Critical Thinking

"It's a pattern as old as time. Somebody makes an important scientific breakthrough, which explains a piece of the world. But then people get caught up in the excitement of this breakthrough and try to use it to explain everything." Good to read and raise your radar. Simplistic arguments for a complex topic. He offers 2 alternative views. What's that about?

Visible Thinking includes a number of ways of making students' thinking visible to themselves, to their peers, and to the teacher, so they get more engaged by it and come to manage it better for learning and other purposes. When thinking is visible in classrooms, students are in a position to be more metacognitive, to think about their thinking. When thinking is visible, it becomes clear that school is not about memorizing content but exploring ideas. Teachers benefit when they can see students' thinking because misconceptions, prior knowledge, reasoning ability, and degrees of understanding are more likely to be uncovered. Teachers can then address these challenges and extend students' thinking by starting from where they are.

But what we admire and what we deliberately cultivate aren't the same. When researchers dig deeper, they find that many adults think of curiosity as a trait possessed by some but not others. Or they think that as long as the environment isn't too repressive, children's natural sense of inquiry will surface (Engel, 2011). In fact, when Hilary and I asked teachers to list which qualities were most important without giving them a list to choose from, almost none mentioned curiosity. Many teachers endorse curiosity when they're asked about it, but it isn't uppermost on their minds-or shaping their teaching plans.

Web 2.0 Tool correlated to Blooms and Gardner's Multiple Intelligences - share with teachers!

The News Literacy Project (NLP) is an innovative national educational program that mobilizes seasoned journalists to help middle school and high school students sort fact from fiction in the digital age.

 if you really want to rediscover wonder, you need to step outside of that tiny, terrified space of rightness and look around at each other and look out at the vastness and complexity and mystery of the universe and be able to say, "Wow, I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong."

 Ask the tough questions. Ask to see the evidence. Ask for the part of the story that's not being told. The answers shouldn't be simple, because the brain isn't simple. But that's not stopping us from trying to figure it out anyway.

About EFF From the Internet to the iPod, technologies are transforming our society and empowering us as speakers, citizens, creators, and consumers. When our freedoms in the networked world come under attack, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is the first line of defense. EFF broke new ground when it was founded in 1990-well before the Internet was on most people's radar-and continues to confront cutting-edge issues defending free speech, privacy, innovation, and consumer rights today. From the beginning, EFF has championed the public interest in every critical battle affecting digital rights.

Researchers need the skills to explore all sides of their research topic. Young researchers often search exclusively for material that confirms their pre-existing notions of their topic. This results in confirmation bias. Even experienced researchers can fall prey to this bias. Use comparison searching as a tool to help your students become aware of confirmation bias. Comparison searching enables students to develop more thoughtful and nuanced understanding of their research topics and the way they themselves ask questions and search for information. The process asks students to actively consider and evaluate two or more disparate results sets.

The News Literacy Project (NLP) is a national educational program that taps experienced journalists to help middle and high school students "sort fact from fiction in the digital age." According to its website, the project teaches students critical-thinking skills that will help them become smarter consumers and creators of information across all types of media. It shows students "how to distinguish verified information from spin, opinion, and misinformation-whether they are using search engines to find websites with information about specific topics, assessing a viral eMail, viewing a video on YouTube, watching television news, or reading a newspaper or a blog post." Working with educators, students, and journalists, NLP says it has developed original curriculum materials "based on engaging activities and student projects that build and reflect understanding of the program's essential questions. The curriculum includes material on a variety of topics … that is presented through hands-on exercises, games, videos, and the journalists' own compelling stories."

A new pilot study has been looking at how neuroscience can be used to understand how business decisions are arrived at, and the role it can play in management accountancy by evaluating the decision-making process and the role that emotional responses play their part in this

We hear this everywhere - students should be doing "real-world" math and they should be applying what they learn in math to "real-world situations."

"The idea that the brain is somehow fixed in early childhood, which was an idea that was very strongly believed up until fairly recently, is completely wrong. There's no evidence that the brain is somehow set and can't change after early childhood. In fact, it goes through this very large development throughout adolescence and right into the 20s and 30s, and even after that it's plastic forever, the plasticity is a baseline state, no matter how old you are. That has implications for things like intervention programs and educational programs for teenagers."

a recent New York Times piece, "Wasting Time Is New Divide in Digital Era" (or, as Gawker put it, "Poor People Are Wasting Time on the Internet!") asserts that while all kids are spending more time with media, those with lower socio-economic status were spending even more of it, and on activities like Facebook that aren't exactly conducive to learning. In other words: even when you give poor people access to technology, they don't know what to do with it! Might as well give a paleolithic tribe access to a chip fab, pffft. Jessie Daniels, Associate Professor of urban public health at Hunter College and CUNY and author of a forthcoming book on Internet propaganda, tweeted her displeasure at the piece. (There's even a Storify of all her comments on it.)

One man's version of truth sans evidence.

"Species diversity refutes the theory of evolution"

What You'll Learn Critical thinking is a vital component of every part of the school day. With each activity that students engage in, they are utilizing critical thinking skills - skills that must be fostered and encouraged by educators so students can perform at the highest level possible. This module will teach educators to employ various strategies and tactics that will ensure that they are continuously cultivating critical thinking skills in their students throughout the day so that student achievement is constantly being emphasized. In this course you'll learn how to encourage critical thinking and active learning, as well as tactical and structural recommendations to enhance your lessons, different approaches to thinking, and how to drive thinking through questions. You will discover: The intrapersonal components involved in critical thinking The role of critical thinking in student interactions How to incorporate critical thinking strategies into every activity and lesson plan The various approaches to thinking

Editor's note: The following essay has been adapted from Howard Rheingold's new book Net Smart: How to Thrive Online, which offers Rheingold's insights on how to find quality information on the web, and then how to piece that information together "intelligently, humanely, and above all mindfully." The book was published in April by MIT Press.