Critical Thinking Pedagogy

My approach to teaching is informed by both radical pedagogy and backward course design. “Radical pedagogy,” a philosophy of education described by Paulo Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) and bell hooks in Talking Back (1989), understands education as a tool of social transformation. In an effort to develop in students “critical consciousness,” that is, an ability to discern social and political contradictions and thus challenge social oppression in its various forms, teachers should replace the traditional “banking” concept of education for the “problem posing” concept of education. “Backward course design,” described by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe in Understanding by Design (2005), describes a student-centered approach to curriculum development. According to this model, instructors should begin their course design with learning outcomes, that is, what the student should be able to do a the end of the educational experience, rather than in terms of course content or what the instructor will do.

While “radical pedagogy” and “backward course design” may come from very different sources, I find the approaches to be quite compatible. Beginning with the course outcomes rather than course content helps displace the presumption that I, as the instructor, am the only knower in the classroom, ready to make knowledge deposits into the student’s empty minds. Instead, I consider my role as akin to a coach who promotes students’ intellectual confidence by setting high expectations for student performance and providing close guidance and support to help students reach those expectations. To that end, I inform my teaching practice with some of the best scholarship on teaching and learning, I support student research within and beyond the classroom experience, and I provide experiential and service learning activities to help students transfer academic skills to their larger communities.

My use of backward course design is most apparent in my approach to critical thinking instruction. After years of dissatisfaction with how available textbooks taught critical thinking, Paul Newberry and I collaborated on developing our own critical thinking textbook. Titled Critical Thinking: A User's Manual, (Cengage Learning), the book is now in its second edition.

In 2013, I received a CSU Promising Practices Course Redesign grant to improve the pass rate in my critical thinking courses. The plan for my redesign was informed by my 10 years of experience teaching the course, the online instructional development training I received, my work developing Critical Thinking: A User’s Manual with Paul Newberry, and Ann Cahill and Stephen Bloch-Schulman’s award-winning essay, “Argumentation Step-by-Step: Learning Critical Thinking through Deliberate Practice” (Teaching Philosophy 2012). The most recent version of the redesigned course dramatically improved student pass rates. In this innovative version of the course, students learn the course material at their own pace, and because the learning outcomes are scaffolded, they move to the next learning outcome only after they demonstrate competency in the previous outcome. Final grades are then based on how many learning outcomes the student completes.

Although I have not yet had the opportunity to weave together my approach to critical thinking instruction with hers, I am very impressed with Maureen Linker’s book, Intellectual Empathy: Critical Thinking for Social Justice. I published a review of her book in Teaching Philosophy (September 2015).