Using the Tools of Critical Thinking to Teach Students How to Study & Learn (2015 Webcast)

We are focused in this session on using the tools of critical thinking to teach students how to study and learn. And of course, we can approach this topic from many angles fruitfully. I would like to begin as I often do with a kind of conceptual analysis in which I open up what I consider to be key questions at the heart of the topic or issues that we're dealing with. And I often do that by taking my topic and unpacking the very question, the very key terms that I see in the way that I've articulated the topic itself. So for instance, if I take our title for the session, using the tools of critical thinking to teach students how to study and learn, one of my first questions is how does it make sense to think of studying and learning? We will be focusing on essential tools of critical thinking as we approach this topic. But I would like to spend a little bit of time thinking about this concept of studying and learning or these concepts of studying and learning. And I want to begin by saying that we assume when we talk about teaching students to study and learn that we mean to study deeply and to learn well. That's implied but perhaps it should be stated. So we could ask these kinds of questions in approaching this topic. How does it make sense to conceptualize how to study and learn or studying and learning at a high level deeply? When we Here's another question we could be focusing on in approaching this topic. When we think of studying and learning, what do we think of and why? Here is another. How rich is our conception of studying and learning? We know that because the human mind is complex, we must have a rich conception of studying learning or we won't be able to effectively accomplish our goals. Here are some other questions at the heart of our work today. How does one study and learn so as to acquire knowledge? And that leads to further questions like what do we study? What should we learn? What should we learn of what we study? Should we do we study everything that is here and of all that we study? What do we learn of it? What do we accept of it and what do we reject of it? That really is going to be a big question that I'm going to have to ask as a student. So, if I'm in your class and you're my teacher and you want me to study and learn within your class, does that mean everything and all? You give me a textbook that I am to purchase at the bookstore. Do I study it and learn it all? Do I do I believe everything that is there? If not, what do I reject and what do I accept of what is in this all of this voluminous material that is given to me as a student? So one of the things that we understand when we are approaching studying and learning from a deep perspective is that we uh we can't take for granted that everything we're asking students to study would be something that we would want them also to learn or at least we're asking the question what of this should they learn? What of this might they question? Do we teach them? Do we teach them the difference? How to approach this question? How to figure out what to accept? reject within a body of work within an academic discipline, within a field of study. As a student of psychology, this is a uh question dear to my heart because I um

I understood relatively early on in studying psychology that psychologists often themselves do not agree on the very assumptions upon which they base their thinking. But I did I was not taught this as a student. and I had to figure this out on my own. But if I'm teaching a class in psychology, that is one of the first things I want my students to understand that it's that that psychology is a field in which we fundamentally disagree on many important um concepts and ideas and again assumptions. So, um, if I'm teaching well within my discipline of psychology, then I want my students to understand this early on and to use the tools of critical thinking to work their way through this um, all of this world of ideas that will be sort of thrown at them through this process we that we call schooling. So, we're beginning with deep questions. Do you see how these questions are much deeper than the questions that we tend to ask uh or think of when we begin with a topic like using the tools of critical thinking to teach students how to study and learn? We often still want that worksheet. We still want those questions at the end of the chapter that we can just plunk in. And uh we still want those easy ways of teaching students how to study and learn. And one of the things that we understand if we understand the first principles and critical thinking is that this will not be an easy task for many reasons. We're going to be working today with uh this book mainly how this thinker's guide how to study and learn and we did send you the link to that guide so you could see the one that we're using. Some of you will have that available and if you have it you will want to maybe pull it out now or have it available during the session and if you don't then you can refer to this later as you wish and I want to point out that we are going to be dealing with let me see we seem to have a little problem here we are going to be uh focusing at our international conference which is in just a couple of months now on a number of topics that dovetail with our topic for today which is again focusing on how to study and learn. And so you want to join us for this conference if at all possible. And if you can't join us in person, which is preferable, then we are going to be offering some of our sessions online. But we certainly hope that you will understand that we will be unpacking and developing these ideas, contextualizing them so that we continue to go to deeper and deeper levels of understanding of critical thinking and how to foster deep understanding over time in teaching and learning. And we also hope that you'll join us for our fellows academy this summer right after the conference in which we'll be able to work with a very small group of people going into the theory and application of critical thinking at a far deeper level even than we can do at the conference. When we again think about how to study and learn at a deep level, we can approach this topic from a number of angles. And I'm going to be moving around today in this thinker's guide. And um I'm going to uh to begin by focusing on the four let's say or five primary ways of teaching and learning or processes that we use to um just give me a second here to get my page numbers correct. Oh, they're up here. Bear with me with as I work through this a bit, this technology. I'm working directly from this guide and I've got it before us. I'm focusing on page 22 and I've got uh this on the screen. So, if you're looking at the screen, you'll be

