What if We Actually Taught Critical Thinking Explicitly?

For all of our talk about critical thinking, how many of the following do you think our average graduate would be able to describe​ or recognize​? How many come up in any of YOUR classes? I could imagine a general education program and assessment based only on these. Probably more productive of that elusive "responsible citizen" than all of the ideological tripe we try to wedge into GE. ​Can I fantasize about a curriculum built around these and some affirmative evidentiary and analytical skills?  One where we start with a framework of such and design our courses to resonate with it (wouldn't have to change a lot - just reference these as touchstones and cultivate styles of thinking that recognize bad arguments and can generate good ones.

It might help to develop the critical thinking skills of the faculty and administration, too, and make for big improvements in how those two polities perform.

From "A List Of Fallacious Arguments" by Don Lindsay (h/t Victoria Stodden)

• Ad Hominem (Argument To The Man)
• Affirming The Consequent
• Amazing Familiarity
• Ambiguous Assertion
• Appeal To Anonymous Authority
• Appeal To Authority
• Appeal To Coincidence
• Appeal To Complexity
• Appeal To False Authority
• Appeal To Force
• Appeal To Pity (Appeal to Sympathy, The Galileo Argument)
• Appeal To Widespread Belief (Bandwagon Argument, Peer Pressure, Appeal To Common Practice)
• Argument By Dismissal
• Argument By Emotive Language (Appeal To The People)
• Argument By Fast Talking
• Argument By Generalization
• Argument By Gibberish (Bafflement)
• Argument By Half Truth (Suppressed Evidence)
• Argument By Laziness (Argument By Uninformed Opinion)
• Argument By Personal Charm
• Argument By Pigheadedness (Doggedness)
• Argument By Poetic Language
• Argument By Prestigious Jargon
• Argument By Question
• Argument By Repetition (Argument Ad Nauseam)
• Argument by Rhetorical Question
• Argument By Scenario
• Argument By Selective Observation
• Argument By Selective Reading
• Argument By Slogan
• Argument By Vehemence
• Argument From Adverse Consequences (Appeal To Fear, Scare Tactics)
• Argument From Age (Wisdom of the Ancients)
• Argument From Authority
• Argument From False Authority
• Argument From Personal Astonishment
• Argument From Small Numbers
• Argument From Spurious Similarity
• Argument Of The Beard
• Argument To The Future
• Bad Analogy
• Begging The Question (Assuming The Answer, Tautology)
• Burden Of Proof
• Causal Reductionism (Complex Cause)
• Contrarian Argument
• Changing The Subject (Digression, Red Herring, Misdirection, False Emphasis)
• Cliche Thinking
• Common Sense
• Complex Question (Tying)
• Confusing Correlation And Causation
• Disproof By Fallacy
• Equivocation
• Error Of Fact
• Euphemism
• Exception That Proves The Rule
• Excluded Middle (False Dichotomy, Faulty Dilemma, Bifurcation)
• Extended Analogy
• Failure To State
• Fallacy Of Composition
• Fallacy Of Division
• Fallacy Of The General Rule
• Fallacy Of The Crucial Experiment
• False Cause
• False Compromise
• Genetic Fallacy (Fallacy of Origins, Fallacy of Virtue)
• Having Your Cake (Failure To Assert, or Diminished Claim)
• Hypothesis Contrary To Fact
• Inconsistency
• Inflation Of Conflict
• Internal Contradiction
• Least Plausible Hypothesis
• Lies
• Meaningless Questions
• Misunderstanding The Nature Of Statistics (Innumeracy)
• Moving The Goalposts (Raising The Bar, Argument By Demanding Impossible Perfection)
• Needling
• Non Sequitur
• Not Invented Here
• Outdated Information
• Pious Fraud
• Poisoning The Wells
• Psychogenetic Fallacy
• Reductio Ad Absurdum
• Reductive Fallacy (Oversimplification)
• Reifying
• Short Term Versus Long Term
• Slippery Slope Fallacy (Camel's Nose)
• Special Pleading (Stacking The Deck)
• Statement Of Conversion
• Stolen Concept
• Straw Man (Fallacy Of Extension)
• Two Wrongs Make A Right (Tu Quoque, You Too)
• Weasel Wording

The "Completion Agenda" and GenEd Reform

Discussions and debates among faculty and administrators often occur in the context of conversations and machinations happening several levels up from faculty meetings and the gatherings of deans.

In 28 March Chronicle of Higher Education Dan Berrett describes several institutions where administrators and faculty don't see eye to eye about curricular changes associated with "the completion agenda." Of note:

• curricular changes get pushed through over objections with justified by the need to "smooth the transfer of credits between institutions"
• supporters of credit hour changes trumpet state concerns as "a big problem"
• the debate is framed as changes that support completion vs. academic quality
• the Lumina Foundation and its "Degree Qualifications Profile" are in the background
• at one school, a core humanities requirement gets replaced by a course on "leadership "based in part on a self-help book by Steven R. Covey, The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People."

The institutions mentioned include Alamo Colleges in Texas, CUNY's Queens College, Fort Lewis College in Colorado.

