Critical thinking is a key driver of work that happens on the Social Impact and Education teams at Unity, a company that empowers creators through their real time 3D game development engine. Whether evaluating worthwhile causes to invest in, establishing partnerships with companies and institutions around the world, creating training materials for a diverse audience, or training individuals and organizational teams, the skills of interpretation, analysis, evaluation, inference, explanation, and self-regulation, all identified as core cognitive critical thinking skills (Facione, 1990). These skills are further developed and defined with additional subcomponents by Facione, and while they provide a lot of context, that context can be difficult to remember and teach the deeper one ties to go into the subject matter (Schmaltz, Jansen, and Wenckowski, 2017). The overarching skill categories identified by Facione are at least a starting place for this work though, and they can be applied to externship opportunities by teachers such as the professional externship component of Mindspark STEMPath program.

In the first week of the author’s externship experience, it became apparent that that many critical thinking skills are required in the professional space. One of the first tasks was to codesign a presentation on the Unity game engine for a diverse audience of educators who had varying levels of skill, implementation, experience, and implementation in their programs. The analysis and evaluation of appropriate content and the interpretation of user feedback and inferences drawn from audience participation, including from body language, stated questions, and verbal feedback on the lesson presentation all had to be accounted for before, during, and post presentation. This is what great teachers do all the time in their classrooms with kids, and it was interesting to see the same concerns, approaches, and implementation in a professional training space.

As a teacher with experience in the training arena and having developed and given many professional development sessions for adult audiences, the most interesting part of this first official endeavor was not the training in and of itself but rather in having the opportunity to train on a technical tool. In most prior training experiences, it was necessary to stay broad or with topics that provided a surface level overview of generalized teaching topic such as grant writing, social networking, or reading across the curriculum. This training, however, was an opportunity to train subject matter experts in computer science, some of whom had experience with the game development engine, new tricks and strategies for successfully implementing Unity with their own classes in the fall. Topics covered included coding, visual scripting, information about how the engine deals with physics, and a variety of other computer science and real time rending topics.

Finding out who was in the audience, how they were using Unity, which educational levels they support, and their experience both with computer science and with real time rendering in general provided an insight into how to approach the hands-on session where users had the opportunity to engage with the tool. Listening to the formal presentation while walking around helping to support individual teachers required self-regulation, interpretation, analysis, and evaluation of when to step in, when to remind the main presenter about topics that may have been glossed over, and when to slow the presentation down to give people in the room the best support possible. It was clear that in addition to the author’s role in the presentation, the staff member from Unity had also spent a lot of time planning the appropriate content, pacing, and design of the presentation.

As with any human , critical thinking plays a key role in any interaction because without understanding and considering an audience’s need, it is extremely easy to miss the mark on what the other person or people might need, want, or experience. In training, on demand changes to a presentation to accommodate the audience requires flexibility and real-time analysis and evaluation often times rooted in the subtle reactions of others that require good inference skills. Add to all of that that in the described presentation there were also technical challenges that had to be solved in real time, the experience was a study in critical thinking, just like almost any other teaching experience.

Works Cited:

Facione, P. A. (1990). Critical thinking: A Statement of Expert Consensus for Purposes of Educational Assessment and Instruction. Research Findings and Recommendations. Newark, DE: American Philosophical Association.

Schmaltz, R. M., Jansen, E., & Wenckowski, N. (2017). Redefining critical thinking: Teaching students to think like scientists. Frontiers in Psychology, 8. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00459