able to see this. So when we are uh again learning, we're going to be learning using certain modes of of thought. We're going to be reading ideas into our thinking. We're going to be writing to be speaking ideas into our thinking. And we're going to be listening, hearing, listening, and bringing ideas that we hear and agree with or believe are powerful. We're going to be bringing those into our thinking. So if we I if we approach teaching and learning as a as entailing these four processes that we're going to use uh over and over again in different ways, but in powerful ways to deepen student thinking and to help them better reason through the problems. and issues in within our disciplines and fields of study. So in other words, if you're going to teach students, help them bring ideas into their thinking, there is only a certain small set of ways in which to do this as far as I understand. One is to read ideas into their thinking. So if I'm a student, I can read. I can read and I can think about those ideas and bring those ideas into my thinking. I can write, I can think, I can bring the reading and the writing together. I can talk to someone else and I can hear their ideas and I can so I can and I can interrelate these processes. But so what I want to know then as a teacher, as an educator, is how can I use these modes of thinking to help my students reason their way through the problems and issues within my field or within our fields uh of discip our academic fields of study. So let us take for instance we can focus on any one of these reading writing speaking listening we can burrow into any one and what I would like to do is focus right now on reading. Now if you have our thinker's guide if the students have this thinker's guide and it's for students on how to study and learn they can turn to page 23 and they can read what is highlighted here. Hopefully you can see my highlighted words. Um, close reading. Stop after every paragraph to summarize either orally or in writing what is being said. You might get into the habit of explicitly stating the essential idea in a passage. I often say that many if not most of the most powerful ideas in critical thinking are very simple theoretically. And so take this idea that's highlighted. What could be more simple, let's say mechanically, than stopping after you read a paragraph or a complex sentence and summarize it either in your own words out loud or in writing. And this very powerful and very simple idea is an idea that intellectuals use and employ every day to advance their thinking to cultivate their own minds. And what often happens, but what often happens with our students is that they read this, stop after every paragraph to summarize either orally or in writing what's being said. Oh, that sounds really good. That's a very good thing. I think I should do that. Or we hand this out to students and we say, "Hey, read this. This is a good thing. Take this home. Do this. " I think it's rather naive of us to think that they'll know how to do this, though it seems very simple. So let us take a reading or a just a brief uh excerpt from Henry David Thorough's Walden which he wrote in 1854 or was published in 1854. What I would like to do is read a little bit. I want to read aloud and I would like to articulate in my own words some of what I'm reading in order to show how we can help students

