Our New Teaching Critical Thinking Guide

Faculty across disciplines want students to think critically, but critical thinking can be difficult to define, teach, and assess. It isn’t a single, generic skill that students simply acquire by encountering challenging material. What counts as strong reasoning depends on the questions, evidence, methods, and standards of judgment within specific disciplines.

The Faculty Commons’ new guide for Teaching Critical Thinking distills key research into practical guidance for the classroom. It can help you identify the thinking moves already embedded in your discipline, make those moves more visible to students, and create deliberate opportunities for students to practice, examine, and strengthen their reasoning.

Our guide includes

• four foundational principles for teaching critical thinking,

• evidence-based approaches to explicit instruction, modeling, practice, discussion, and metacognition,

• guidance for assessing the quality and development of students’ thinking, and

• adaptable examples, activities, rubrics, and a cross-disciplinary menu of critical thinking moves.

Access our guide offers language and strategies that you can adapt to the forms of critical thinking most authentic to your courses and disciplines.