videos with subtitled lyrics. The lyrics have words missing and students try to fill them in as they listen to the songs. Available for several languages. it might be fun to have students create their own and share.

  tags: elpcm

Bad Arguments

• Bad Arguments

  Site that presents a variety of arguments, many taken from real life such as arguments made in support of not extraditing "a famous film director" from Switzerland to the US, and then presents multiple choice options for why the argument is flawed. After you choose what you think the flaw is, you get feedback on whether you were right or wrong and why.

  tags: elpcrithnk

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Currents - Stitching the World Together - NYTimes.com

• Currents - Stitching the World Together - NYTimes.com

  Interesting analysis of today's global pioneers and pilgrims. It might be good to ask ICU students which of the categories, if any, they feel they do or might someday belong to as well as what other categories they can think of.

  tags: elp, globalization

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Donald Clark Plan B: Massive increase in words consumed

• Donald Clark Plan B: Massive increase in words consumed

  interesting statistics on exposure to words and how we are exposed to them.

  tags: arwvof

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Students Find Free Online Lectures Better Than What They're Paying For - Technology - The Chronicle of Higher Education

• Students Find Free Online Lectures Better Than What They're Paying For - Technology - The Chronicle of Higher Education

  There is a wealth of good lecture material out there.