Critical Thinking for Teachers

Abstract

Firstly, there is no single, commonly agreed denition of the term 'critical thinking'. However, most commonly as teachers we use it to refer to what are known as the higher-order thinking skills. These higher-order thinking skills are skills that require us to think in a deeper, more complex manner. If you are familiar with Bloom's taxonomy, think of the upper levels of the hierarchy-analyze, evaluate, create. We could also add infer to this list of critical thinking skills. Put simply, critical thinking requires the student to engage in an objective analysis of a topic and evaluate the available information in order to form a judgment. Critical thinking demands a systematic approach to evaluating new information. It encourages us to question and reect on our own knowledge and how we arrive at the opinions we have and make the decisions we make. C A R T (0)