Foundation for Critical Thinking

Tomorrow: Free Webinar Workshop "Recognizing and Handling Conflicts Using Critical Thinking" Wednesday, February 19th 1:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time (10:00 a.m. PST) https://lnkd.in/ghN9nZfw Description: Human conflict can arise for numerous, often overlapping reasons that operate in tandem, including: -Clashing purposes, or purposes wrongly seen as clashing. -Ignorance or misconceptions of one another’s intentions, beliefs, or point of view. -Faulty assumptions. -Preoccupation with trivialities. -Differing views of what questions, goals, and risks are most important. -Egocentric and sociocentric thinking. -The impacts made by emotions and desires on reasoning. This list is far from exhaustive. In many cases, the true causes of a conflict remain unknown to one or each party involved. Participants may misapprehend the sources of strife, thereby stumbling down unproductive or counter-productive avenues of thought and communication; other times, they may disregard why friction is occurring as they focus entirely on concluding the dispute in their own favor. In all the above circumstances, critical thinking can help. It can shift focus from declarations to exploration – for example, by uncovering the roots of conflict through probing questions about such factors as relevant purposes, points of view, and how words are being used. It can illuminate misconceptions on each side of a disagreement by explicating ideas, assumptions, information, and interpretations. It can help highlight solutions by finding new information, raising prior questions that generate context, and reasonably evaluating implications. This webinar will discuss lesser-known ways that irrationality can provoke or worsen conflict, and it will offer methods of critically analyzing conflicts with a view of evaluating their components to find fairer resolutions.

"Few of us are good historians or philosophers in the matter of our own lives. But then, no one has encouraged us to be. . . . We don't see ourselves as shaping our experience within a framework of meanings, because we have not learned how to isolate and identify central issues in our lives. Rather we tend to believe, quite egocentrically, that we directly and immediately grasp life as it is. The world must be the way we see it, because we see nothing standing between us and the world. We seem to see it directly and objectively. We don't really see the need therefore to consider seriously other ways of seeing or interpreting it. As we identify our point of view (philosophy) explicitly, and deliberately put its ideas to work in interpreting our world, including seriously considering competing ideas, we are freed from the illusion of absolute objectivity. We begin to recognize egocentric subjectivity as a serious problem in human affairs. Our thought begins to grapple with this problem in a variety of ways. We begin to discover how our fears, insecurities, vested interests, frustrations, egocentricity, ethnocentricity, prejudices, and so forth, blind us. We begin to develop intellectual humility. We begin, in short, to think philosophically. Children have this need as much as adults, for children often take in and construct meanings that constrain and frustrate their development and alienate them from themselves and from healthy relationships to others." ~Richard Paul in "The Contribution of Philosophy to Thinking" https://lnkd.in/gtXTSBwQ To develop your reasoning, learning, problem-solving, decision-making, and teaching on your own schedule, consider a 30-day free trial in the Center for Critical Thinking Community Online, the world's largest digital repository of critical thinking resources, literature, videos, etc.: https://lnkd.in/gCi9FX37

Free Webinar Workshop: "Recognizing and Handling Conflicts Using Critical Thinking" Wednesday, February 19th 1:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time (10:00 a.m. PST) https://lnkd.in/ghN9nZfw Description: Human conflict can arise for numerous, often overlapping reasons that operate in tandem, including: -Clashing purposes, or purposes wrongly seen as clashing. -Ignorance or misconceptions of one another’s intentions, beliefs, or point of view. -Faulty assumptions. -Preoccupation with trivialities. -Differing views of what questions, goals, and risks are most important. -Egocentric and sociocentric thinking. -The impacts made by emotions and desires on reasoning. This list is far from exhaustive. In many cases, the true causes of a conflict remain unknown to one or each party involved. Participants may misapprehend the sources of strife, thereby stumbling down unproductive or counter-productive avenues of thought and communication; other times, they may disregard why friction is occurring as they focus entirely on concluding the dispute in their own favor. In all the above circumstances, critical thinking can help. It can shift focus from declarations to exploration – for example, by uncovering the roots of conflict through probing questions about such factors as relevant purposes, points of view, and how words are being used. It can illuminate misconceptions on each side of a disagreement by explicating ideas, assumptions, information, and interpretations. It can help highlight solutions by finding new information, raising prior questions that generate context, and reasonably evaluating implications. This webinar will discuss lesser-known ways that irrationality can provoke or worsen conflict, and it will offer methods of critically analyzing conflicts with a view of evaluating their components to find fairer resolutions.

Dr. Linda Elder, educational psychologist and Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Critical Thinking, discusses the importance of deliberately choosing important purposes while minimizing undue influence from the societies and social groups to which we belong.

