Thinking Critically about Critical Thinking

Abstract

For a long time the dominant way to teach critical thinking in schools has been a way with a focus on skill development. This approach emphasizes direct instruction to teach discrete critical thinking skills, offering students opportunities to practice applying thinking skills and helping them transfer critical thinking skills from one context to another. In this paper, we propose to conceive critical thinking with a more holistic approach based on dialectics, which complements, or rather substitutes, formal logic with an approach that analyzes the way things are, their histories and the way in which things change in the world.