engage in critical reading in this form or a similar form to engage actively in the process of reading and thereby bring deep ideas into their thinking over time. and learn when and where to reject ideas that are not based in sound reasoning. Let me just read a little of this and exemplify what I'm talking about here, what I'm looking for in my work with students. quote, and I'm reading, by the way, from page 82 from the um from this book, which is uh let's see, uh the section from Walden, what I Lived For. Quote, "Men sometimes speak as if the study of the classics would at length make way for more modern and practical studies. But the adventurous student will always study classics in whatever language they may be written and however ancient they may be. For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man? When I'm reading this, I'm trying to withhold judgment, withhold acceptance or rejection until I fully understand what I'm reading to the point that Henry David Thorough himself would agree with my interpretation. So, I'm going to read this one more time since you're having to listen. you don't have this in front of you. I know it's critical listening is difficult. At least it is for me. And so I'll read it again and then I'll do a little bit of interpretation. This is the kind of work that I engage my students in routinely, which means every day or so in my classes to help them learn how to engage with intellectual work and with the thinking of the best authors. again quote, "Men sometimes speak as if the study of the classics would at length make way for more modern and practical studies. But the adventurous student will always study classics in whatever language they may be written and however ancient they for what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man. " So let me give you a brief interpretation. Again, I would want to spend more time with this if I were in the classroom. I want my students to spend as much time as they need interpreting, but we'll just do a little bit of this for exemplification purposes. So, men sometimes speak as if the study of the classics would at length make way for more modern and practical studies. So what he's saying thorough is saying is that when I hear people talking they're I often hear them saying that the study of the classics is going to to be replaced really by the new modern work uh the new ideas the new practical ideas um but the adventurous student will always study classics. Now I would like to say by adventurous student the row means the critical thinking student or the intellectually disciplined curious student or the person the person who wants to develop her mind will always study the classics in whatever language they may be written. And that means he's suggesting we go back to the original languages. And he does suggest this. He wants us to read in the Greek and in the Latin because he wants us to get the ideas as close to the first source as we possibly can. And so what he's saying here is what do the classics represent? What ideas are in these classics that make them classics? But the noblest, the most advanced, the highest um recorded thoughts of men, the the best developed ideas that we have, we get from the classics. That's what Theorough is saying. I want to hear the my students

articulating that voice without any agreement or disagreement or uh bringing their own ideas into the passage telling us what they think about it. And let's go on a bit. A quote, "We might as well omit to study nature because she is old. To read well, that is to read true books in a true spirit is a noble exercise and that and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written. Now I'll just spend a few more minutes with interpretation. So what? Well, let's begin again over starting where I began. I'm going to take this apart very briefly beginning with the first sentence. We might as well omit to study nature because she is old. So in other words, why would we not study the classics just because they're old? What reason is that to give? And yet that is a reason we hear today. In my own field of psychology, I was taught as a student that if you if that in all of your references in your written works, in your research papers must be references that come from the last 10 years or preferably the last year or two. Anything beyond that is old, antiquated. That's absurd on the face of it. And thorough is trying to help us understand why. Um, so he's saying we may as well admit to study nature because she's old. That's not a good reason. Maybe the best ideas are the oldest ideas. in the field of psychology are some of the oldest ideas. Maybe the newest ideas aren't the best ideas. We have to question this. To read well, that is to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. Or in other words, uh that will place more burden and difficulties on the reader than anything else they're doing in their lives. Whatever the customs of the day, that's what Theo is saying. Thorough believed deeply in the power of ideas and in the importance of reading. we see in this sentence and many of the other sentences that we read, but in this sentence alone, he's saying it requires a training that that involves um dedicating your whole life to developing as a reader. And it hence a thinker because that's the ultimate goal to think at the highest level of skill, ability and uh virtue. How many students think of books this way? How often do we teach them that um they must read the books as deliberately and reservedly as the authors um a as the authors wrote deliberately. In other words, I didn't say that very well, but in other words, they have to um to read the book as deliberately with the same kind of deliberation that the author used in writing the book. and with the same level of reserve to use his terms. I think here he means being cautious and careful in this approach.

