Teaching Critical Thinking across the Curriculum / John Chaffee.

The need for colleges to develop critical thinking skills in mainstream courses is emerging as an issue of national significance. Students benefit from clearly articulated and pedagogically sound courses that directly and explicitly teach thinking skills, as well as from efforts to reinforce these abilities across the curriculum. At LaGuardia Community College (LCC) in New York, the thinking skills program began with a course entitled "Critical Thought Skills," which seeks to develop students' writing, reading, and speaking skills; address basic thinking, reasoning, and problem-solving skills; and encourage students to explore their attitudes toward life and education. For the past four years, one section of the course has been paired with other courses selected from a variety of disciplines. The intellectual abilities taught in "Critical Thought Skills" are reinforced as the content of the two courses is integrated. Students enrolled in "Critical Thought Skills" paired with writing and reading courses have developed language skills at accelerated rates, through substantive writing assignments, critical evaluation of challenging readings, and thoughtful discussion. The pedagogical focus of the program stresses the relationship between what students are learning and their own experiences, building systematically from concrete, familiar contexts to more abstract, conceptual understandings. Thinking skills are taught through a process of synthesis, giving students the means to clarify and make sense of themselves and the world in which they live. The final elements in LCC's critical thinking program are faculty development, collaboration, and ownership of the program. (AJL)

Practitioners. ericd

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