Critical Thinking Institute & Professional Learning Community
at Indian River State College
Dr. John Carpenter, Associate Professor
English Communications & Modern Languages How it all started:
John Carpenter I was awarded the Gladys Williams Wolf Endowed Teaching Chair in Communications in 2013. My proposal was to form a Critical Thinking Institute that would bring together ten faculty members a year, for three years, to define critical thinking among themselves. Each instructor would then design or refine an assignment that would teach critical thinking as the group had defined it, and finally, create assessment methodology to measure the success of each assignment in teaching critical thinking. The institute began in 2013 and I’m pleased to say that this is one of the most exciting projects I have ever been involved with. What has made it work so well is the excitement of the participants. I had originally thought that I would recruit Institute members through blanket emails and pitches at faculty meetings, but both last year and this year, word of mouth was all that was needed to recruit inspired, dedicated, and creative teachers from across the curriculum. After the Endowed Teaching Chair was awarded and the project was initially announced at the faculty breakfast, colleagues began to approach me, which leads me to the most important aspect of what is happening with the institute. This seems to be a project that faculty needed to happen. Just as Associate Dean of Communications, Humanities, and Social Sciences Bruce Fraser’s development of a critical thinking rubric, as part of his work on General Education Learning Outcomes, inspired me to write my proposal for the Institute, the idea of quantifying the teaching of critical thinking inspired my colleagues, and it was apparent from the very first meeting. The atmosphere at that meeting was electric as faculty members immediately reached across disciplinary boundaries to talk about the importance of critical thought and the roadblocks to instilling it in our students. Interdisciplinarity can seem like a lofty ideal for faculty entrenched in the realities of teaching. But this was not, and is not, the case for the participants of the CTI here at Indian River State. Tobi Schelin from Nursing was immediately able to frame aspects of teaching critical thought in a way that made sense to Don Lucy from accounting and all the rest of us regardless of academic field. The initial group had incredible synergy from day one, and this year’s group does as well. I think this is because all of us have been trying to teach critical thinking without necessarily identifying it as such, and that identification, together with the idea of “metacognition,” or thinking about thinking, has pulled us together and energized us. |
S. Arlene Green Chandler, Assistant Professor
School of Business Purpose Statement
According to The Critical Thinking Community (www.criticalthinking.org), “critical thinking” is “the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action.” In short, critical thinking involves the movement beyond rote learning to some type of application of learned material—a leap necessary to successfully negotiate the move from “academic” to “professional” worlds. The Critical Thinking PLC strives to be a pan-disciplinary institute that brings together IRSC instructors across the curriculum. The goals of this institute are for its participants (1) to create instructor-specific assignments for the development of student critical thinking, (2) to create assessment rubrics designed specifically for these assignments, (3) to deploy the assignments and assessments in the classroom, and (4) to report back to the other instructors in the institute with results and problems. (5) Together, institute participants would discuss and refine methodologies and refine definitions of critical thinking as taught and measured in their specific disciplines. Resource: Critical thinking - Accredited Online Courses in Critical ... www.criticalthinking.org The Foundation is a non-profit organization that seeks to promote essential change in education and society through the cultivation of fairminded critical thinking--thinking which embodies intellectual empathy, intellectual humility, intellectual perseverance, intellectual integrity and intellectual responsibility. |
For more information about this page, please contact
Professor Arlene Green Chandler at [email protected]
or join me at http://sachandler-irsc.weebly.com/
Professor Arlene Green Chandler at [email protected]
or join me at http://sachandler-irsc.weebly.com/