I help to direct three initiatives designed to assist students in reasoning more carefully and disagreeing more productively. All three rest on the conviction that critical thinking is teachable, that it can be assessed, and that students who learn to analyze arguments are better equipped to explore controversial questions across their differences.

At the national level, I direct Integrating Civil Discourse into the Curriculum funded by FIPSE in the U.S. Department of Education, trains faculty fellows across a network of partner campuses to integrate two classroom tools: Thinker, which that helps students map the structure of an argument, and Sway, which structures respectful discussion of contested ethical questions. Partner institutions include Notre Dame and Harvard, alongside public, private, community, and historically minority-serving colleges and universities.

At the state level, I co-direct with Geoff Sayre-McCord ICDC-NC, the first attempt to institute the ICDC curriculum across an entire state system. With funding from the University of North Carolina Common Ground Collaborative, all 17 UNC campuses have faculty fellows integrating Thinker+ Sway into their courses.

At the university level, I co-direct with Irina Mikhalevich thinkPACK, in which a dozen faculty from the College of Humanities and Social Sciences are integrating Thinker into their classes.

To assess our success, we use a free evaluative instrument I developed with Daniel Gruehn, the Critical Reasoning and Inference Test. CRIT measures whether students’ reasoning actually improves, so that we can show, rather than merely assert, that Thinker + Sway teach critical thinking and civil discourse effectively and efficiently. 

What we are now trying to find out is whether they can do so at scale.