Read More at COHE

See Also

• Jennifer R. Lloyd. "Alamo Colleges faculty unite against proposed curriculum change"
• Colleen Flaherty. Humanities could be replaced by '7 Habits' self-help 17 FEBRUARY 2014 Times Higher Education Supplement
• The Pathways Program at Queens College of CUNY
• "Why Should You Be Upset About Pathways?" on the Unofficial Student Senate Site at CUNY
• Dale Rodebaugh "College to abandon four-credit system: FLC trustees end months of controversy" Durango Herald
• Jonathan Rees. "Fort Lewis College: Shared Governance Denied." Colorado AAUP. FEBRUARY 24, 2014
  

A Modest Suggestion for GE Reform

From Majoring in the 21st Century blog...

When, as is usually the case, nobody has actually put forward a coherent critique that exposes what's wrong with the current system and why it needs to be thrown out and replaced, consider an innovation process that's different from the usual approach in higher education.

What if we challenge ourselves to start by repackaging and repurposing what we have, thereby really identifying what things about it could be corrected, tweaked, turbo-charged, etc. to make it live up to its promise. Usually, the fact of the matter is we were stoked about it when we invented it and neither world nor students nor we have changed that much; it's what we've let happen to it since that is the problem. Unless we can focus on how one deals with those things, we will almost certainly see the same thing happen to a new plan.

So before embarking on a giant do-over, perhaps...

Tell Them Why I

Develop coherent and persuasive description of why we have a GE program and what it is supposed to achieve.

Tell Them Why II

Build into orientation each year an academic address in which a faculty member is charged with coming up with a creative and compelling explanation of, argument for, the GE program both in principle and in particular. A few years of this will provide us with some internal dialog on what it means and why it is there as well as providing a foundation for all subsequent advising around GE.

Collect data

Write a short bit of code which would count ALL gen-ed fulfilling courses to see how the distribution is. In other words, take as given that we have a set of areas and we have a set of courses that relate to them. Apart from meeting minimal requirements, what does the distribution of "general education" actually look like for a class of graduates? (coding note: need to filter by major so we do not bias results based on distribution of majors).

Use Design to Change Attitudes

Move away from the "check box" mentality by re-configuring Banner and MAPs so they don't simply indicate that a requirement has been fulfilled, but rather track and document how and how many times each requirement has been fulfilled, providing both student and anyone who looks at the transcript a visualization of her general education. Include the rationales described above in the transcript/MAP.



Thus, instead of this…

They'd see this:

From the Majoring in the 21st Century Blog

(Not 95) Theses on General Education, etc.

General Education reform has a long history in higher education of being a no-win zone. Correct that: in any given GenEd campaign there is often a player or group of players (e.g., an administrator or administrator want-to-be who gets credit for shepherding the program through to approval (and to be fair, it's probably good training) or a department that gets a influx of resources it will never lose (even when GE is next revised) or a group of faculty who have opted out of discipline-based work and now rise to institutional importance) who manage to get something out of it.

The kudos and benefits, though, are almost never dependent on whether the program actually works and there is never any accountability for problems associated with the diversion of time, energy, and resources required by the program.

I share the Camelot-esque urge to champion the life of the mind, to fight against the forces of mediocrity in the modern world, really educate our students for the 21st century, and just generally to work for a better tomorrow, but I've seen this windmill tilted at too many times not to offer some ideas, collected over the years, about GenEd revisions. Offered partly in the spirit of provocation and healthy debate, but mostly on the (naive) optimistic belief that it IS possible to do better at higher education reform than is usually the case. The problem is that the ruts in the road are deep ones indeed.

Read the rest at Major 21

Is this Bandwagon a Handbasket?

One of the most reliable reflex actions in higher education is the urge to re-make general education every decade or so.  The effort described in this article is exemplary for its inclusion of just about every current buzzword and trendy reform.  Competencies. Portability. "Outside the classroom." Design thinking.  Learning Outcomes. Value of degree.  Measuring outcomes. Marketable skills. 

My prediction: schools will come up with cute names that offer a local brand for a program that is a hybrid of existing models dressed up with features that are buzz-wordable.  None of it will be based on known outcomes - methods and models will be attractive because school X tried it (and each of our institutions will fixate on a small number of role model institutions), not because of evidence that it works.  A small group of faculty will champion it and non-tenure stream faculty will be recruited to support it with implicit promises of employment.  The more entrepreneurial departments will help craft the program in a manner that generates enrollments and a share of the "new resources" that will be necessary to make the program a success.

The efforts will be marked by no real documentation of what the failings of the current system are and even if some are identified, the new program will not demonstrably address those failings. Political considerations will dominate so that even if the underlying trope is about basic skills, marketability, and preparation, the new program will have heavy doses of "values" education around race, class, gender, social justice, etc. and the content will be more political compromise than coherent.  No one will articulate criteria by which the success or failure of the new program can be evaluated.  And in ten years it will need to be replaced, primarily because "we never really implemented it as we planned."

Most of all, schools that are really concerned about enrollment and career placement will never seriously consider the fact that almost no one enrolls at a college because of its general education program and almost no employer hires a graduate on the basis of general education skills.  This is especially true when every school is jumping on the bandwagon - the illusion of uniqueness in general education is just that, an illusion.  And for four year schools, it's a funny strategy to put ooodles of energy into the one part of their curriculum that is the same as what students get in community or junior colleges.

And, not to put too fine a point on it, but by now we should have learned to be wary of things with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation stamp on them.  Be sure to read the press release behind this story. There you will see that this effort is an extension of Gates' ongoing efforts to import ideas from K12 into higher education and it's tied very closely to the Lumina Foundation's Degree Qualifications Profile. Expect more rubrics, more mapping of curricula, and more efforts to turn faculty judgments of student work into grist for the big data mill.  

Read more at IHE