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Critical thinking skills is essential in everyday life and an important skill to help foster in as an instructor in an educational setting.
This is already shaping up to be an interesting module! I really liked and learned from the characterisitcs and steps involved in critical thinking. I'd like to introduce my intro students to these subjects and their corresponding elements, to help start them on a good track to critical thinking throughout the program, careers and lives.
Critical thinking skills are essential in education, as they are in life. They are also difficult to develop and difficult to employ. It is much easier and much quicker to use emotion to solve problems and answer questions. That is how most of us approach politics, religion, and purchasing decsisions. We need to instill in our students a desire to approach decisions objectively and to allow the knee-jerk reaction phase to pass so that problems and questions can be solved and answered from a stand point of clarity and reasoning.
I learned about the characteristics of critical thinkers: Be informed, process information to fit our lives and personalize the information as applicable to our lives.This application can be applied in my role as a nurse educator to keep myself informed, and plan, implement the ideas or activities to fit in to enrich the students' learning experience.
Crictical thinking has been used since the start of early generations ( Fire) Students need to use critical thinking skills in efforts to be a btter leraner and sort out inaccurate information
In my profession, we often refer to critical decision making, which would imply that a person in our profession is thinking critically (and because we work in health care, thinking ethically) before making a judgment call about how to help a person reach their health goals. This requires that we not only make decisions based on our previous knowledge and training, but also seek out the most current information based on various levels of research and study. This allows us to base our decisions on fact and not rely so much on the potentila short-comings of our current knowledge and experience. It also allows for an objective analysis prior to making decisions, rather than relying on emotion. It is this process that we try to weave into teaching the students and future professionals in our field of practice. This is typically accomplished by noting a real-life problem and seeking to find the most effective solution based upon research and evidence and then following up with outcome measures to determine if the solution was actually effective in improving people's lives.
Show students the importance of finding facts about a situation to make a decision on what is best
I feel critical thinking can be taught but it really depends on the student and what their goals are.
The biggest challenge with youger students is if they cannot get "instant"results to a problem most will not invest the time or effort to engage in critical thinking even after they process is explained and demenstrated to them. Too often if they just say "I don't know" someone else will will supply them with an answer.They cannot see a place or time in their future they don't have access to a electronic device "phone" or someone else to give them answers.
Critical thinking is self-directed, self-disciplined, self-monitored, and self-corrective thinking.
Using critical thinking is important and is a process. Unfortunately some lack criticsl thinking skills and we must tap into that to assist them.
Critical thinking needs to be introduced to young students because it becomes much more difficult to instill and instruct it in adults with little problem solving experience. Start the process in elementary school!
I've learned that critical thinking is a process. It takes time to develop a strong skill and that it needs to be practiced regularly. If you don't use it you lose it.