Not overly accepting, not being overly generous, being critical. I believe that's the term he's looking for here. He doesn't have the language of critical thinking explicitly that was to come later fundamentally with the work of Richard Paul but others who came in between the two. I'll read just a little more of this and then we'll go on. quote, "The crowds of men who merely spoke the Greek and Latin tongues in the middle ages were not entitled by the accident of birth to read the works of genius written in those language languages. " In other words, most of the men people who lived in the middle ages were not able to read these works. They were speaking them, however, for these were not written in that Greek or Latin which they knew, but in the select language. Oh, sorry. Let me read start over. The crowds of men who merely spoke the Greek and Latin tongues in the Middle Ages were not entitled by the accident of birth to read the works of genius written in those language languages. For these were not written in that Greek or Latin which they knew, but in the select language of literature. They had not learned the nobler dialects of Greek and Rome, but the very materials on which they were written were waste paper to them, and they prized instead a cheap contemporary literature, bringing us to the current moment. But when the several nations of Europe had acquired distinct though rude written languages of their own sufficient for the purposes of their rising literatures, then first learning revived, and scholars were enabled to discern from that remoteness the treasures of antiquity, what the Roman and Grecian multitude could not hear after the lapse of ages. A few scholars read and a few scholars only are still reading it. And I want to pause here and close this this reading by saying that what I find powerful among other things in this reading is that is reminding us of how few of us are engaging in deep reading of the important works that have been written throughout history that contribute to our understanding of criticality and the problematics in thinking. He's arguing that we go back to the the original uh Greek and Latin. But we can just we can um we can say for our part today at minimum what we should do is understand that there is great power in these writings of these uh distinguished thinkers and people are distinguish considered distinguished thinkers for good reasons that uh should speak to us as thinkers and so I want to hear what Walden has to say. This is a good way for me to wake up in the morning to read and to talk to Walden. I mean, I'm sorry to Walden to Theorough. I want to hear what Theorough has to say. I want to talk to Theo. I can talk with him in this way. I can engage with him as a reader. Though he is no longer alive, I can still speak to him and I can speak with him and he can speak to me and I can hear him. And this is what it means to engage with literature at a deep level. Now, we've only been engaging in critical reading for understanding. We have not assessed this work. and to assess the work. Of course, we're going to call into play uh the intellectual standards that uh that we are all familiar with and that we are bringing into our work with students. And um and so when we're bringing in these standards, we understand that when we're reading passages from um the works of authors, we're going to have to clarify the thinking. check for accuracy. We're going to have we're going to ask ourselves how relevant is this material today? You can see that I see a lot of relevance in this work because of my very reading of it. Um, you can see that

I consider this very deep work, important, powerful, worth spending a an hour of my time on which is very precious, an hour of your precious. Um we want to we ask ourselves whether this this reading or this material is logical. Is it significant? Is uh is the author looking at this po at the problems and issues that he or she is focusing on from a fair perspective. and maybe fairness wouldn't be relevant in a given case. These standards must be applied in context. So going back to our modes of teaching or our ways of approaching teaching and learning so we can focusing on close reading. There are many other ways to focus on close reading. I've been trying to get into one relatively deeply rather than dealing with many in a more superficial way. And I want to um to point out that uh before I close though on the reading that at the foundation for critical thinking, we are very concerned with the loss potential loss of ideas as we move forward and increasingly into this digital age that um that uh is frightening in many ways. And one is that we really have no ideas what is going to happen to ideas in especially rare books that are going to uh to uh will not be digitized potentially. And so we have a library of critical thinking that we're starting that we have been um that we're going to to open to the public to uh contribute to. We have been housing rare books, important books in the field of critical thinking for over probably 40 years, beginning with Richard Paul's collections and we've been adding to these collections to this collection. We are increasingly concerned about the loss of reading material for future generations. And so if you would like to uh contribute to this library, which we hope to continue in perpetuity, uh if you run across rare books, important books that you think may be lost and you'd like to contribute to this library, please send those books to us and we'll house those here and people who visit us can have these available in the future and certainly we will have them available for future generations. This is the kind of thinking that we those of us who are concerned with the preservation of ideas will need to be thinking about increasingly. So we can focus on reading but we need good reading material. We need to teach students how to go deeply into the ideas that are embedded in the works of great thinkers. And we can also we should have them routinely write. We have for example here get in the habit of writing summaries of basic ideas and their interconnections and then share what you've written with others. Again this is this idea is so powerful that it's difficult to to understand its power. So, one thing that I can do is I can, for instance, if I'm teaching and I want my students to process for a few minutes, we'll do that right now because I've been talking for some considerable time. You've been listening. Let's do a little writing for maybe a minute or two. Let's say two minutes. Write a summary of what I've just been talking about for the past 30 minutes process. What is the essential idea that I've been focusing on or one of the essential ideas? And let's say why is this idea important in instruction? any of these ideas that I've been focusing on. Specifically, I've been dealing with the idea of close

