Today Tony asked our students to make up a skit to show their image of schooling. This activity provide opportunities for students to speak English and express their ideas or images of schooling which may be the first step to realize and change their own teaching perspective.
During the activities, an interesting phenomenon showed up. Most of them criticized the education they had in China. While,it was true that the Chinese education had many problems. But, the thinking and reasoning of the problematic educational phenomenon is shallow, or not deep enough, in other word, critical thinking is missing.
In order to get more from this activity, students should not jump up to conclusion too quickly. They should not ignore the context that these things took place, the social context, the historical context, the economic context, the physical context, and so on. They should also rethink the theories and rationals behind their judgement and carefully examine the proof and logic. In short, critical thinking should take the place of criticism.
Why harsh criticism of people’s own education is not good even harmful? First, it easily leads to extreme and skin deep thinking which block more intellectual endeavor. Second, it hurt their self-image and self-confidence. Third, it can easily separate their connection with the previous themselves and places. Extreme criticisms call abandon or escape but not improvement and responsibility. Try to think of place-based learning, it heals the disconnection between people and places while harsh criticism do the opposite.
According to Daniel T. Willingham, critical thinking have three key features: effectiveness, novelty, and self-direction. Critical thinking is effective in that it avoids common pitfalls, such as seeing only one side of an issue, discounting new evidence that disconfirms your ideas, reasoning from passion rather than logic, failing to support statemnts with evidence, and so on.
Critical thinking is novel in that you don’t simply remember a solution or a situation that is similar enough to guide you. Using a complex algorithm to solve a math problem is not critical thinking. But devising a new algorithm is. Critical thinking is self-directed in that the thinker must be calling the shot(making desicions themselves): awards or punishment will disrupt instead of promote critical thinking.
