Educating for critical thinking: thought‐encouraging questions in a community of inquiry

Abstract

This paper presents one method for educating for critical thinking in Higher Education. It elaborates Richard Paul’s method of Socratic questioning to show how students can learn to be critical thinkers. This method combines and uses the wider pedagogical and critical thinking literature in a new way: it emphasises a thinking‐encouraging approach where the academic teacher scaffolds students to think for themselves, rather than leading them to understand a body of knowledge, and is based on isolating and articulating critical thinking by ‘reverse engineering’ the questions expert critical thinkers ask. The result of using this method is that students will be immersed in the practice of making critical judgements where they will hone their critical skills, cultivate a critical character and begin to speak, act and think like expert critical thinkers.

Keywords:

• community of inquiry
• critical thinking
• questioning
• Socratic dialogue

Notes

1. The origin of the ‘community of inquiry’ is Peirce’s (1912) theory about how scientific knowledge is constructed by the community of scientific inquirers. This has been most prominently developed as a pedagogical praxis in the philosophy in schools tradition founded by Matthew Lipman (2003). See also Gregory (2007a) for a survey of the literature on using a community of inquiry in other disciplines such as science, mathematics, social science and art. This also has similarities to the tradition of situated learning in a ‘community of practice’ (Wenger, 1998).

2. Approaches that purport to teach general critical thinking so it can then be applied in specific contexts can be re‐interpreted in‐line with this developmental model. For example, Davies (2006) presents an infusion model, advocating that students be taught general argument mapping and evaluation skills, which they then apply to their specific disciplines. This model could be reinterpreted as advocating that students should learn the developmental core of argument analysis that can be developed into specific disciplinary variations.

3. Jones’ (2007, 2009) research into conceptions of critical thinking in different disciplines could support this developmental position. While she finds important differences between the conceptions of critical thinking involved in different disciplines, she also finds ‘elements that run across most of the disciplines’ (2009, p. 95).

4. Other successful methods of educating for critical thinking can be understood in a similar way. For example, the Reason!Able approach using computer software to diagram and analyse reasoning (van Gelder, 2002) need not be understood merely as a means of practising the skills of argument analysis and, instead, can be understood as a means of initiating students into the practice of critical thinking. Like my method, Reason!Able isolates and makes explicit what a critical thinker does – organizes arguments into evidence and conclusions, so that a clear evaluation can be made – and has students participate in the resulting culture of argument analysis. Although this involves diagrams rather than questions, the same educative principles are at work.