Frasch Ideas—Examine, Inquire, Explore

Critical Thinking

• Posted by Theresa on February 21st, 2007 filed in Anything Goes

I am working through the Toastmasters Leadership manual called Competent Leadership. It is designed to increase your leadership skills as you work through each lesson. Each lesson consists of an essay on the skill being covered, a self-test so you can see where you stand now, and then 2 - 3 projects to be completed for each lesson. Most of them are things we already do at a Toastmasters meeting, but some occur outside the meeting itself. For each project we are to have somebody evaluate us on how we did in that particular role.

The lesson I am just starting is called Critical Thinking. It has some good material in it.

Analytical thinkers question what they read and hear, determine the quality, merits and faults of an idea or piece of information, are able to distinguish between fact and opinion, and use logical reasoning and analysis to reach conclusions.

This is hard to do because we tend to be biased one way or another, even without meaning to. It is hard to put aside what you think you know and look at something from a different angle. And sometimes it is easy to get caught up in something because you so want it to be true, that critical thinking goes by the wayside.

Critical thinkers are able to consider information in different ways. They can:

• interpret - they can translate the meaning of experiences, situations, data and judgments.
• analyze - they can identify the relationships among events, statements, concepts and situations.
• assess credibility - they can assess the logical strength of a statement, description, or interpretation, and judge if the evidence supports the conclusion being drawn.
• infer - they form hypotheses or deduce the consequences of data or events.

Once critical thinkers have assessed a situation or problem, they are able to reach a conclusion and explain how they reached that conclusion.

Here are some tips from the Toastmasters Manual for developing Critical Thinking Skills:

1. Be informed - collect information from numerous sources
2. Refrain from making decisions too early
3. Keep an open mind
4. Ask questions - do not make assumptions
5. Be honest about yourself - acknowledge your biases and avoid letting them influence you
6. Weigh opinions against facts - be wary about placing more value on opinions than on facts
7. Be persistent
8. Be organized - sort the information you collect and devise criteria for evaluating it
9. Consider and analyze all options

Here again is the quote from above - the test to see if you really gave it thought - critical thought:

Once critical thinkers have assessed a situation or problem, they are able to reach a conclusion and explain how they reached that conclusion.

The key thing here is you have to be able to explain how you reached your conclusion. You can’t say you just know it is true, or you feel that it is. You have to be able to explain how you reached your conclusion. I know this is true for me. If I find myself stumbling over my words and getting things mixed up as I try to explain, it means I haven’t given it enough of my own thought to draw a conclusion. Maybe I read something I liked, that explained the way I felt about something, but if I cannot explain it on my own, then I haven’t given it enough critical thought.

This is a hard one to get a hold of because we want to be right, we want the way we feel to be the right way, we want the way we grew up with, the way things have always been done to be the right way. We don’t like to move out of our comfort zone.

And yet…it is the act of gaining knowledge that makes life exciting. It might be painful to have to admit we were wrong, but once we do it’s like a whole new way opens up before us.

Like Stephen M.R. Covey says in his book The Speed of Trust - Be open to the possibility of learning new truths that may cause you to rethink issues or even redefine your values.

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