Community of Practice on Critical Thinking
Gerald Nosich said: "Critical thinking is reflective; it involves standards, and it is authentic. Critical thinking is thinking about your thinking as you are thinking in order to make your thinking better.”
As educators, our goal should not be simply to teach a knowledge base, but more importantly, it should be to encourage our students to think effectively and creatively. This is a process, and many of us have learned to do this without being explicitly taught. We should be purposeful with our students and intentionally incorporate the concept of critical thinking and the skills that can help our students to learn more effectively and efficiently.
The Community of Practice (CoP) on Critical Thinking offers gateway faculty an opportunity to collaborate with other like-minded colleagues and to develop a more deliberate understanding of critical thinking and methods of using this in our classroom. This CoP needs and wants faculty from all disciplines since different ways of thinking about our students will only give us more and better ways of engaging our students.
Some of our goals for the academic year include:
- Developing a Canvas site as a repository for methods to be used in the classroom, resources on practices for learning, and resources on how to study
- Learning how to assess critical thinking
- Organizing internal presentations on topics central to critical thinking and learning
- Presenting methods that we have developed at a workshop
We will be reading and discussing Gerald M. Nosich’s book Learning to Think Things Through. We will discuss introducing it into our classrooms with a goal of trying to incorporate critical thinking.
If you have questions or are interested in joining this CoP, please contact Marie Nguyen.