First off, a warm welcome to any Huffington Post readers visiting us for the first time.
By a stroke of good fortune, a top notch teacher I know who has been using elements of the Critical Voter curriculum in his AP English class is also a writer for the educational pages of HuffPost, and was kind enough to pass along something I wrote to his editor.
I didn’t realize that this column came with an account to continue blogging on their site, which I hope to do (without diminishing from adding new material to this blog), although it may be worth finding a comparable right-leaning site to also blog at in order to preserve the non-partisan cred of the whole Critical Voter project.
With that out of the way, I can’t believe I’ve gotten this far without mentioning one of the longest standing resources for critical thinking education in the country: the Foundation for Critical Thinking which is celebrating 30 years of providing training and education to teachers interesting in finding new ways to integrate critical thinking into their classrooms.
Much of the Foundation’s programming is based on the work of Dr. Richard Paul who, along with Dr. Linda Elder (current President of the Foundation) writes, speaks and presents on topics central to the Foundation’s mission, much of it built around their own model for critical thinking.
That model, which suffuses the Foundation’s many publications on the topic, is constructed around a set of Elements of Thought (which includes Point of View, Purpose, Question at issue and other critical thinking components), and Intellectual Standards (including Clarity, Accuracy, Precision, and many more). They also provide a list of traits for a critical thinker that we’ve visited before in our discussion of Intellectual Humility paired with Intellectual Courage.
While my own approach to the topic is a bit more of a pragmatic blend of classical wisdom and modern cognitive science, the Foundation takes pride in a model that, while drawing from ancient and modern sources, stands alone as their own comprehensive framework.
Having read several books published by the organization (and even taken an online course from them), I would say that their material is most suitable for teachers trying find ways to introduce critical thinking into different disciplines. That said, they also publish a series of mini “Thinkers Guides” on such subjects such as Fallacies, Bias and other subjects Critical Voter listeners will find familiar.
And don’t miss out on their article database, a part of their site I lost myself on for a month a couple of years back, which contains readings on everything from Cicero and Newton to the latest thinking in instructional design.
While the field of critical thinking education suffers from a number of challenges, too many people working in it is not one of them. So kudos to the Foundation for Critical Thinking for the three decades they have put into inspiring people to think about their own thinking.