reading. So, I'm going to pause. I want you to uh just spend about two minutes writing summary of one or more of these basic ideas. So let's continue. I would like to make a few comments about writing, speaking and listening and then I want to come back to writing burrow into that a little more. So but let's talk about these three modes of thinking generally writing speaking and listening. So if we take the most if we make the most foundational move here we realize that we can have students reading and then they can read a little bit and they can write a little bit on what they've read. They can listen. So they can listen to me talking which I try to talk very little in my classes because I know critical listening is very difficult but they can hear words being said and then they can state in their own words what they've heard. So in the classroom here is a strategy that we can use. I can explain a concept for a brief period of time, let's say five minutes, and then I can have student one student explain to the other student what I said, what is the idea? In other words, what's an example? See how I'm unpacking this for them? I can give them a structure for that process or I can just say person have uh have my students pair up and say one of you be person A, one be person B, person B explain to person A what I just said. B person A or the other, you know, the partner help out. Help the first person out. Did you agree with that? Is that what I said or did I say something else? Did I add something that was missing? Did this person misrepresent what was said? Did they did he or she add something that wasn't there to begin with? Because critical listening is very difficult. So, these are some strategies I do use routinely, meaning every day in my courses. And if you were there with a partner and uh you would be able to do some of this with them right

now, which would enhance this learning process just by having a partner there. But we don't have that capacity at the moment. I mean, we're not able to do this with this webcast format. Still, you get some of the ideas that you could use in the classroom. So, now speaking um speaking is a very important part of learning. But the question is how am I speaking? At what level? What is the level of my explanations? Am I using intellectual standards in explaining? Am I making sure that I'm being clear? That I'm being uh that my thinking is um clear enough for you to understand me precisely and accurately. Am I unpacking the ideas well enough for you to understand exactly what my I mean you're listening. Are you asking questions of clarification? These are all questions that we want our students to be asking as they listen to explanations. So, they're hearing somebody say something to them that presumably is accurate. They can ask it, "How can we check on this? How can we find out this is true? How can we verify a test set? They may not even ask the person. They may ask it in their own minds. In other words, I'm not sure this is right. I need to check on this later. Or they may that may be the opportunity to say, "Let's see. You're saying this is true. Where's your evidence? How how do you know that that's true? " we can uh when the speaker is speaking and we don't see the relevance of what they're saying to the problem that we're focusing on then we can focus we can call into question whether they're adhering to the standard of relevance. So these standards come back again and again to the process and must be used whether we are speaking, listening, writing, reading or using any other mode of studying and learning. So we are speaking to one another. The question is how well are we speaking? Are we speaking clearly? Are we questioning one another when we are not clear? How often have you been in a meeting when you weren't clear about what was being said but no one asked question of clarification? It's just a jumble of thoughts. So we want to avoid that and we want to teach our students to avoid that and to understand the importance of speaking well and listening well and writing well and reading well to learning well and studying well. So, let's talk about writing a little bit and let me give you a couple of strategies that are helpful which you may want to consider using in the classroom. And some of these uh some of you may already be using this. This is probably I would say well certainly one of our most widely used let's say template though I don't like the term uh for um using the elements of reasoning to unpack um to analyze an article essay or chapter. And for those of you who may not be familiar with the elements of reasoning, what I mean by these by this is that whenever we reason, we reason through these elements. We are using these as reasoners throughout the day. However well or poorly we're reasoning, we have purposes qu we're asking questions. We use information. We make inferences. We can't help it. We begin with concepts. We begin with assumptions that are driven by those concepts. Our thinking goes somewhere. It has implications and we begin from some point of view. And that's just a very quick way into this. If I understand these elements, then I can bring them into the classroom in a way that help that helps my students reason through the logic of the

