Teaching for Critical Thinking: Tools and Techniques to Help Students Question Their Assumptions (Jossey Bass: Adult & Continuing Education) 1st Edition

A great foundational book on critical thinking. I use ideas from this book to help me design my college classes, and the workshops and classes I lead outside of college. This one's a keeper!

I just finished reading Stephen D. Brookfield, Teaching for Critical Thinking: Tools and Techniques to Help Students Question their Assumptions (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2012). I am glad I read it, I expect to read it again, I have a fairly long short list of folks to recommend it to, and when one of those people asked to borrow it I realized that I didn't want to let my physical copy of it out of my hands because I want it for ongoing reference. In other words, I really REALLY think it's good.Brookfield has a lucid and useful summary definition of critical thinking - "clarifying and checking assumptions by viewing material from different perspectives (79)" - that accompanies his cross-disciplinary perspective on critical thinking. It's all about identifying, questioning and checking assumptions for accuracy and validity to enable informed decisions. Critical thinking won't necessarily change the world - but on the other hand, if the world is going to change, critical thinking will need to be in the tool kit.The author includes a wealth of specific techniques for introducing critical thinking into the college curriculum, across the disciplines. I can imagine myself "speaking in tongues" and engineering some of the critical group exercises he outlines with actual students. He devotes a full chapter to reading and writing critically, and discusses the need for modeling these complex activities for students at length, with helpful examples and demonstrations. A side-effect of this feature is, I think, that the book is warm and funny and wry and endearing, as well as informative.One of the particular delights is a balanced, concise but thorough discussion of the intellectual traditions that value critical thinking and bring it into the university curriculum: analytic philosophy, Enlightenment experimental method, pragmatism [art as experience], psychoanalysis, and the critical theory of the Frankfurt school. Reading a pretty mainstream book in education that lifts up concerns about hegemony and cites Gramsci with appreciation is one of the better intellectual experiences I've had recently.Brookfield also takes critical race theory and feminism seriously, devoting a lot of ink to examples of in-class deconstruction of racial micro-aggression and including a fully serious engagement with the critique that critical thinking protocols represent patriarchal analytic thought-style, in opposition to women's more connected ways of knowing. His response is that critical thinking as he defines it is empirically most effectively a product of social learning, for people of whatever gender, implying that bringing assumptions to the surface of consciousness and checking their accuracy and validity need not be a competitive or adversarial activity. It's clear from this that Brookfield practices what he preaches and teaches.While the book is obviously designed for teachers, it seems potentially valuable for folks in other settings where critical thinking needs to be encouraged, as well. Boards, committees, and task forces come to mind, for some reason.

I found Brookfield's book to be the best survey resource yet available on "critical thinking." Early in the book, the author takes us on a quick tour of the various "traditions" of "critical thinking." I found this extremely valuable. When one sees these arranged together, it is easy to see why each of these "traditions" in itself furnishes an incomplete development of higher-level reasoning if adhered to in a doctrinaire way. Such is the case in many schools.A more comprehensive design in general education to teach the ways of knowing/frameworks of reasoning of the metadisciplines of arts, humanities, sciences, social sciences, mathematics and technology offers a way to bring the best parts of each of these "traditions" to students. If done across curricula rather than confined to a (God forbid) one-term "critical thinking course," students can achieve higher-level reasoning skills.Currently, disciplines teach content and skills and assume that higher level reasoning will result without explicit instruction about the frameworks of reasoning and how to employ them. It will not. This book serves as a nice guide to reflecting on our own assumptions about critical thinking. As we read it, articulating the central concepts of our own metadisciplinary frameworks of reasoning, reflecting on how we teach these, if at all, as we teach our content and skills and how we might do better by making the implicit ways of knowing more explicit makes this read a valuable exercise.

important information and worth keeping as reference, only wish the publisher would allow text-to-speech.