Practical Strategies for Critical Thinking

de Jan Rehner

This brief guide demystifies the process of critical thinking by identifying and illustrating a number of specific problem-solving strategies that students can apply to their own college courses. It encourages students to become more aware of their own patterns of thinking and to develop strategies for applying critical thinking systematically and creatively to the world around them. Throughout, the guiding questions are, "How does this strategy work?" and "How can I use this strategy to become a more effective critical reader, thinker, and writer?" Critical thinking typically involves both a set of activities and a particular attitude toward thinking and learning. The practical activities of a critical thinker include, for example, various strategies for asking questions, testing assumptions, and generating ideas. One aim of this book is to make such activities explicit to students by providing a repertoire of strategies that can be applied to individual learning situations. The notion of application is central to the attitude of critical thinkers, who take an active rather than a passive approach to learning. Thus, a second aim is to encourage students to try the strategies in other courses and classrooms, in contexts that are personally meaningful or rooted in a particular academic discipline. Practical Strategies for Critical Thinking can be used as a core text for critical skills and composition courses or in conjunction with a wide range of courses in the humanities and social sciences. The question, "How can I use this strategy to become a more effective critical reader, thinker, and writer?" is answered by linking each strategy to a particular critical skill. For instance, students can use branching as a strategy for generating ideas, role-playing for examining an issue from multiple perspectives, and freewriting for analyzing a text. In this way, students learn to recognize the kinds of problems and tasks that recur in a range of courses and begin to develop the thinking skills necessary to solve the problems and succeed in the tasks.