Pathways to critical thinking

Courtesy of: Mentoring Minds

I found this via one of my LinkedIn groups. Critical thinking skills really are just about being able to think about information rather than just receive it know how to synthesise it and apply it to new and novel situations.

As I think about designing learning experiences for students, it seems to me that the goal is to build properly scaffolded experiences. These will provide enough structure so students have a place to start (usually with some sort of well defined learning outcomes and clear goals), but activities that force the them to engage with, rather than simply receive the information.

As an anecdote, I remember setting up the simple case of sythesising various sources of information on a topic, only to be castigated for not picking consistent and reliable sources for the student to read. They did 16 and found one source to contain errors. Goal achieved even if not appreciated.

While I'm not thrilled with this as being the most well designed infographic, it does contain a number of useful points.