One of my dearest interest is to teach critical thinking as I think this is the one thing students can take away from their college experience. This paper challenged my understanding of critical thinking as a transversal concept.

Let’s simply list my main take-away from this paper, then, we’ll dive into each of them one at a time:

1. Critical thinking relies on deep structure recognition as opposed to superficial structure as the latter is obvious and only the former focuses on patterns across different situations;

2. Once acquired, critical thinking skills might not be broadly applicable because it remains disciplinary specific (i.e., analysis means something different in Literature, History, or Biology for example);

3. There needs to be some curriculum effort to coordinate critical thinking teaching to have a long-lasting effect (not that one teacher cannot have an impact, but it will be limited);

4. Finally, knowledge is still crucially needed as a driver for critical thinking teaching ... the key is to decide which knowledge as opposed to all knowledge for the sake of it.

1) Deep versus Surface structures

First, if you google this you might encounter a different while quite similar concept originally developed by Noam Chomsky. Simply put by the ICHARS organization:

“Deep structure is what you wish to express and surface structure how you express it in with the help of words and sentence.”

Although similar to this approach, in the context of education and most importantly teaching, deep and surface structures are both referring to what students extract from problem prompts. On one hand, the surface structure being the obvious information given by the prompt and what images it triggers in students’ mind. For example, a problem about a dolphin population experiencing a boom due to the increase in preys evokes sea, cruise, and feeding related images to mind. Another example focusing on the plateauing of a deer population (i.e., the stabilization of the population of deer around a specific number of deer in a particular area) in a National park evokes images of forests, meadows, grazing, hunting, and protected lands to mind. On the other hand, the deep structure is the underlying properties of the problem, less obvious to students’ eyes. For example, returning to our two previous examples, students should recognize the shared emphasize on population dynamic (and its related equation describing both the increase and plateauing phases mentioned in the dolphin and deer examples).

Why does this matter? Because critical thinking is about teaching students to recognize those deep structures. Finding the deep structures and the similarities between problems is the key to progress in their learning journey. It is hard to do, though. Thankfully, practice seems to be the key and focusing on repetition seem to yield good results when trying to have students identifying those deep structures. However, the journey needs to start with the surface structures. Indeed, deep structures will remain hidden if students do not first learn the basics and the content. A good analogy is between a chess grandmaster and a novice. Few grandmasters can explain how or why, but their capacity to recognize positional patterns and assess positions as favorable or not is very good. The novice will struggle to see any of those patterns until they develop a deep (ironically) understanding of the game from pieces values and movement capabilities, to tactics and end-game techniques.

Therefore, the good news is that teaching critical thinking must start by making sure students learn the ropes (the dreaded course content). The bad news is that it is hard to get students to see the deep structure patterns without spending a lot of time on various exercises. One avenue to explore is to present two problems side by side. Both have a similar deep structure while widely different surface structures. Then, ask students to discuss the differences and similarities between those problems. Another thing to keep in mind is to stay away from step-by-step problem solving instructions as slight variations will throw students off … simply labeling the steps with the goal they achieve solves this problem!

2) Is critical thinking too disciplinary specific?

This one is easy enough to explain, but not easy to reconcile with. Perhaps not surprisingly, an expert in one field is assumed to have extensive critical thinking skill associated with this specific field. However, turns out that very same expert might not be doing as well in other field, even close related ones! Rest reassured that they will still be better than novices and by far, but critical thinking honed in on field does not completely transferred to another field, no matter how closely related. Far from a sliver lining, this seems to me as a great news in fact: Keep at it, keep learning, and you will become naturally better in a whole lot of areas! Should we be so concerned about this? Certainly, we should keep this in mind and strive for more overlap between fields. Maybe the way critical thinking is taught leads to this incomplete transfer of skills? Nonetheless, teaching critical thinking still yields huge payoff for students who learn those skills. Not completely transferable does not mean not worth learning … on the gradient from useless to useful it seems that critical thinking still stands closer to useful by a lot.

One of my favorite quote from the article relevant to what is discussed here:

Perhaps most surprisingly the analytic abilities of professional philosophers do not extend to everyday judgments. Philosophers are no less susceptible than average adults to being swayed by irrelevant features of problems like question order or wording (Schwitzgebel & Cushman, 2015).

It’s almost like the conclusion here is “we are all humans” and no amount of excellence will ever make us immune to brain farts …

3) Curriculum wide coordination is needed

Lone professors working hard to teach critical thinking can still have an impact; yet, a concerted effort is going to be more effective. If anything, simply because with more inputs (from all faculty involved) we get more and better outputs. Starting with a couple of colleagues is great, have a teaching teams for all faculty teaching the same course is better. The next step is to make sure communication channels exist between course teams, especially when courses are linked in students’ journey in at the institution (e.g., General Biology I and II). Furthermore, having teams is not a cure-all, there needs to be purposeful action toward developing a set of learning outcomes and learning skills for each course. Armed with those lists, each faculty can then focus on teaching those specific points and skills with targeted assignments. Finally, beyond departmental coordination, making sure the institutions have clear missions and if not that wide of a mission, making sure the college/unit know their student population well enough to serve them according to their needs. It is the most important part of all this: What are students seeking in their education? What is their next step and how can we help them get there? Not that all learning needs to be laser focus on job opportunity, but aiming in the correct direction is necessary and we all know that students learn so much more when they understand why they are learning the material.

I’m lucky to be part of an institution (Wake Technical Community College) where most of that work has already been and is continuously done. This is the first step toward teaching critical thinking: the direction. With the direction established, wading through the (dreaded) content and selecting what is relevant becomes possible. The final step of coordination, as eluded above, is to make sure there is some type of articulation of those learning objectives and skills over the students’ journey in the institution. We talked in #1 why repetition is important for critical thinking, if we do not implement repetition across curriculum when focusing on critical thinking we are only having students work through disconnected units and the chances that they retain any of the critical thinking skills diminish greatly.

4) Curating as a key to teach critical thinking

It will hurt a lot of people, but it is unlikely that most of your students need to know as much as their professors on all the subjects they encounter during their studies. Nonetheless, if they learn how to learn … or how to fish … you see where I’m going here. For that objective to be achieved, it is going to be essential to distance ourselves from our course content. It is not anymore sufficient to be the depository of knowledge, the well of science (Dr. Google beats you any day at that, if used well … see where this goes?). Giving students a textbook and having them read it never worked, why would it work even when we decide what content we choose? Because once the content is curated, designing assignments achieving the goals we want our students to meet becomes the next step in effective course design. Nothing happens in a vacuum and everything needs good foundations to get anywhere. I will leave us with that last thought, my understanding of teaching critical thinking in my classroom as reach the point where I’m wondering how I can get my students to buy in learning the things I want them to learn. I can’t simply tell them to learn them because I said so, they’ll try to find ways around doing the work. That’s why I now spend so much time repeating why we are doing what we are doing, and how is it going to benefit them in the long run. I wouldn’t dream of saying it’s working (I need to quantify it first), but it’s where I am now. What about you?