"All subjects, in sum, can be taught philosophically or unphilosophically. Let me illustrate by using the subject of history. Since philosophical thinking tends to make our most basic ideas and assumptions explicit, by using it we can better orient ourselves toward the subject as a whole and mindfully integrate the parts into the whole. Students are introduced to history early in their education, and that subject area is usually required through high school and into college, and with good reason. But the unphilosophical way history is often taught fails to develop students' ability to think historically for themselves. Indeed, history books basically tell students what to believe and what to think about history. Students have little reason in most history classes to relate the material to the framework of their own ideas, assumptions, or values. Students do not know that they have a philosophy, and even if they did, it is doubtful that without the stimulation of a teacher who approached the subject philosophically they would see the relevance of history to it. But consider the probable outcome of teachers raising and facilitating discussion questions such as the following: 'What is history? Is everything that happened part of history? Can everything that happened be put into a history book? Why not? If historians have to select some events to include and leave out others, how do they do this? If this requires that historians make value judgments about what is important, is it likely that they will all agree? Is it possible for people observing and recording events to be biased or prejudiced? Could a historian be biased or prejudiced? How would you find out? How do people know what caused an event? How do people know what outcomes an event had? Would everyone agree about causes and outcomes? If events, to be given meaning, have to be interpreted from some point of view, what is the point of view of the person who wrote our text? Do you have a history? Is there a way in which everyone develops an interpretation of the significant events in his or her own life? If there is more than one point of view that events can be considered from, could you think of someone in your life who interprets your past in a way different from you? Does it make any difference how your past is interpreted? How are people sometimes harmed by the way in which they interpret their past?' These questions would not, of course, be asked at once. But they should be the kind of question routinely raised as part of stimulating students to take history seriously, to connect it to their lives, minds, values, and actions. After all, many of the most important questions we face in everyday life do have a significant historical dimension . . . " ~Richard Paul in "The Contribution of Philosophy to Thinking" https://lnkd.in/gtXTSBwQ

"A substantive concept of education not only highlights the qualities of the educated person, but also implies the proper design of the educational process. There are essential minimal conditions for cultivating educated minds. These entail modes of instruction that facilitate development of the standards, abilities, and traits of the educated person. All of the traditional content areas of school may be, but typically are not, taught so as to conduce to those standards, abilities, and traits. For example, when history is substantively taught, it is taught as historical thinking, the major goal: to give students practice in thinking historically (analyzing, evaluating, and reconstructing historical interpretations and problems). As a result, students learn not only how to read historical texts with insight and understanding, but also how to gather important facts and write well-developed historical essays of their own. Through this mode of instruction, students come to see the significance of historical thinking both in their own lives and in the life of culture and society. History becomes — in such a transformed mind — not random facts from the past, but a way to reason about the past to make intelligent decisions in the present and reasonable plans for the future. . . . When students are taught using a substantive concept of education as the guide to the design of instruction, they learn to initiate, analyze, and evaluate their own thinking and the thinking of others (within all the content areas they study). Doing so, they come to act more reasonably and effectively in every part of life. They are able to do this because they have acquired intellectual tools and intellectual standards essential to sound reasoning and personal and professional judgment. Self-assessment becomes an integral part of their lives. They are able to master content in diverse disciplines. They become proficient readers, writers, speakers, and listeners. They use their learning to raise the quality of their lives and the lives of others. They become reasonable and fair-minded persons capable of empathizing with views with which they disagree and disagreeing with views uncritically accepted by those around them. They are able to use their reasoning skills to contribute to their own emotional life and transform their desires and motivations accordingly. They come to think, feel, and act effectively and with integrity." ~Drs. Richard Paul & Linda Elder in A Critical Thinker’s Guide to Educational Fads (2019, Rowman & Littlefield) To be part of the solution and develop your reasoning, learning, problem-solving, decision-making, and teaching on your own schedule, consider a 30-day free trial in the Center for Critical Thinking Community Online, the world's largest digital repository of critical thinking literature, videos, activities, and so on: https://lnkd.in/gCi9FX37

