Can you teach critical thinking?

Excited for my conversation today with a friend and Lexingtonian. So a neighbor of mine, in effect, Jonathan Haber, who is the author of the recently published book by the MIT Press, Critical Thinking. Check it out. You certainly will want to after this podcast. First, Jonathan, welcome to the show.

Thanks, Michael. It's always great to hang out with you and nice to do it in side by side windows. I hope we'll get to be in the same physical proximity again soon.

Yeah, well, once it warms up, we'll be doing some bike trails and so forth I suspect. But I'd love to dig in right off your off the topic of your book, I got to read it. I think it's fantastic. It's super helpful in codifying an area that for a lot of people sounds like a buzz phrase and it's something that they know employers are asking future employees to be able to do better and so forth. But how to teach it and how to help people learn it is a lot murkier, I think, in most people's minds. So let's just start generally. Tell us about the book and what you were hoping to accomplish by writing it.

Sure. Well, the book first. It's part of the MIT Essential Knowledge series, which is a series of books for readers who want to grasp complex topics, often in technology or philosophy, but don't want to read a 500 page academic tone, but they want more than just a web search can give them. So my first book in that series was on massive open online courses MOOCs. But this one, the key things I thought for the wide lay audience, which I thought was going to be an important component of which is going to be educators needed sort of three great myths related to critical thinking dispelled. One is that we don't know what it is, meaning we have definitional issues. There's no sort of understood definition of critical thinking. There's this notion that till we know what it is, we can't do anything about it. That's a myth, and one that's been a break on critical thinking, but also that we don't know how to teach or assess it. So this book is less of a sort of how to guide. There's other books I've written one that's more of a how to guide for critical thinking, but this one is really geared for educators, educational policymakers, people who want to move from talking about critical thinking, the aspiration of improving critical thinking skills of students, to actually doing it.

Makes a ton of sense and incredibly needed. I think right now at this time, where it's gotten lumped in the 21st century skills conversation. But as a backdrop to that, given that people are talking about it so much, how are we doing in teaching it in your perspective in both K12 and higher ed?

Well, you know, there's I'm a class half full kind of guy and then there's some valuable sort of statistics. If you survey teachers, and that's at all grade levels, kindergarten through graduate school, you know, ask them their top three priorities, virtually all of them will say helping students develop their critical thinking skills is a top priority. That's great. And if you look at sort of modern academic standards, next generation science standards, common core and variants C3 and social studies, you see critical thinking, critical thinking concepts sort of woven throughout them. So there's a recognition that sort of critical thinking is important. On the class half empty side, if you talk to employers, 75% of them will say the students that are graduating after 12, 16 or more years of college don't have those very skills. Okay, so there seems to be, there's not an argument over whether we should teach critical thinking skills. I think most educators think it's important and they probably think they're already doing it. But as the employer number indicates, you know, we may just not be teaching it the right way. You know, that's why the sort of section in the book on teaching critical thinking sort of looks at some of the research and tries to find out, you know, is there a way we can make aspiration meet reality?

So I'm curious actually, do you see differences in your opinion across country and internationally? And the reason I'm asking is the PISA exam, for example, that's given internationally, purports that students in other places do better in critical thinking. But I'm wondering if you sort of agree with that assessment. Is perhaps our education system doing better on critical thinking than some other places or no, in your opinion?

You know, I'd say the, you know, given the state of the world, I would say everybody could use upping their kind of critical thinking game to begin with. So I think, you know, no place could be completely satisfied. I think, you know, when you're talking about trying to measure critical thinking, whether it's through a sort of international, you know, PISA type exam or even just in the local classroom, you have to recognize that, you know, there are different sort of constructs for critical thinking. And for an exam, it's going to rely on important elements like how to analyze an argument and sort of make inferences, those sorts of things. So I Could well believe some countries do better on an exam that sort of captures things like inference. But critical thinking has a sort of broader collection of knowledge, skills, and also dispositions that aren't all capturable on an exam. I'd say, you know, certainly in Europe, where students are taught philosophy sometimes in high school, a lot of the skill set and critical thinking, not exclusively, you know, philosophy, but logic and those sort of things enter into their curriculum more than we might find in the US So that that could help. But I would say, you know, the collection of skills that, you know, at least I feel, fall into the bucket of critical thinking and most researchers would agree with are not sort of thoroughly well taught in K12. You know, they are taught in some aspects of higher education where they have actual critical thinking courses. And that's great, but I would say by the time people hit college, to a certain extent, it's sort of too late. They should develop those skills much earlier.

