30th Concurrent Presenters

Launching a critical thinking program across your institution, and  fostering engagement with your teachers, staff or students, can present a number of challenges for administrators.  This session will guide participants in engaging with an implementation model and growth strategy developed by the University of Louisville (UofL).  Launched in 2007, the UofL Ideas to Action initiative has created lasting critical thinking programs and curricular structures across the disciplines and in the student affairs and student service arenas.  The session facilitator will share “lessons learned” in fostering organizational change that places critical thinking as a common value and curricular framework; participants will consider how they might transfer these concepts to their own institutions.  An interactive worksheet will guide attendees in applying the concepts to their work; bibliography and assessment tools to measure change readiness are included.

Abstracts from University of Louisville

In 2007, the University of Louisville launched its quality enhancement plan (QEP) titled Ideas to Acton:   Using Critical Thinking to Foster Student Learning Community Engagement.   This ten-year initiative is centered upon the development and assessment of students’ critical thinking skills and the promotion of community engagement across the undergraduate curriculum. The Ideas to Action (i2a) program is part of UofL’s commitment to ongoing improvement as part of the regional reaccreditation process.   The Paul-Elder critical thinking model provides the framework for the teaching and learning innovations faculty and staff are creating as part of i2a at UofL. These innovations include the development of new or revised learning tools, assignments, assessments, programs and teaching and learning strategies.   The i2a staff and campus partners are promoting critical thinking infusion and “Paul-Elder integration” by facilitating new learning communities, developing workshops and small group sessions, offering individual consultations, creating resource materials and fostering cross-disciplinary conversations about critical thinking. To learn more about the i2a critical thinking work at University of Louisville, go to: https://louisville.edu/ideastoaction

Presenters from the University of Louisville:

Drawing on the Thinker’s Guide The Art of Asking Essential Questions, this session is organized to generate successful methods for designing higher education curricula, specifically senior-level experiences that blend critical thinking concepts with focused reflection, integration, and application.  Capstone courses offered at the culmination of undergraduate education are common structures for these activities.  Participants will work closely through the three areas of questioning outlined in this guide: analytic questions, evaluative questions, and questions within academic disciplines, together with best practices on integrative and experiential learning to develop course components for genuine and authentic experiences.  Exemplars and best practices from the literature and University of Louisville courses will be shared with participants to help generate creative and innovative approaches to integrating critical thinking.

The purpose of this session is to share strategies and student outcomes for incorporating the Paul-Elder critical thinking framework into a large enrollment introductory psychology course.

This course was revised to explicitly focus on critical thinking skill building.   This session will include information about, and sharing of, a resdesigned core assignment that focuses on the “logic of an article.”  Other strategies build on the Paul-Elder framework of critical thinking and include the use of iclickers, YouTube and random number generators.  This session will be interactive and participants will be given the opportunity to assess the effectiveness of these strategies for their own classroom use.

This session will focus on strategies for communicating the practical benefits of critical thinking within academic, personal and professional domains. Participants will explore the power of critical thinking and the Paul/Elder framework for personal decision-making and practical problem-solving, as well as applications of the framework to catalyze “breakthrough” creativity and design innovative solutions. Participants will also envision a fair-minded critical society, review the intellectual traits necessary to create such a society, and practice a conversational model that communicates the relevance of critical thinking within the context of the greater good.

The Paul-Elder critical thinking framework provides academic advisors with tools for understanding how students make meaning of their academic experiences. Socratic questioning provides a vehicle for advisors to engage students in a reflective dialogue that probes student perceptions and uncovers factors that may help or inhibit student success. Professional academic advisors at the University of Louisville are involved in a pilot project that incorporates the concepts of the Paul-Elder framework, Socratic questioning, intrusive advising, basic counseling techniques, and the NACADA teaching/learning paradigm of academic advising into an innovative approach to advising students in academic peril. The purpose of this session is to share how the University of Louisville academic advisors are planning an intervention program to foster student engagement and success through the art of Socratic questioning.

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Team-based learning (TBL) is a pedagogical method that compels students to ask the right questions to learn content. Students are assigned individual study before class to master fundamental concepts. In class, student learning of concepts is assessed through individual and team readiness assurance tests. This is followed by a team exercise that requires students to ask the right questions to solve a relevant problem. This session will illustrate how this works by engaging the participants in a TBL exercise.

