Strategies To Develop Critical Thinking Skills

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Strategies to Develop Critical Thinking Skills Critical-thinking strategies that will help you and the discussion participants dig deeper include full-spectrum questioning, making connections, and honoring multiple perspectives. With these tools, you can add a deeper dimension to a dialogue that is “wallowing in the shallows” of a satisfactory, conventional approach or an unexamined vocabulary. You can also address critical issues of unexamined beliefs or assumptions that might block the path to productive thinking, or explore the reasons for these beliefs/disbeliefs through analogies, without arousing defensive reactions. By implementing digging-deeper strategies, then, you lay open for examination the rationale and implications of participants’ contributions, and you move beyond advocacy of positions to consideration of the “why” aspect of propositions or claims that are held to be valid. Critical thinking varies according to the motivation underlying it. When grounded in selfish motives, it is often manifested in the skillful manipulation of ideas in service of one’s own, or one's groups, vested interest. As such it is typically intellectually flawed, however pragmatically successful it might be. When grounded in fair-mindedness and intellectual integrity, it is typically of a higher order intellectually, though subject to the charge of idealism by those habituated to its selfish use. Critical thinking of any kind is never universal in any individual; everyone is subject to episodes of undisciplined or irrational thought. Its quality is therefore typically a matter of degree and dependent on, among other things, the quality and depth of experience in a given domain of thinking or with respect to a particular class of questions. No one is a critical thinker through-and-through, but only to such-and-such a degree, with such-and-such insights and blind

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