discipline. And here is a again a template for writing uh to writing their ideas in this process. So the student is asked to read an article, essay or a chapter and write the main purpose number one and we are helping the student understand what is meant by this um the key question the author is addressing. What question is at the heart of the author's thinking in writing this piece? How often do we assign articles, chapters to our students to read? They come to class, we tell them what we know they didn't read. So instead of having them do some writing or proving to us that they did some work because we know they didn't actually do the work, we do it for them. So, I'll stand up and I'll do the back flips and the somersaults and you'll see how fun this subject is, but you won't know how to think within it when it's finished, when we're finished. And that's a disservice to students. Students have to learn to think within the logic of the disciplines themselves. And to do this they must read and write and think their way, speak their way, listen their way through the discipline together as learners and along with us let's say mentors or um highlevel learners. I I'm avoiding the term teacher or instructor. In other words, I'm saying I want my students to see me as a student first, a student of thinking. The way that distinguished thinkers always think of themselves first as a student. And I believe that thorough exemplifies this uh in terms of his approach to ideas. is he clearly says, "I'm I know very little, but let's see what I do know. Let's see if I can unpack what little I do know, and maybe this will be helpful for someone else down the road. " So, um, what we want is for students to embrace the concept of deep learning, deep studying, and they've got to do this by applying their own thinking. and they must get off of the bench and they must be on the court and they must perform practice do the work and so we must as teachers I believe put the burden of learning on to the students and it's on us as students and our primary goal then becomes learning to develop our own minds so that we understand that path for the students And so here's a template that we can use. We can have students write their ideas before they come to class. Read the article. Read the chapter. What if we did this for every class? If you uh for every chapter that we assign, students must figure out the purpose of the chapter, the key question at the heart of it, the most important information in the chapter, the main inferences, conclusions key ideas at the heart of this argument, these arguments that are being made in this chapter or this line of reasoning, the key assumptions the author is beginning with. This is not easy to do. Um, and we only become skilled at this when we engage in it. And so I caution you that if you're going to use this template then you should also uh if you're asking your students to use it rather than you should also be using it in preparing to work with students on a given uh piece in which you've asked them to figure out the logic of let's say a chapter using this template. In other words, if you ask students to figure out the purpose of the chapter, the questions, the information, etc., and now you are standing in front of the class and you're going to give the students feedback on their work. I suggest that you do your homework in advance and that is figure out the logic yourself. What are the key assumptions in this first chapter or in the second chapter? When you look at your disciplines and

your subjects from this kind of perspective, new concepts and ideas and difficulties are illuminated that you will not necessarily be prepared for if you aren't doing, as it were, the homework along with your students. I don't know how often faculty actually take my advice on this but I know from my own perspective that it takes uh going through this process many times before you begin to understand for instance how to easily distinguish between sometimes an assumption even and even an inference or the key ideas in the assumption. and the implications in the inferences because often they begin to look a lot alike when you're working very closely with uh with um intellectual material. So we've got to practice ourselves and after we've done this let's say 10 20 30 40 times then we'll be ready to give the feedback to our students on their work. um on using this sort of template. And some of you may think that I'm actually not serious, but I am. And um and we can um and and when you are doing this work, you begin to see the power in it and the complications in the process. And you can also see why assessing critical thinking authentically becomes more complex because if we are we ourselves do not understand purposes and reasoning questions, information, inferences, ideas and these concepts that are at the heart of the field of critical thinking studies then we will not be able to um help our students embrace these same concepts. S here is another template that you can be that you can use along with the previous one. So you can have students figure out the logic of a short piece essay, article, chapter, had them do the template, use this template, go through this process multiple times during a semester and by that I mean every class period or every other class period or once a week but many times. We can also do this with the logic of a textbook. so that students can early on get the foundational concepts at the heart of the textbook and often therefore the subject or discipline. So again you see the same concepts applied to a textbook or a book. We don't have much time left, but I would like to bring in one other important set of um or some important thoughts before we close. If we're going to teach students to study and learn at a deep level, then an essential part of that process will be helping them cultivate these traits of mind at the heart of a fair-minded conception of critical thinking. And we can take the first one and just focus in on that for a minute. And I'm going to read this aloud for you. I'm focusing on intellectual humility. Intellectual humility is knowledge of ignorance. Sensitiv sensitivity to what you know and what you do not know. It means being aware of your biases, prejudices, selfdeceptive tendencies, and the limitations of your viewpoint. Now, that's a beginning place. Questions that foster intellectual humility include what do I really know? I mean, know as a student about myself, about this situation, about this other person, about my nation, about what is going on in the world? What do I really know about this subject? about what this author is saying. What do I know? What do I what am I unclear about? [clears throat] To what extent do my prejudices or biases influence my

