Thinking Critically about Critical Thinking
Sarah Dillard and Edie Abraham-Macht
In education, critical thinking is a popular idea but an elusive reality.
In a typical American public school, high school students spend a lot of their day copying notes from slides. There is nothing wrong with learning content: in fact, it’s the necessary first step to critical thinking. As cognitive scientists say, “You have to know things to think about things.”
But too often, the lesson stops with the facts. Instead of building a base of knowledge to discuss and use–to transfer to action–students simply move on to the next set of concepts to memorize. The typical American high school classroom looks something like this:
Students are expected to learn a large body of content knowledge, but are given limited opportunities to discuss it and even fewer to apply it. This is too bad: discussion and transfer are where critical thinking happens as students seek to make meaning of what they’ve learned. Without discussion and transfer, content knowledge is crammed into students’ minds without the connections that will make it stick beyond the test. Like dolls collecting dust in the attic, the knowledge is mostly forgotten and rarely valuable.
At Kaleidoscope, we are building a different model, combining powerful content with space for students to discuss and use what they are learning. It looks something like this:
Our courses cover less content, but we select it carefully and design so that our students usefully retain more of what they’ve learned for longer.
To illustrate this, let’s look at the 20-hour version of our Social Sciences for Social Problems. I’ll pass it off to my colleague Edie, who developed and taught this class.
Edie:
For the short-form version of Social Sciences for Social Problems (there is also a yearlong version), we worked hard to select powerful content and strike a balance between content, discussion, and transfer that enabled students to ask meaningful questions to go beyond and beneath the headlines, illuminating new dimensions of social issues and getting creative about solutions to them. In other words, to think critically.
To show you how we did this, I’d like to zoom in on a single day of the class—the first of three “lens days,” which involve considering a single social issue through three social science lenses.
1: Building domain-specific knowledge: selecting powerful concepts
Earlier in the week, we’d introduced students to each of the three social sciences for the lens day–economics, sociology, and history—so they had built basic content knowledge that they could then apply on this lens day. For example, on the sociology day, students learned about the three theoretical lenses through which sociologists analyze social institutions; on the lens day, they considered which theoretical lens–or lenses–sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom used to analyze the concept of “structural incompetence” she introduces in her essay “Dying to be Competent.” They were able to read a new source with a depth they wouldn’t have been able to achieve just a few days before.
2: Building domain-specific knowledge: selecting powerful sources
On the lens day itself, the sources we used were engaging and challenging–and built content knowledge of the issue from the unique perspectives of each of the three social sciences. First, we introduced the concept of structural inequality and economists’ powerful ability to measure various forms of inequality through data analysis. Next, to talk about inequality through a sociological lens, we used the aforementioned Tressie McMillan Cottom essay “Dying to be Competent”; finally, to approach it from a historical perspective, we used the digital humanities project Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America. We built a foundational understanding of why an economics perspective on inequality is crucial, then used additional sources to complicate this perspective by introducing students to the interlocking effects of racial and housing inequality and how they impact economic inequality.
3: Making connections between the classroom and the world
Multiple students’ comments indicated that the sources, and the larger concept of structural inequality that they illuminated, did what education should: prompted students to see the world around them with new eyes. As Jadyn Lewis, a student in the course, put it, the class “showed me how there are little connections and little interactions that are affecting the world and the spaces we’re in, but then it can also all be traced to bigger structures in society. [The class] allows you to better see the intricacies of how everything is connected in the world.” The day’s content was valuable not only because it was engaging and challenging, but also because it was highly applicable to students’ lives.
4: Using discussion to deepen thinking
During discussion, students shared contributions that were both deeply intellectual and deeply personal. They offered up opinions, feelings, and experiences related to topics as thorny as structural inequality, and they listened to their peers with unwavering attentiveness and kindness. With their minds and hearts working together, students were able to make meaning of what they were learning, a crucial form of critical thinking.
5: Moving from isolated concepts to the bigger picture
Finally, we gave the various angles, or “lenses,” a chance to work together. During the “Economics and Inequality” section of the lesson, for example, we asked questions like: “How could a sociologist’s perspective complicate this analysis?” and “How could a historian use this data in their work?” Students were practicing critical thinking: using the research techniques, key questions and insights, and even the limitations of each discipline to more deeply interrogate the world around them.
This balance worked beautifully. As Jadyn said, “The first lens day was one of the best classes I’ve ever taken. It really demonstrated the power of interdisciplinary learning.” To punctuate the multifaceted nature of knowledge, we concluded with Rumi’s “Elephant in the Dark”: “If each of us held a candle there, / and if we went in together, / we could see it.”
Sarah:
Visiting Edie’s Social Sciences for Social Problems class on the last day, I was struck by the critical thinking I saw on display in students’ final projects. I’ve encountered critical thinking so rarely on the many school visits I’ve done that it feels like magic to me. This class was no exception.
For their projects, each student selected a substantive article about a social issue and analyzed it through multiple social science lenses. Jadyn, for example, used anthropology and economics to unpack experiences of motherhood during the pandemic. She added layers of nuance to the Anne Helen Petersen article she chose to analyze—which already adopted a sociological approach—by unpacking its limitations.
In her presentation, Jadyn offers suggestions for how an anthropologist could expand on this existing study (which focused on women from Indiana), and for how the study itself could expand to compare mothers' changing sentiments as the pandemic has progressed over the past two years. For example, Jadyn poses the questions, “What are the norms for women in southern Indiana? How do those differ from other places in America? Did those norms change when the pandemic started? If so, how did those norms change and what did they become?” With these incisive questions, Jadyn put one of the most powerful contributions of anthropology into practice: revealing that normalcy is subjective, that it changes from time to time and place to place. While this may seem obvious to you as an adult, it’s rare for high school students to reach this level of nuance–and to do so intentionally.
Even a basic introduction to the major social sciences allowed students to ask much deeper questions than simply analyzing current events would. The social sciences, and their powerful concepts, enabled students to go beyond the headlines. I saw on display in students’ projects so many of the things I deeply want from our education system: a serious engagement with social issues, the ability to take multiple perspectives, and classrooms full of students who want to engage in the work of learning more.
These are all within reach. While critical thinking has a basic physics, it’s not rocket science. To increase critical thinking, we need to select more powerful concepts, give them breathing room through discussion, and ask students to meaningfully apply them. Students are eager for it, and the world needs it.
HELPFUL LINKS
Learn more about Social Sciences for Social Problems:
The short-form version we run in enrichment programs
Read more about our education philosophy:
POV: An Autocrat Designs an Education System, Giving us Lessons for What Democracy-Building Education Looks Like