How to teach critical thinking to beginners

Do you drive a car? So, can you tell me how the carburettor works? Or about the importance of wheel differential? Maybe you can – and if you want to be a Formula 1 driver, that’s great. But a vast majority of us just need to know the fundamentals of how to drive. In your first driving lesson, did you sit in the driver’s seat? Or did the instructor pop the hood and say, ‘So this is how it works…”

My name is Dr Sarah Ivory, I’m a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, and I’m going to explain how this analogy applies to introducing critical thinking to your university students, and the stunning results you will see in your students if you choose to do this explicitly – but carefully – and not in the way that critical thinking is traditionally introduced.

Following a number of years of postgraduate teaching, I took on the challenge of redesigning our first-year undergraduate offering. And I soon realised that these students were intelligent and enthusiastic, but they didn’t know how to think critically.

So I thought I would explain it to them, I’d explain what critical thinking is and how to do it. And I just couldn’t explain it. I could do it; it’s my bread and butter, it’s what I do every day.

But when actually explaining how, I got caught up in long-winded and not useful explanations, which ended with saying “so you need to…think…more…critically”.

But what does that actually mean, and how should they do it?

So I started looking into it, and I found that resources for students often jumped from generalist study skills all the way to critical thinking as a philosophical idea comprising logical proofs, laws of thought and Aristotle.

And there is nothing wrong with that. If you want to be an expert in critical thinking, this is important – in the same way that if you want to be a Formula 1 driver, you need to understand your car. But our students, especially our young students, don’t need this, not when they are just first being introduced to the idea.

What they need is something that is understandable and – and this is key – something they can apply and do. I want to explain why those two things are different and equally important.

I developed a definition of critical thinking in my book, and it draws on many other experts, and it is this: “Critical thinking is a cognitive process of actively and carefully evaluating the reasoning and evidence behind knowledge and arguments and developing defensible knowledge and arguments ourselves.”

This makes the concept understandable. But it does not make it useable. A student can learn this definition off by heart, they can even understand what it means, and still not be able to think critically.

Let’s return to our car analogy. They need some time in the driver’s seat. They need to press the accelerator and feel the vehicle move. A definition of driving doesn’t make us a driver, any more than a definition of critical thinking makes us a critical thinker.

So I introduced three simple aims of critical thinking which I teach my students. I teach them this on day one, and I come back to it in every lecture and, importantly, they know that each of these aims is one of the three criteria by which I will assess all of their assessments.

The big three aims of critical thinking, that I teach, are:

• quality of argument
• strength of evidence
• and clarity of communication.

Purists among you may suggest that “clarity of communication” is a communication rather than a thinking aim, and they’d be right. But communication of our arguments and evidence is essential to developing and improving these through discussion and critique.

These three aims are simple, yes. But they are also the foundation stones of more complex critical thinking, logical proofs et cetera, that can come later if students are interested.

To teach “quality of argument”, I suggest you use argument maps which visually depict a claim, which is a position or a proposition, which is linked to a premise, or hopefully a number of premises, which represent the line of reasoning.

Students can practise developing their own argument maps for the topics of your specific lecture, of your specific discipline.

For “strength of evidence”, it is really important to demonstrate when evidence is needed, and how to assess different types of evidence. This can be discipline- and topic-specific.

But I find that the key here is if I explain to students why I want them to use certain sources, why academic sources, and also when other sources are either useful or acceptable. Then they engage more in making their own judgements about those sources of evidence.

Finally, it is essential to get your students to practise both written and spoken arguments, and that is their “clarity of communication”.

At the end of each of my tutorials, I allocate 10 minutes for students to sit and draw an argument map based on a claim I write up on the board linked to whatever I was just teaching. I ask them to write a paragraph then explaining their argument map.

Towards the end of semester, when they’re just a little bit more confident, I will then ask people to talk, to speak up and to talk us through their argument.

The first time my students attempt this, it is a disaster, lots of descriptive writing, incoherent, unlinked facts or opinions. By the end of semester, just 12 weeks later, they are getting it. And to be clear, I don’t mark these.

Students come to the realisation themselves on what is working in their written or spoken arguments, and what isn’t. That is, the quality of their critical thinking.

I can confidently drive a car. I can even put myself in difficult situations like driving on the other side of the road. And I still don’t know how a carburettor works.

Thank you for your time.

Sarah Birrell Ivory is a lecturer in climate change and business strategy at the University of Edinburgh Business School.

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