Hello Elizabeth, thank you very much for your reply. The TED talk is very interesting.
I am pleased to say that I have always worked in settings where good questioning was encouraged: asking questions to work out *how* the student knows, how they are thinking, to support higher level thinking. My last school was very keen on Bloom’s Taxonomy and we had to show what we were doing to move children’s thinking to higher levels.
My fascination with critical thinking dates back to 1996 when, as part of my degree, I took a foundation module entitled “Theory and Society”. We did not use the word “critical thinking” then. The learning outcomes included: “understand the distinctions drawn between fact, opinion and value judgement; and between a line of argument, its assumptions and the evidence use to support it – both within academic discussion and other forms of discourse; understand the various ground rules and conventions that shape social scientific theory-building and research and know how to begin to assess the quality of the knowledge claims generated within the social sciences; identify different modes of reasoning and arriving at defensible conclusions; and identify what makes some ways of presenting argument and evidence seem more compelling than others.
I can honestly say that doing this module changed my way of reasoning and understanding what I read in the news etc.
My problem at the moment is that I am practising on the King Alfred the Great paper and… I am not making any progress. I thought it would be easy but I just cannot move on from Connect. (I have posted separately about this).
Anyway, thank you very much for all the replies. It is all stimulating.
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