What is Critical Thinking Anyway?
We need a definition for critical thinking that is useful to educators. Everyone knows that critical thinking is important. But what is it exactly? If you ask 10 teachers what critical thinking is you will most likely get ten different answers, most of them hopelessly vague. If you put those ten teachers is different rooms and ask them to create examples of critical thinking, you will get a range of problems and activities at every level of rigor.
A basic Google search for a definition isn’t much help:
“The objective analysis and evaluation of an issue in order to form a judgment.” – Oxford English Dictionary
“Disciplined thinking that is clear, rational, open-minded, and informed by evidence”. - Dictionary.com
“Forms of learning, thought, and analysis that go beyond the memorization and recall of information and facts.” - Edglossary.org
These definitions may be accurate but they are not particularly useful for teachers who are trying to develop critical thinking as a specific skill. In practice, the way we talk about critical thinking has become so diluted that practically any task beyond basic recall can be described as requiring 'critical thinking'.
So I am proposing a new definition of critical thinking that can actually be used to establish criteria useful to teachers who are planning activities. Here it is: “Critical thinking is the application of more than one concept to an unfamiliar problem.”
The two main components here are that there is more than one concept involved and that the problem or text is unfamiliar. Figuring out which concepts to apply, or not to apply, is the critical part of the thinking. The emphasis on an unfamiliar context is a way to keep teachers honest. It doesn’t matter how many steps or concepts are involved, if the teacher just modeled a problem that looked exactly the same, then the students don’t really need to think critically at all.
This definition will look very different when applied across subjects and grade levels but the two fundamental components can hold up in most any context. And this is not to say that this is all that critical thinking is. There is room for additional emphasis on analysis, creativity, evaluation, communication etc…
The hope is just that this definition can give teachers a coherent and applicable definition that can be used when planning activities and assessments. This is a definition that establishes a clear bar for teachers to strive toward when planning units and individual lessons.
If we can get our students into the habit of applying multiple concepts to solve or decode unfamiliar situations, then we can be assured that those students are going to be alright.
