Workshop Topic Detail
Teaching Critical Thinking
Description
This workshop provides participants with concrete tools for teaching critical thinking skills while covering required course content. By the end of the workshop, participants are able to create lesson plans that enhance critical thinking skills based on content from any discipline in the humanities or social sciences. Participants will also learn how these skills can be easily and accurately measured.
By the end of this workshop, participants know or be able to:
- Understand fundamentals of the human brain regarding dispositions toward critical thought, bias, use of evidence, and heuristic thinking.
- Understand what works and what doesn’t work regarding critical thinking instruction.
- Learn and apply precise pedagogical methods that help students at any level improve their critical thinking skills.
- Learn and apply precise pedagogical methods to improve writing skills based on critical thinking practices.
- Create critical thinking rubrics.
Plans for Audience Participation and Interaction:
- Participate in exercises proven to enhance critical thinking.
- Create exercises and exams that enhance and measure critical thinking skills.
- Use and create rubrics that provide viable measurements of critical thinking.
Facilitator(s)
Dr. John Eigenauer is a professor of philosophy at Taft College. He holds a master’s degree in English, a master’s degree in humanities, and a doctorate in interdisciplinary studies from Syracuse University, where he was the recipient of the prestigious Syracuse University Fellowship. Dr. Eigenauer has taught philosophy, English, mathematics, computer science, physics, and Spanish. He has delivered workshops nationally and internationally on the pedagogy of critical thinking and published articles on critical thinking and rationality. His most recent article, “The Problem With the Problem of Human Rationality,” published in the International Journal of Educational Reform, was highlighted in Psychology Today. Other publications of Dr. Eigenauer’s have appeared in The Historian, The Harvard Theological Review, History of Intellectual Culture, Inquiry: Critical Thinking across the Disciplines, The Rational Alternative, Thinking Skills and Creativity, Eighteenth-Century Studies, The Huntington Library Quarterly, Innovation Abstracts, and The NISOD Papers.