Critical Thinking is a broad subject, I want to focus on this powerful statement:
-It’s not about mastering the content, but about understanding the process.Today, facts are very easy to find, but processes are often un-googleable or burried inside pages of facts. Yet people continue to memorize facts without understanding the processes.
Processes connect facts in unexpected ways that make all the difference in a conversation. Processes are the keys to understanding how the world operates.
For example:
- It is more important to know that carbon dioxide emissions cause climate change than to know the precise amounts involved.
- It is more important to know that the world's population is levelling off than to know the precise future number. Ideas and links: OVERPOPULATED - BBC Documentary
- It is more important to know that objects in orbit are falling around the earth than to know the precice altitude of their orbit. One gives you an expanded understanding of gravity, the other just another fact.
Conversely, a sure sign of Altzheimer's is forgetting a process such as: What a pencil is used for.
Food for thought.
Steve
More quotes from Peter Ellerton's article:
...Learning about what the differences are between hypotheses, theories and laws, for example, can help people understand why science has credibility without having to teach them what a molecule is, or about Newton’s laws of motion.
...thinking is not so much something we do, as something that happens to us. We are not as in control of our decision-making as we think we are.We are masses of cognitive biases as much as we are rational beings. This does not mean we are flawed, it just means we don’t think in the nice, linear way that educators often like to think we do.It is a mistake to think of our minds as just running decision-making algorithms – we are much more complicated and idiosyncratic than this.How we arrive at conclusions, form beliefs and process information is very organic and idiosyncratic. We are not just clinical truth-seeking reasoning machines.Our thinking is also about our prior beliefs, our values, our biases and our desires.
...But ideally, ... focused on the thinking of their students as well as the content they have to cover.
Source: How to teach students to think critically - Forum:Blog Forum:Blog | The World Economic Forum