So let's dig into this. If we're talking about it so much and where, you know, there is definition to what critical thinking is, there are know, as you said, a bucket or basket, if you will, of knowledge and skills and things that you should do or be able to do to think critically, why aren't we doing it so well, in your opinion? Why do the employers say it's continually lacking?

You know, there's a critical thinking researcher called Robert Ennis who did publish a paper, you know, more than 20 years ago that defined three different approaches to teaching critical thinking. One was called a general approach. That's where you teach critical thinking as a course like. Like we do in college. There'll be a critical thinking is the syllabus, critical thinking is the subject of the course, and that they may pull in information from other disciplines, for example, some things. But the point of the course is critical thinking. So that's a general approach. But then there's two approaches for teaching critical thinking by integrating it into other subjects, like Core 4 academic subjects. One is called the immersion approach, and that's where you teach your subject matter, be it chemistry or history or English or math, and assume that because those subjects require students to think hard, that sort of critical thinking skills come along for the ride. So that's the immersion approach. Another approach is called the infusion approach, where you still integrate critical thinking topics like logic and argumentation and information literacy, those kinds of things, into traditional curriculum, but you make it explicit. Okay. The example I always like to use is, you know, the math teacher who's teaching geometric proofs in middle school is actually teaching deductive reasoning. But how many math teachers stop and say, by the way, we just learned deductive reasoning? Let me show you how that applies outside of math. And as it turns out, the worst way to teach critical thinking is the immersion approach. Assuming that critical thinking is learned through osmosis.

Just assuming that it's happening. Yep.

I think that's the primary approach we use in K12. You know, smart teachers teaching complex material, assuming critical thinking skills come along for the ride. But like I said, if you need students to understand deductive logic and the difference between deductive and inductive logic, there's a great place to teach it in that math class. Just like there's high leverage content areas across the curriculum for teaching certain critical thinking skills. But, you know, teachers aren't trained to do it that way, you know, so you don't get that math teacher who brings up deductive logic wouldn't even think to do it. So I'd say moving from the immersion approach to the infusion approach, which turns out, at least according to research done since Enos Ennis wrote his article, to be even better than the general approach, it looks like that's the best way to teach critical thinking. So now we just have to sort of do it that way, get more people to do it that way.

Gotcha. I'll say on my own evolution on learning about this topic, that has been something that's jumped out a lot at me, which is my initial sort of take on it was critical thinking is extremely domain specific and content specific. As in, I think I'm able to think critically about a range of historical and education topics and the like. But I'm not so good at, you know, doing that in say, computer science because I lack the, the domain knowledge. I think to your point, what changed my view on this or helped me see it was a place like Minerva Institute, for example, that says, let's be very specific about the skills and what you need to do and the procedures and so forth to think critically. And so that when you do it in one context, we're now going to take you in another context and have you do those procedures again so that you can really build that pattern recognition and the ability to, you know, when you jump into a new domain area, sure, you may not be able to think critically initially, but as you master the definitions and taxonomies and so forth, then you can actually apply in a very deliberate way, say deductive logic or whatever it might be to tackle something. So that's, that's really changed, I think, my mindset. But it flies, I think, in the face of how a lot of our teachers are prepared to teach and that they're generally brought up through specific subject matter disciplines. They're not thinking about a lot of these extensions. Right. That there's a concept here that, you know, we, we should basically teach for far transfer as opposed to just near transfer of these skills. So, you know, how do we get from here to there? Do we need to dismantle the curriculum and just start over? Like, what's it going to take?

