Instructor Tools:
Questions are a big part of critical thinking and the following resources should help you when you’re posing your questions to students and when you are supporting students to learn to pose well-formed questions themselves.
Questioning Strategies offers guidance for using questions while you’re teaching. It suggests how to prepare questions and how to handle students’ responses and non-responses.
Checking for Understanding Activities includes a list of question stems on pg. 3 to help you write questions to use during lectures and discussions.
Self-evaluation and metacognition are often considered important facets of critical thinking. The following resources should help you to support students’ development as metacognitively aware and self-reflective learners.
Structures for Student Self Assessment from the Foundation for Critical Thinking offers suggestions for in-class activities, some of which could be adapted for distance education, that will encourage students to articulate their understanding so that they can engage in self-evaluation and peer-evaluation. The suggestions for strategies related to reading and listening may be particularly useful.
Communicating in Math Classrooms includes a video and background essay illustrating techniques for encouraging students to consider and explain their reasoning during problem-solving activities. Though based on a math example, the technique could be applied in many classes.
Reading is a necessary precursor to much of the critical thinking we ask our students to do. The following resource may help you to anticipate and address difficulties your students will encounter when they are adjusting to the reading required in college courses.
Harvard Report This summary of a (possibly fictional) research study done at Harvard is a reminder that we need to help our students learn to avoid “obedient purposelessness” when reading for classes. “The exercise of judgment in reading requires self-confidence, even courage, on the part of the student who must decide for himself what to read or skip.”
Strategies to Help Students “Go Deep” When Reading Digitally is an article with a few suggestions from UC Berkeley’s History-Social Science Project about how students can be taught to interact with digital texts to find main ideas and to paraphrase in order to digest difficult texts.
Student Resources:
7 Ways to Improve Your Critical Thinking Skills is a brief, informal webpage that tries to explain critical thinking, how it differs from “everyday thinking” and what it takes to think critically. It might provide an introduction to your students about the purpose and value of the CT skills you require in your class.
Thinking-Intensive Reading this page offers students tips on how to read critically in order to be ready to use what they have just read.
How to Mind Map a Textbook is a step-by-step guide to creating a set of mind-maps to facilitate note taking and to make it easy to refer back to a visual, well-organized representation of the book you’re reading.
A Simple Guide to Text Annotation includes what type of information to be looking for in the text in order to annotate it and some suggestions for annotation shorthand.