Overview

Introduction to Critical Thinking

Reasoning

Application

Teaching Critical Thinking

Conclusion

The purpose of the Think Bank is to share and explore teaching/learning strategies and techniques that promote critical and creative thinking in the community college classroom. The Think Bank, housed at El Paso Community College, features web resources for instructors to use in sharpening their own critical and creative thinking skills and in teaching these skills to students. As these resources contain information applicable to any field or discipline, instructors are urged to review as many of the resources as possible and then to try relevant strategies in their own classrooms. Instructors will notice some repetition of information from one resource to another; this overlap demonstrates the unity among the core concepts and how they are applicable to all teaching approaches.

This module is intended to serve as a one-stop shop for critical and creative thinking, a site where faculty searching for ways to teach these skills can find ideas from instructors in several disciplines. It provides links to El Paso CC's Think Bank website as well as other important sites in the areas of critical and creative thinking.

An introduction to the whole Think Bank, this section contains a brief history of critical thinking, the rationale behind and definitions of critical and creative thinking, and the core concepts encompassed by those terms.

The ability to reason is one of the most significant characteristics of critical thinking utilized by thinkers in all disciplines. Therefore, the Reasoning section contains resources that explain reasoning, its importance to thinking and learning, and its application to a variety of fields and studies.

In addition to resources on the application of the overall concept of critical thinking, this section includes resources on:

• critical thinking fallacies (because at times it is more important to know what critical thinking is not),
• assessment (because it is important to assess and evaluate oneself and others to determine when something is working and when it is not), and
• critical thinking within specific disciplines.

Currently only a handful of academic disciplines are included, but as the site grows more will be added.

This section contains resources that will help instructors teach critical and creative thinking in addition to their respective subjects. The goal is to persuade instructors that by taking the time to teach critical and creative thinking in addition to their subject matter, they will be producing responsible students who will take the initiative and learn the subject matter better than without critical thinking.

The final section serves as a catchall for other critical thinking resources that outline what the academic critical thinking community is doing. In addition, this section contains glossaries, logic puzzles and other mind teasers, and suggestions for using humor to promote learning.