Critical Thinking Skills

 

                  One of the skills that is important for success is critical thinking. Good thinking is a skill that may be developed like any other skill. Cerbin (1995) presents some differences between good thinkers and poor thinkers:

 

The Good Thinker	The Poor Thinker
Welcomes problematic situations and tolerates ambiguity.	Searches for certainty and is intolerant of ambiguity.
Is sufficiently self-critical; looks for alternate possibilities and goals; seeks evidence on both sides.	Is not self-critical and is satisfied with first attempts.
Is reflective and deliberative; searches extensively when appropriate.	Is impulsive, gives up prematurely, and is overconfident in the correctness of initial ideas.
Revises goals when necessary.	Does not revise goals.
Is open to multiple possibilities and considers alternatives.	Prefers to deal with limited possibilities. Does not seek alternatives.
Uses evidence that challenges favored possibilities.	Ignores evidence that challenges favored possibilities.

                 

Naisbitt and Aburdene (1985) in Re-inventing the Corporation presented the following discussion of critical thinking:

Thinking is the ability to synthesize and make generalizations, to divide into categories, to draw inferences, to distinguish between fact and opinion, to put facts in order to analyze a problem.

                  Traditionally, however, most of us have put thinking ability into the same category as creativity, believing (quite incorrectly) that either you are born with it or you go through life doing without.

                  The educational innovators of the new information society, however, are rejecting that cliched approach and experimenting with a host of new programs that teach thinking.

                  “Thinking has to do with the way information is arranged and rearranged to make decisions, solve problems, create opportunities and raise human potential,” says Edward de Bono, founder and director of the largest program in the world for teaching thinking as a specific skill.

                  “Thinking is the most fundamental and important skill. Like all human skills, it can be learned and developed,” he believes.

                  Edward de Bono is an Oxford-educated professor at Cambridge University in addition to running his own thinking institute. He is probably the world’s leading advocate of teaching thinking.

                  It is a function of the clarity of de Bono’s approach that his thinking courses work equally well with schoolchildren or executives.

                  In the Untied States, de Bono has taught thousands of Fortune 500 executives how to improve their thinking skills, yet his courses have also been used in more than 5,000 schools worldwide in industrialized, developing, even communist countries.

                  In Venezuela, for example, 106,000 teachers have been trained to teach de Bono’s thinking techniques as part of that country’s extraordinary national program to increase the intelligence of its people.

                  Writing in Phi Delta Kappan, the nation’s leading education magazine (with an audience that could spread his thinking course to millions of American students), de Bono made the strongest argument we have heard for teaching thinking in the new information society:

 

Information is no substitute for thinking and thinking is no substitute for information. The dilemma is that there is never enough time to teach all the information that could usefully be taught.

 

De Bono is absolutely right. The more information we have, the more we need to be competent thinkers. This is the quandary of the information society: We have an overabundance of data. But we lack the intelligence, the thinking ability with which to sort it all out. That is why thinking is now as basic as reading.

De Bono’s program consists of sixty different thinking lessons which a student can follow with an individual instructor, by mail, or in arranged small classes.

The first lesson, called PMI, is a simple exercise which illustrates de Bono’s approach.

PMI stands for “plus, minus, interesting.” It is a way to scan and map out the ramifications of an idea or possible action, instead of reacting the way we usually do with a snap judgement about whether we like or dislike an idea without really exploring all the possible outcomes.

PMI works with any idea - going back to college, asking the boss for a raise, seeing a movie with Joe. Whatever idea you want to explore, make a list of the plus points (P), a list of the minus points (M), a list of the points that are neither plus nor minus, just interesting (I).

With executives, the idea might be, "What if everybody in the company wore badges to show what sort of mood they were in?"

Some of the responses to the badge idea might be:

(P) "We'd know the boss was in a bad mood and would not ask for a raise."

(M) "Declaring one's mood might be an invasion of privacy."

(I) "It might be fun to get up in the morning and decide your prevailing mood for the day."

It sounds easy and it is. But exploring an idea objectively requires discipline. It really does make you think. If you do not like an idea, it is extremely difficult to look for the positive points.

One of the characteristics of a thoughtful person is hopefully the ability to be broad-minded. Though we talk a lot about how valuable it is for people to be open and tolerant, it is usually a vague hope. PMI is a specific tool which directs you (or a family member or coworker) to explore an idea.

Millions of people have improved their thinking skills with de Bono's program, which is not, of course the only approach to thinking. There are many other innovative models.