daily basis. Chapters 2 and 5 provide a rationale for this kind of low‐stakes writing, which is a seedbed for generating and growing ideas. Exploratory writing records the actual process of critical thinking while simultaneously driving it forward. Perhaps more than any other instructional tool, exploratory writing transforms the way students study for a course because it can make active critical thinking about course subject matter part of each day's homework. Chapters 5 and 6 give numerous suggestions for integrating exploratory writing into a course, ranging from various kinds of journals or thinking pieces to postings on electronic discussion boards.
Problems as small‐group tasks. Disciplinary problems make powerful collaborative learning tasks. Small groups can be given a set time to brainstorm possible solutions to a problem or to seek a best solution by arriving at a consensus or a reasoned “agreement to disagree.” In a plenary session, groups report their solutions and present their justifying arguments using appropriate reasons and evidence. The instructor usually critiques the groups' solutions and often explains how experts in the discipline (for whom the teacher is spokesperson) might tackle the same problem. During plenary sessions, the instructor models and coaches disciplinary ways of making arguments, also attending to the generic critical thinking skills of looking at the available evidence and considering alternative views. Chapter 8 focuses on the uses of small groups to promote critical thinking.
Problems as starters for class discussions. Discussion classes can begin with one or two critical thinking problems written on the whiteboard or posted in advance on an electronic discussion board as questions of the day. The teacher guides the discussion, encouraging students to appreciate and manage complexity. (If students have addressed these questions the night before in an exploratory thinking piece, they will be more prepared for class discussion.) Other ways to get students actively addressing critical thinking problems include classroom debates, panel discussions, and fishbowls. See chapter 9 for suggestions on bringing more critical thinking into lectures and class discussions.Besides giving students good problems to think about, teachers need to critique students' performances and to model the kinds of critical thinking they want students to develop. This book suggests numerous ways that teachers can coach critical thinking, including critiquing solutions developed by small groups, guiding class discussions to deepen complexity, inviting alternative points of view, writing comments on student drafts, holding conferences, sharing their own autobiographical accounts of their own thinking and writing processes, discussing strengths and weaknesses of sample papers, breaking long assignments into stages, and stressing revision and multiple drafts. An equally important aspect of coaching critical thinking is to provide a supportive, open classroom that values the worth and dignity of all students. When students actively use a course's new concepts, ideas, and information to address authentic problems, they engage course material on a deep level.
Step 5: Develop Strategies to Include Exploratory Writing, Talking, and Reflection in Your Courses
Good writing, we like to tell our students, often grows out of good talking—either talking with classmates or talking dialogically with oneself through exploratory writing. A key observation among teachers of critical thinking is that students, when given a critical thinking problem, tend to reach closure too quickly. They do not suspend judgment, question assumptions, evaluate evidence, imagine alternative answers, play with data, enter into the spirit of opposing views, and just plain linger over questions. As a result, they often write truncated and underdeveloped papers. To deepen students' thinking, teachers need to build into their courses time, space, tools, and motivation for exploratory thinking. Closely connected to exploratory tasks are reflective tasks aimed at encouraging students to think metacognitively about their own thinking processes, to connect learning in one course to other courses or to their own lives, to transfer skills from one setting to another, and to integrate their learning. Chapters 5–10 suggest numerous ways to integrate exploratory writing, talking, and reflection into your courses. Specific strategies for teaching metacognition, reflection, and self‐assessment are found in chapter 12.
Step 6: Develop Strategies for Teaching the Genres of Your Discipline and the Ways That These Genres Use Evidence to Support Claims
Instructors in disciplinary courses hope not only to improve their students' critical thinking skills but also to teach them to think like disciplinary experts (to think like historians, psychologists, biologists, business managers, or nurses). To move from novice to expert in a given field, students must learn the discipline's ways of thinking, talking, and writing—what rhetoricians call the field's discourse community. Teachers can accelerate students' understanding of a field by designing assignments that teach students to write within the discipline's typical genres, such as experimental reports, ethnographies, recommendation memos, nursing care plans, design proposals, or field‐specific conference papers suitable for presentation at an undergraduate research conference.
In a prototype paper in many of these genres, the writer typically uses evidence from discipline‐specific primary sources or data to add something new, surprising, or challenging to a conversation carried on within the discipline's secondary sources: “Some scholars have said X (literature review), but I am arguing Y (thesis to be supported by analysis of appropriate primary sources or data).”
What undergraduates particularly need to learn is how different disciplines use different kinds of primary data for evidence. According to Richard Light (2001), “A surprising number of undergraduates describe learning how to use evidence to resolve controversies in their field, whatever their field, as a break‐through idea” (122). Light describes the bafflement of first‐year students as they shift from discipline to discipline, encountering different ways that disciplines gather and use evidence to address problems. Some disciplines derive their evidence from aural, visual, or verbal texts housed in libraries, historical archives, newspapers, art galleries, museums, or cyberspace. Other disciplines use evidence from lab or field research, often subjecting quantitative data to statistical analysis with results displayed in graphs or tables. Still other disciplines use qualitative data from observations of natural or cultural phenomena or from ethnographic notes, focus group transcripts, surveys, or interviews. Students need to see how these kinds of data serve as evidence to support an argument that joins a disciplinary conversation. Chapters 3 and 4, as well as chapter 10 on teaching undergraduate research, treat the use of disciplinary genres and evidence in more detail.
Step 7: When Assigning Formal Writing, Treat Writing as a Process
In many courses, the student artifact that most fully exhibits critical thinking is a formal paper requiring analysis and argument as opposed to algorithmic calculations. Too often, however, what students submit as finished products are often simply edited rough drafts—the result of an undeveloped and often truncated thinking process that doesn't adequately examine all the available evidence, consider alternative views, develop ideas fully, or imagine the needs of a new reader. Students often avoid or truncate the messy writing process through which undeveloped and initially confusing ideas become gradually focused, deepened, and clarified through successive drafts. No matter how much we emphasize global revision of early drafts, many of our students will continue to write their papers