There exists copious amounts of literature disseminated from the Foundation for Critical Thinking that promotes the following point of view: A non-questioning mind is an intellectually dead [emphasis added] mind. By the way, have you ever taught or matriculated a course in which your mind drifted into the realm of irrelevance? Now, think of a specific class that exemplifies the aforementioned course and ask yourself: Was the class characterized by incessant lecturing (i.e., didactic instruction) or was it made alive by the questions emanating from the instructor and classmates? With the intent of promoting the Socratic spirit, this presentation will utilize the threat of nuclear war evinced during the Cold War era to generate spontaneous and issue-specific questions amongst the participants. Moreover, participants will gain insight into how to develop a pedagogy that utilizes disparate methods (e.g., video, music, role play, document reading) designed to generate a classroom that comes alive with questions.  For example, how does the film Rock IV aid a student in gaining an understanding of the Doomsday Clock and how that particular concept is relevant today? Just keep that question in mind as you prepare to enter the frigid era of the conflict between two superpowers. 

Questions can be the underlying structure for an introductory course in a social science such as sociology. Creation of knowledge within the social sciences is based on the questions posed by the research method model. By using the elements of reasoning and the intellectual standards, an instructor is able to prepare meaningful lectures and assignments. Questions guide students to a deeper involvement with the logic of the discipline. Some examples of such assignments will be presented in such a way as to allow concurrent session participants to initiate their own course assignments using this approach.

On the Educational Testing Services (ETS) website video, Positioning Educational Assessment for the 21^st Century, Distinguished Presidential Appointee Irwin Kirsh states that 50 percent of high school graduates lack the reading and mathematics skills needed for college entry. Yet, many of these students attend community colleges or four-year colleges and universities, and struggle to adapt academically. How do we engage their minds to bridge the content knowledge gap between where they are upon entry, and what they ought to know to succeed in college-level courses?  Developing questioning minds in these under-prepared college freshmen as they transition from high school to college is the focus of this session.  Using the critical thinking elements, standards, and traits as a basis, participants will explore practical ways to guide the development of freshman-level basic skills for under-prepared college freshmen.

This is a session designed to help teachers at both the grade school and college levels implement and facilitate critical thinking about literature in the classroom.  We will discuss each of the elements of thought (point of view, purpose, question at issue, information, interpretation/inference, concepts, assumptions, and implications/consequences) as they specifically relate to literature.  First, after discussing each of the eight elements by themselves, I will give a concrete example using a specific poem or other short (one to two pages) piece of literature.  Then, we will work together as an entire group relating each of the eight elements to a different short piece of literature.  We will then break up into small groups.  Each small group will work together relating each of the eight elements to a third short piece of literature. Then, each small group will share their work with all of us.  We will repeat this small group sequence, substituting a different short piece of literature each time, until almost the end of the session.  We will reserve time for questions, general thoughts, and discussion of the overall experience.

The cognitive skills needed for patient care include the ability to utilize an existing knowledge base, critical thinking and independent learning skills. In the fields of medicine, nursing and optometry the acquisition of these skills is a required outcome of the educational process.  In the health care professions, the focus on the need to teach cognitive reasoning skills is relatively new. In the past, students were expected to “naturally” acquire these skills while immersed in clinical training.  However, in today’s health care environment, the complexity of health care delivery and the emphasis on productivity, demands a student clinician, who has a solid understanding of cognitive reasoning skills before starting clinical training. The New England College of Optometry developed and implemented the Clinical Reasoning Course (CRC) sequence, to facilitate and augment the teaching of cognitive skills. Innovative teaching pedagogy was used to create an active learning environment. This environment stimulated students to learn by questioning, peer teaching and self directed study. This session will describe the pedagogy and facilitate a discussion of common challenges and practical solutions.

Revision is essential if we want our students to become competent, self-reflective writers.   While it is essential for students to be taught the basic rhetorical modes and strategies, it is more important for them to identify when they are using those strategies effectively and purposefully. 
Question-based peer review, if done well, can be tremendously effective towards this end.  This session will look at several questioning and revision techniques that allow students to interrogate their work through student-teacher conferences, peer revision teams, self-reflection, and self-evaluation.

Action research has shown the power of the Elements of Thought to give learners agency over their own thinking. This session will focus on using the logic wheel to help students uncover and illuminate how they are reasoning. We will walk through the process of teaching the wheel, explore examples from diverse subject areas, then construct wheels relating to our own disciplines. Participants will gain a deeper understanding of the Elements of Thought, successful strategies for teaching the wheel, along with materials that can be used immediately in the classroom, including a PowerPoint. The session is applicable to all levels of instruction and the strategies presented can be adapted to any discipline.