Well, I. I think the good news is it will not take dismantling the curriculum. In fact, you know, since infusion seems to be the best way to do it, that's just a matter of technique. Right. Skilled teachers still have, you know, methods they use to teach content that are time tested or proven they like, you know, so this is sort of more of a supplement. But that supplement has to be, you know, take into account what you just mentioned, that there is a set of critical thinking skills. Right. They do transfer between domains, but there are certain ones that are easier to teach at certain points in the curriculum for certain subjects, but doesn't mean they are exclusive to that subject area. Like my deductive reasoning in math class. Right. Every field, like everybody doing critical thinking is going to be doing deductive reasoning. So in that case, that provides a very specific tool that transfers. I think it also gives, if students understand this math proof actually is a type of thinking that they could use in another class or in making decisions about where to go to college, you know, that they will know their mathematical proofs better. Right. It's. It adds sort of stickiness to the subject matter, I think, in terms of getting from here to there, you know, once the book was done, I kind of started developing material they call high leverage critical thinking teaching practices. I sort of borrow the phrase from Deborah Ball's work and Math that also talks about high leverage, but the same concept that there are certain subjects and certain techniques you could use that give you a lot of bang for the buck. Right. The big one that I was talking about with the infusion method is teaching critical thinking explicitly. You don't have to teach it explicitly every single day for every single subject. Right. That math teacher, there's no major critical thinking topic that needs to be covered when they teach subtraction, you know, but when you teach geometric proofs, there's one staring right at you. Similarly, if you're looking at argument, if you're looking at analyzing historic documents and history, you Know, that's a great place to bring up argumentation skills, which means people understand what a premise is and what a conclusion is and what connects the the two. If you're going to be studying science, that's not just a great way to learn about inductive reasoning, which is how science works. And it'll be great for the math and science teacher to go back and forth because math is a great example of deductive reasoning, science of inductive reasoning, but also how to control for biases. To a certain extent, science is so successful because it has developed a set of techniques that control for confirmation bias and other sort of biases that humans are prone to. And what I like to describe is like, if we could just take, you know, if we think of science as not this thing special people do, and it's sort of mysterious to the rest of us, but it's just a culture that tries to limit bias just a little bit. And just by limiting it that much, we've gotten the entire scientific and technological revolution of the last 400 years. If we could just move that into our general thinking, you know, be more, be systematic. Doesn't have to just be sort of scientific reasoning, but critical thinking techniques like sort of logic, argumentation, etc. How much progress we can make from where we are now.

So you. I actually want to dig a little deeper in this because you've written also about the importance of civics and dialogue in the public forum and things of that nature as well, and you've been applying a lot of your thinking around critical thinking to the public debates and conversations that we have in an effort to not just fact check, right, people's statements, but ask what's the fundamental logic behind something? Or are they thinking critically as they address a certain set of questions? Right. Or are they using ad hominem attacks or whatever it might be to try to make a point? Um, and so I'm just, I'm just sort of curious the connection in your mind between educating our citizenry and students in, in these areas of critical thinking and what that might do for the questions and challenges we face more broadly right now as a society from. From a civics perspective.

Yeah, I think I got into this game largely because I've concerned about the sort of denigration of sort of civic culture and political culture. And this goes back sort of 12, 16 years. So it's not just the last four years that have sort of taught me the lesson. My first work in this area was called Critical Voter. It was podcast and I turned into a book. And there I used election politics to teach critical thinking skills. It wasn't a political book. It was an educational how to book. But it used campaign politics where a lot of, you know, or at least we're supposed to have kind of argumentation. But there's also fallacies in play. There's also various biases that people try to take advantage of. So, you know, more recently, I think what you're referring to is a site I created called logic check logiccheck.net where again, I'm using the news of the day to teach critical thinking skills. That was based on, you know, fact checking sites, you know, like factcheck.org or Politifact. But I think one of the problems is that, you know, we've been fact checking for the last, you know, 20 some odd years and, you know, fact checking is great, I love facts, we should check them. But I think it's fair to say, you know, we have not gotten more. The political culture has not improved regardless of, you know, how much fact checking is done. And I think there's a bunch of reasons for that. But one of the reasons I would say is, you know, facts alone don't tell the whole story. Right. Facts, true facts can often be used to support a false conclusion. Right. You know, facts can be used to. And in that case, you can fact check the sort of premises of an argument all day long. They'll check out. What you're really checking is the connection between the premises and the conclusion. What we call warrant and logical argumentation. Trying to avoid kind of jargon on that. But, you know, it's really, you know, teaching students the connection, the logical connection, the inference, you know, that's important. And that's, you know, what we need to understand the news. We also need to understand what are some of the linguistic techniques, you know, commonly called rhetoric, that are used to persuade. Right, because persuasion can improve a strong argument and make it very convincing and compelling, but it could also be used to kind of dress up a poor one. So you need to understand sort of persuasive communication, both to be able to peer through the rhetoric, to sort of understand the argument beneath and evaluate it for strength and weakness. But also, if you're getting in the game and you want to argue a point like you and I have done many times about topics related to education, you sort of just need to get yourself in the mode where you can understand, okay, this person's arguments, this is what he's asking me to accept. Those are called the premises. This is what he's saying I must accept or should accept if I accept the premises, that's a conclusion. Is that true? And those are the kind of analyses of doing a logic check, you know, really over the last 12 months. So it's been a sort of roller coaster ride, as you can imagine.

