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Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Tomorrow's Professor: Tomorrow's Teaching and Learning - Intellectual Habits of Critical Thinkers



Intellectual Habits of Critical Thinkers

Fair-mindedness entails a consciousness of the need to treat all viewpoints alike, without reference to one's own feelings or selfish interests. It is based on an awareness of the fact that we, by nature, tend to prejudge the views of others, placing them into "favorable" (agrees with us) and "unfavorable" (disagrees with us) categories. We tend to give less weight to contrary views than to our own. Fair-mindedness requires us to develop:

1. Intellectual Humility
Awareness of one's biases, one's prejudices, the limitations of one's viewpoint, and the extent of one's ignorance. (e.g., Many U.S. and other Western students consider their ways of life?competition, individualism, materialism, democratic forms of government, nuclear family arrangements, work ethic?superior to non-Western values and living arrangements. Their biases have a profound impact on their understanding of important concepts in the social sciences, the arts, and the humanities.)

2. Intellectual Courage
Consciousness of the need to face and fairly address ideas, beliefs, or viewpoints toward which one has strong negative emotions and to which one has not given a serious hearing; the recognition that ideas that society considers dangerous or absurd are sometimes rationally justified - in whole or in part, (e.g., Any culture has its set of taboos that also affect scientific discourse. Recent examples include stem cell research, gay marriage, Muslim radicalism or any other radicalism for that matter, global warming, atheism, affirmative action, assisted suicide, and pornography. It takes courage to openly investigate any potentiality rational roots for any of these controversial behaviors and beliefs.)

3. Intellectual Empathy
Awareness of the need to imaginatively put oneself in the place of others so as to genuinely understand them. (Old paradigms in the social sciences often treated their research "subjects" as variables that were to be looked at with no emotional involvement in order to guarantee "objectivity." Nowadays, many social scientists are taking a different approach to understanding social environments. To thoroughly understand others' behaviors and intentions, young scholars need to acquire the ability to take their research subjects' perspective, requiring a degree of personal identification previously denounced as a contamination of the research process. Similar abilities have always been considered a precondition for producing and appreciating good literature and other types of art.)

4. Intellectual Integrity
Recognition of the need to be true to one's own thinking and to hold oneself to the same standards one expects others to meet. It also means to honestly admit discrepancies and inconsistencies in one's own thought and action. (e.g., Cutting corners, plagiarizing and cheating have become pervasive not only in college, but also in graduate school and beyond. Society's expectations for accelerated output in every realm of life, including academia, can put tremendous pressure on students to impress with productivity at the expense of academic rigor and relevance. Admitting shortcomings in one's thinking requires just as much courage as fairly addressing viewpoints with which one vehemently disagrees; see point 2.)

5. Intellectual Perseverance
The disposition to work one's way through intellectual complexities despite the frustration inherent in the task. (Many students in our current school system learn to avoid those things that seem too difficult: "Engineering is too tedious," "Math is too hard and "A PhD in Accounting doesn't pay off." Delaying gratification for the fruit of one's labor is as hard for a student as it is for a child to wait for dessert. This applies also to the daily struggle with intellectual tasks. Many students ask for simple answers and are suspicious when their discipline has not yet produced answers to difficult issues, or when those answers remain ambiguous.)

6. Confidence in Reason
The belief that one's own higher interests and those of humankind at large will be best served by giving the freest play to reason, by encouraging people to come to their own conclusions by developing their own rational faculties; faith that, with proper encouragement and cultivation, people can learn to think for themselves. (Confidence in reason is also confidence in others. It is a pedagogical principle that good teachers live by. Students should not be persuaded to adopt their teachers' viewpoints or drilled to approach tasks in one particular way only. Complex understanding needs to be nurtured, not forced. Experiencing the freedom and encouragement to solve problems in one's own way helps create intellectual maturity. This includes the freedom to make one's own mistakes and learn from them.)

7. Intellectual Autonomy
An internal motivation based on the ideal of thinking for oneself; having rational self-authorship of one's beliefs, values, and way of thinking; not being dependent on others for the direction and control of one's thinking. (The traditional teaching paradigm of telling students what to learn through lecture and textbooks turned students into passive recipients of knowledge. Teachers were the experts whom students trusted to always have the right answers. No thinking for oneself was required. The new learning paradigm puts students in control and makes them accountable for their own learning. Learning theory has discovered diverse learning styles, and motivation theory shows that deep understanding is linked with learner autonomy. The more confident students become in finding their own direction, the more likely they are to develop an integrated understanding of the subjects of their study.)


Reference
Paul, R., & Elder, L. (2001). Critical thinking: Tools for taking charge of your learning and your life. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

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