“The history of education is also the history of educational panaceas, the comings and goings of quick fixes for deep-seated educational problems. This old problem is dramatically on the increase. The result is intensifying fragmentation of energy and effort in the schools, together with a significant waste of time and money. Many teachers become increasingly cynical and jaded. It is time to recognize that education will never be improved by educational fads, and that the manner in which educational trends are marketed guarantees that they will be transformed into fads. Fads by their nature are fated to self-destruction. Parents, educators, and citizen activists need to understand the problem of educational fads so that they can effectively distinguish substantive efforts at educational reform from superficial ones. Hence the motivation for this guide. By ‘fad’ we mean an idea that is embraced enthusiastically for a short time. In schooling, this typically means a short-lived emphasis on a seemingly wonderful new idea that will transform teaching and learning without much effort on anyone’s part. Since by definition a fad will quickly come and go, it cannot be expected to improve instruction in any significant way. By ‘trend’ we mean a general tendency or movement in a certain direction. Trends in schooling typically last 7-10 years, but may last longer. . . . Most educational trends or fads originate in reasonable ideas. All reasonable ideas about education enhance instruction when integrated into a substantive concept of education. They fail when imposed upon instruction through a non-substantive, fragmented conception of education, which is unfortunately typically the case in schooling today.” ~Drs. Richard Paul & Linda Elder in A Critical Thinker’s Guide to Educational Fads (2019, Rowman & Littlefield) Until students learn to think critically through content in a comprehensive, explicit manner, their “learning” amounts largely to the temporary memorization of atomized lists of data points and concepts, little to none of which they internalize for use in future reasoning. Until educators learn to think critically in a comprehensive, explicit manner, they cannot reliably design instruction that helps foster this ability in students. Until administrators learn to think critically in a comprehensive, explicit manner, they cannot reliably undertake professional development that helps foster this ability in educators. To be part of the solution and develop your reasoning, learning, problem-solving, decision-making, and teaching on your own schedule, consider a 30-day free trial in the Center for Critical Thinking Community Online, the world's largest digital repository of critical thinking resources, literature, videos, etc.: https://lnkd.in/gCi9FX37

"When teachers approach their subjects philosophically, they make it much easier for students to begin to integrate their thinking across subject matter divisions. In the preceding discussion, for example, the issues considered involved personal experience, psychology, sociology, ethics, culture, and philosophy. The issues, philosophically put, made these diverse areas relevant to each other. And just as one might inquire into a variety of issues by first asking a basic philosophical question, so one might proceed in the other direction: first asking a question within a subject area and then, by approaching it philosophically, [exploring] its relationships to other subjects. These kinds of transitions are quite natural and unforced in a philosophical discussion, because all dimensions of human study and experience are indeed related to each other. We would see this if we could set aside the blinders that usually come with conventional discipline-specific instruction. By routinely considering root questions and root ideas philosophically, we naturally pursue those connections freed of these blinders. As teachers teaching philosophically, we are continually interested in what the students themselves think on basic matters and issues. We continually encourage students to explore how what they think about X relates to what they think about Y and Z. This necessarily requires that students' thought moves back and forth between their own basic ideas and those presented in class by other students, between their own ideas and those expressed in a book, between their thinking and their experiences, between ideas within one domain and those in another. This dialogical process (moving back and forth between divergent domains and points of view) will sometimes become dialectical (some ideas will clash or be inconsistent with others). The act of integrating thinking is deeply tied to the act of assessing thinking, because, as we consider a diversity of ideas, we discover that many of them contradict each other. Teachers should introduce the critical, analytic vocabulary of English (to be discussed presently) into classroom talk, so that students increasingly learn standards and tools they can use to make their integrative assessments. Skilled use of such terms as 'assumes', 'implies', and 'contradicts' is essential to rational assessment of thinking." ~Richard Paul in "The Contribution of Philosophy to Thought" To develop your reasoning, learning, problem-solving, decision-making, and teaching on your own schedule, consider a 30-day free trial in the Center for Critical Thinking Community Online, the world's largest digital repository of critical thinking resources, literature, videos, etc.: https://lnkd.in/gCi9FX37

Dr. Linda Elder, educational psychologist and critical thinking theoretician, discusses the role of purpose in mental wellness.

Available Now! Critical Thinking Therapy: For Happiness & Self-Actualization by Dr. Linda Elder, critical thinking theoretician and educational psychologist. In color: https://lnkd.in/g99SuG8T In black & white: https://lnkd.in/gcpntRZb E-book available soon! This book introduces a substantive theory of critical thinking to the field of mental health therapy and details a broad, integrated set of critical thinking tools for use in self-therapy and professional therapy. It is for the individual seeking a more enlightened, more fulfilled, less fearful, and less self-defeating orientation to the world. It is also for those who are aware that they are not now reaching their potential and who seek a self-actualizing frame of mind. This book vastly broadens and deepens the critical thinking concepts and principles explicitly available to therapists; it is therefore recommended for use by therapists with clients, as well as for clients and individuals working alone. “Who doesn’t want to live a happier life in work, parenting, friendships, finances and all of its dimensions? In Critical Thinking Therapy, Linda Elder blends her extensive theoretical knowledge and teaching experiences to guide readers on new ways to achieve these goals—using explicit tools for better thinking. Her sane advice and easy exercises, if taken seriously, should help pave the way towards better mental well-being and greater self-fulfillment.” — Elizabeth Loftus, PhD, Distinguished Professor of Psychological Science, University of California,Irvine, named by APA as one of the 100 most eminent psychologists of the 20th century