thinking? As teachers and instructors, we often think that our students come to us as blank slates as if they were thinking nothing as they were sitting there except exactly what I want them to think when it. It's a seductive thought uh to imagine that as I am talking that you the listener are doing nothing but listening to me and learning everything I would like for you to learn at every moment I'd like you to learn it. But that's not realistic. So we can ask to what extent do my prejudices or biases influence my ability to learn within this field right now in this classroom right now within this unit or however I'm defining and then to what extent have I been indoctrinated into beliefs that may be false to what extent am I being indoor ated right now in my life anywhere. Um, how can I distinguish between when I'm being indoctrinated and when I'm being educated as a student? How will I know the difference? The these are the kinds of questions that important thinkers have always asked. How do the beliefs I have uncritically accepted keep me from seeing things as they are? How do the beliefs I, the student, have uncritically accepted, keep me from learning in your classroom? So, these virtues I want you to see, they're not add-ons. They're not something we can do if we'd like to. They are at the heart of any good process of studying and learning. Because a good student understands that the opposites of these virtues are very represent very serious problems. for their learning. Serious students understand that they are often not they often do not embody intellectual humility. Rather, they come to us through the lens of intellectual arrogance. They already know the answers. They don't need our this. They don't need these ideas. They already have the ideas that they need. They get them on the internet. They get them all day long. Why would they need these deeper ideas? You see, so um and and our students need to understand that often they are simply going along with the crowd. They lack this autonomy that is at the heart, intellectual heart of the critical thinker who is thinking in the strong sense or the ethical sense. And so uh to wrap this up, I want to point out that you see the tools of critical thinking, the first principles, the language, the lingua franca of critical thinking is essential to bring into our work with students on a daily basis if we want them to learn deeply. One of the things I would like to do in my conversations with you is to end with a powerful quote from a powerful thinker, a distinguished thinker and I've been already reading from one from thorough and I'm going to read now from uh John Henry Newman from the idea of a university and this is a rare book u and uh it is was published in 1912 but it was originally written in 1852. two and I'm taking this from uh John Henry Newman who was an important uh thinker at the time in Ireland and uh was also involved in uh in the movement toward Catholicism and he wrote some of the best discourses on education I believe that have ever been written. So I will re leave you with these thoughts. I will tell you gentlemen what has been the practical error of the last 20 years. Not to load the memory of the student with a mass of undigested knowledge

but to force upon him so much that he has rejected all. It has been the error of distracting and infeebling the mind by an unmeaning profusion of subjects. Of implying that a smattering in a dozen branches of study is not shallowness, which it really is, but enlargement, which it is not. All things now are to be learned at once. Not first one thing then another. Not one well, but many badly. Learning is to be without exertion, without attention, without toil, without grounding, without advance, without finishing. But the intellect which has been disciplined to the perfection of its powers, which knows and thinks while it knows, which has learned to leaven the dense mass of facts and events with the elastic force of reason. Such an intellect cannot be partial, cannot be exclusive, cannot be impetuous, cannot be at a loss, cannot but be patient, collected, and majestically calm because it discerns the end in every beginning, the origin in every end, the law in every interruption. the limit in each delay because it ever knows where it stands and how its path lies from one point to another. How many of us can say that we are fostering these understandings in our own minds and in the minds of our students? When we are moving in this direction, then we will know that we are fostering the deep learning that we hope to achieve with working with our students. When we take these ideas seriously, when we teach students how to read closely, to think deeply, to listen attentively, to apply intellectual standards in the processes of reading, writing, thinking and listening, speaking and listening while focusing on powerful ideas. This will be a good beginning place. Thank you for joining us. I'm Linda Elder with the Foundation for Critical Thinking. We'll see you next time.