I direct two initiatives that help college faculty teach students to reason carefully and disagree well. Both 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 discuss divisive questions across their differences.

The national initiative, 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.

The University of North Carolina System initiative extends this work across the 17 campuses of our state-wide System. Co-led with Prof. Geoff Sayre-McCord at UNC-Chapel Hill, we help faculty fellows across the state to integrate Thinker+ Sway into their own courses.

Underpinning both initiatives is an assessment instrument I co-developed with Prof. Daniel Gruehn at NC State. The Critical Reasoning and Inference Test (CRIT) measures whether students’ reasoning actually improves, so that we can test, rather than merely assert, that Thinker + Sway teach critical thinking and civil discourse effectively and efficiently at scale.