FREE PREVIEW: Critical Thinking for Every Classroom

The following is a FREE PREVIEW of our latest book, Critical Thinking for Every Classroom:

Introduction for Teachers

Teachers want what is best for their students. They choose a profession that promises to contribute to the creativity, knowledge, and emotional strength of tomorrow’s innovators and servant-leaders. Teachers are fundamentally givers and only collaterally do they receive the joy of a front-row seat to the lifelong impacts of their efforts.

The broader community expects them to nurture students. But paradoxically, those controlling compensation signal that teachers, who should serve important social needs,  get salaries that send a different message. Consequently, educators have only limited status in a culture that frequently equates the worth of a person’s life to dollars earned. 

A 2022 study published in Education Week by scholars at Brown University revealed a dramatic decline in teachers’ job satisfaction. It is at its lowest level in 50 years, with 42 percent of educators saying the stress of their job is worth it, compared to 81 percent in the 1970s. Meanwhile, interest in the teaching profession among high school seniors and college freshmen is at its lowest point in the last 50 years, dropping 50 percent since the 1990s and 38 percent since 2010.

Teachers find themselves struggling to convince a skeptical public that the work teachers provide is essential to a healthy democracy. That work is multi-faceted. But if there is a single goal proclaimed by educators at all levels, it would probably be critical thinking. If we lived in a simpler world where truth and nonsense wore clearly identifiable hats, there would be no need for learning to ask questions distinguishing between sense and nonsense. In such a world, we could trust that social media does not contain conspiracy theories, disinformation, and misinformation. There would be little need to protect ourselves from worthless or even dangerous advertisements, purportedly secret techniques for gaining piles of wealth, diets capsules with well-hidden side effects, or far-fetched paths to certainty.

But we live in a different world in which mental hygiene must be taught and learned. The attitudes and skills of critical thinking are neither part of our DNA nor sought out by most humans. None of us can be expected to yearn for skills that we do not know we lack. As such, the cognitive health of a culture depends heavily on well-meaning teachers who model and share these attitudes and skills with their students.

All teachers would love to enhance the critical thinking skills of their students.  However, their training as well as the expectations of the institutions where they teach present a troublesome paradox. Expressions of affection for critical thinking exist side by side with widespread neglect of coursework focused on critical thinking. Schools at all levels, business leaders, and teachers all swear their loyalty to pursuing “critical thinking.” However, except for a few courses in philosophy, statistics, and discussions of the Scientific Method in science courses, the curriculum contains no explicit training in critical thinking. There are no departments of critical thinking with the responsibility to champion critical thinking. 

How can such a universal goal be assigned so little space in our educational system? The best response we can muster is a phrase often used in analyses of humanity’s failure to address environmental decay: everyone’s business often becomes no one’s business. In other words, because the environment is both fragile and universally significant to our way of living, there is no need for me to pay attention to its problems, for you will surely guard its integrity. Similarly, individual classrooms do not focus on critical thinking because every classroom will supposedly give it extensive attention. This method of avoiding responsibility has been documented repeatedly when investigating why so few assist others in an emergency situation. We see so many actors in the area that we see no need to act in a display of empathy.

To be a teacher is to have numerous pressures and responsibilities. Peer reviews, students with different learning capabilities, research expectations, grading responsibilities, and loyalty to our individual subjects leave little room for anything other than a laser focus on the specific curriculum of existing specialties. In short, teachers are busy and they have little remaining time to teach anything else.

We have devoted more than five decades trying to figure out why there is such a gap between the verbal commitment educators have to critical thinking and the disappointing mental performance of so many who graduate from our schools. We talk about “thinking below the surface” and “doing deep dives” as we construct the thoughts and behaviors that shape our identities. But those signals about our identities become wise only after we have learned to ask questions that reveal the quality of the pathways we have used to form our beliefs, conclusions, and decisions (our “BCDs”). In short, we need to learn and apply critical thinking.

This book is not a comprehensive critical thinking text; it is about the essentials of critical thinking. 

Many of us yearn for the well-toned bodies of a yoga or Pilates guru. But realistically we do not have the time to imitate the hours and hours of stretching that resulted in their physical conditioning. Instead, we need coaching that does a couple things. First, we need to know the five to ten exercises with the greatest impact on developing our sustained physical health. Second, we need to know where to find exercises that focus on specific areas of the body in case we have a desire to address particular aches and pains.

When we decided to be teachers, we were motivated by empathy for learners versus dreams of mansions or the latest high-end Porsche. Our own teachers once liberated us from layers upon layers of oversimplification, blindness to the rich tapestry of human imagination, and the flood of mistakes flowing from superficial knowledge. We cringe to think what our lives would have been like had our teachers not focused on our mental and emotional needs.

To prepare for passing along the gifts of understanding we hoped to share with learners, we needed specialized training. We learned to love chemistry, accounting or theatre, which was optimized by courses expanding our knowledge in that area. As our training narrowed, it also deepened. This narrowness is reflected in the many areas of study that we avoided as our specialized understanding increased. Therefore, we became a particular kind of teacher who introduced ourselves as a Psychology or an Art History teacher. 

When the time to teach arrives, we teach within the confines of our training in a single discipline. At our best moments, we fulfill our responsibilities to inspire a lifelong fascination with that discipline. A method of teaching that trespasses on questions from other areas of specialization would not make sense.

But at some level, we recognize educational objectives beyond our disciplinary silos. Emblazoned on the animated websites and colorful brochures of educational institutions  is an open embrace of both silos AND skills needed by every voter, consumer, entrepreneur and friend. Such skills are exclusive to no specialization or major. They are essential to optimization of every discipline.

Yet with some noteworthy exceptions, schools assume that critical thinking skills and attitudes develop as a person encounters them in the specialized curriculum. However, individual subjects encourage some elements of critical thinking with practical application to their practices, such as thinking like a lawyer, a biologist or an artist. While one of us was regularly cited in educational impact literature to have demonstrated that students learn critical thinking generally, my research suggests the opposite. When asked to evaluate reasoning or evidence, all but a small percentage of graduating college students can think of no criteria for assessing persuasive reasoning beyond the maxims We need to “know the other side,” and “have evidence for the conclusion.” Both mental habits are important. However, critical thinking requires evaluating alternative perspectives and distinguishing compelling evidence from the weak.

Our book is simple enough that teachers can spend very little time teaching critical thinking, providing only some advice and support for those reading the book. Critical thinking has dozens of components, but  in this book, we emphasize clarity, including only the most powerful elements of critical thinking with illustrations of these skills.,We recommend that any class time you allocate to critical thinking skills be on those that apply directly to your class. The theme here is efficiency, to offer as much critical thinking training as possible with minimal  need to formally teach dozens of critical thinking skills. We ask you to trust that we have included only the most valuable critical thinking skills to protect the reader from those who  seek their money, votes, time and loyalty. In addition, these skills provide a justifiable confidence that a critical thinker’s beliefs, conclusions and decisions  are based on relevance, curiosity, respect for reason, dependable expertise, careful reliance on evidence, and humility.