Well, but it's an important set of things because I think a lot of folks see some of the fact checking and they'll see something say, well, this isn't true and it's sort of. Well, that actually isn't a fact. You just checked, for example, in some of these, I mean, in some of the more egregious examples. Right. And what you're really doing is checking the conclusion or the assumption that's being made about something. So I think it's an important exercise that you've been engaging in. As we wrap up. I just sort of want your sense for what's the roadmap forward. Right. In your mind, how do we move our schools? Help leaders, teachers, students, families move to an orientation where they're prioritizing critical thinking and doing it explicitly as they work through the subject matters and the curriculum that we have.

If you get to the end of the book, there's a set of recommendations for educators and policymakers which actually I need to thank you, Michael, for, since as an early reader you kind of recommended I add that to the conclusion. But I'd say those recommendations are, we need to move to these sort of what I've distilled into sort of high leverage practices, but just turning critical thinking from aspiration to a set of concrete things that we can implement at appropriate times in the classroom. We don't have to dismantle the current curriculum. We don't have to swap out an existing course for critical thinking course. We just need to get educators prepared to integrate critical thinking effectively through an immersion process and ideally follow some of the other practices that I list on my Degree of Freedom site, which I could share with you afterwards. But I think. Where does that take place? Well, we could be reforming or making changes to methods classes in schools of education so that when people are learning methods for teaching math, they could also learn methods for teaching critical thinking at sort of certain junctures, certain high leverage places for in service teachers that could be worked into professional development. So, you know, and then I think, hopefully the broader culture, I mean, I think certainly the last, you know, the last four years, but I would, I would go back even further. I think there is this sort of sense that we can't sort of Go on like this, you know, where all of our political communication is sort of becoming sort of mud throwing. I think, you know, there's all kinds of concerns that on one sense, there's terrible things going on in the social media realm. At the same time, people are really uncomfortable with just sort of banning things and hoping government and giant profit making corporations are going to solve this for us. And what I keep telling people is like, it ain't going to happen, right? You know, the people who got into power or made billions of dollars with the system as it is, they're not going to change things. The last line of defense is us. And in fact, if we can develop these skills, then, you know, manipulative techniques will not work on us. You know, and if enough of the people do it, then those who want to sort of persuade us will have to actually engage with us and with each other. So, you know, this really is a kind of, I would describe sort of critical thinking as a revolutionary act now. And you know, the good news is you could sort of get into the game. I mean, it'll be great. And I'm, you know, working very hard to try to get educators to sort of, you know, buy into these next steps. And I really appreciate this opportunity to talk through this forum. But I mean, we could be doing this on our own now as with our kids as adults, you know, value the ability to sort of engage with people with different viewpoints that keep an open mind. You know, these sort of, these are the critical thinking dispositions and you know, the, I think enough benefit accrues to people who think in these ways that they'll want to do more of it. And that's the way we sort of get personal and sort of societal change.

It's frankly a very hopeful and presents a real path forward for getting us out of a lot of the mess in which we find ourselves right now. So, Jonathan, thanks for writing the book. Thanks for being willing to chat about it. But then thanks for continuing to follow up with educators on the ground to show them the power that they have and families the power that they have to influence this course. So deeply appreciate your time today.

Oh, thanks, Michael. And then thanks for all you're doing in this field. Also, I cannot wait for our next walk in the woods.

Well, we'll look forward to it. And everyone, thanks for joining us on the future of education.