Every college class I took had been designed to develop my “critical thinking skills.” I remember completing course evaluations and being asked whether I thought my professors had helped me develop those skills. What I don’t remember is ever being taught just what they were, what they looked like in practice, or how I would be tested to prove I had them.
The same is true of the courses I now teach, which are mainly Composition 1 and 2, but also Literature and Creative Writing. The college where I work is charged by the state that gives it funding to ensure that its students leave their courses with the ability to think critically.
So, what does this mean, exactly?
According to my state’s administrative code, critical thinking involves the capacity for “creative thinking, innovation, inquiry, and analysis, evaluation and synthesis of information.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s description is even vaguer. The term’s “definition is contested,” it admits, but each competing meaning revolves around the act of “careful thinking directed to a goal.”
Instructors like me have an idea in our minds of what students should be doing when they think critically. This idea, shaped as it is by our own educational experiences, both as students and as teachers, may differ widely from course to course.
The lack of a universally agreed-upon definition isn’t per se problematic. But in my experience, today’s college students, having gone through high school during the pandemic and being taught in large part “to the test,” struggle with any work that requires them to learn, much less think, in any other way than rote memorization.
This doesn’t mean they’re not capable of critical thought. It does mean, though, that they might benefit from a clearer explanation of what their teachers mean by it.
With this in mind, I’ve started explicitly talking about it with them — something none of my professors, good as they were, ever did — from the beginning of each term to the end. I bring up the sections of the syllabi that mention the course outcomes, and I tell my students what these outcomes mean: that it’s not just me or even the college but also the state that expects them to demonstrate critical thought in their work for the course. I might then ask them what they think they should be doing to show they’re thinking critically. Either they’re too shy to venture an answer or they genuinely don’t know.
So I try to explain by way of examples. I’ll tell them how I learned to write while in college, to not just regurgitate what I’d learned via summary but to take things a step further, to do something with the material — to form and express an opinion on it and to support that opinion with evidence.
This often seems abstract to them, so I’ll try to make connections to “real life.” I’ll show them a phishing scam email and ask them whether they’d click on the link at the end. When they say no, I’ll ask them why. Invariably they point out the strange email address and the text in the body, which strikes them as off, somehow, even if they can’t describe why.
Once they’ve done this, I’ll let them know that they’ve just thought critically.
But have I taught them anything they didn’t already know? I don’t think so. I’ve simply made them more aware of their own thought processes.
Still, it usually takes them a while to do this on their own in writing. They’re not used to being asked to think for themselves — and to express those opinions in essays. I see a lot of summary-based writing, and in my feedback I let them know that this is good but that they now need to take their own stand on the issue[1].
That’s how we’ve assessed critical thinking in composition courses up to this point: original thought conveyed through original writing. This is hard enough — both for professors to teach and for students to show they can do it. But now that generative AI has been thrown into the mix, it’s even more difficult. And infuriating.
Infuriating not so much because the students use it, but because there’s a push among educators to incorporate ChatGPT and similar tools in ways they shouldn’t be used. The writing of “boring” emails, according to this line of thought, can be outsourced to machines, as can the creation of assessments. Future comp courses, some educators believe, will be less about learning to write than they’ll be about learning to edit.
I can’t begin to explain all that’s wrong with this, but it starts with the basic fact that you can’t learn how to edit if you’ve never learned how to write in the first place.
This is why I tell my students not to let a robot do their thinking — or their writing — for them. This is why I encourage my students to develop their own writing voice. If everyone starts writing like ChatGPT — which is already beginning to happen — that is, if everyone’s writing sounds exactly the same, we’ve failed to teach our students how to think at all, which puts our already-precarious democracy that much more at risk.
There are no easy answers for this, no cookie-cutter, one-size-fits all method to teach and learn critical thought. To search for such a method is to try to short-cut the learning process — the trial and error, the wrestling with conflicting ideas, the failure, the growth that comes through hard work.
After I read bell hooks’ Teaching Critical Thinking, I went, for whatever reason, to Goodreads and read the book’s reviews. Several users took the author to task for not directly providing a method for learning to think critically. These reviewers, I think, were missing the point. The book is filled with anecdotes of hooks’ experience in education, both as a learner and as a teacher. By telling these stories, she gives a model for how critical thinking might be learned and taught.
Perhaps, then, we should be less focused on a definition of the term, or on a single way to teach it, and more on modeling behavior that exhibits it: curiosity, empathy, refusal to jump to conclusions, willingness to put in the work and to question authority, others, and, crucially, ourselves.
As to how we might assess this, there are, again, no easy answers. What I can say is that we need it now more than ever.
Note
[1] I let them choose their own topics, which often comes as a surprise to them; they aren’t used to this and in every class at least a few students have trouble deciding on one.
