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Development of Critical Thinking Skills

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This group is for the sharing of information on how to develop critical thinking skills - both for therapists and for teachers to share tools and methods for bringing critical thinking into the classroom.

Members: 25
Latest Activity: May 20, 2014

Discussion Forum

Critical thinking isn't negative thinking. 3 Replies

Do you think that most people believe that it is negative thinking?Here's a wee excerpt from this little…Continue

Started by Vlad. Last reply by Vlad Jul 8, 2011.

Do you think that that the development of CTS is given adequate attention in our education? 3 Replies

I'm referring to the education in the massage therapy profession itself - not education in general. I know that people can probably only comment on their own education within it, but I'd just like…Continue

Started by Vlad. Last reply by Gordon J. Wallis Jul 7, 2011.

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Comment by Vlad on November 5, 2011 at 2:00pm: Over at the POEM site there is a substantial list of good online resources:

http://www.poem-massage.org/user-added_links

Comment by Vlad on October 10, 2011 at 1:05pm: RSA animation has some great video presentations from TED talks and other speakers. This one struck me as relevant to the development of critical thinking skills.

Comment by Vlad on October 5, 2011 at 11:56am: Here are a couple of site that I think are pretty interesting and worth a look:

http://www.fallacyfiles.org/index.html

(ignore the ads on there)

http://www.humboldt.edu/act/HTML/tests.html

And this wee one is supposed to be for students, but anyone could benefit from it - just because there is so much misinformation on the web:

http://www.vtstutorials.ac.uk/detective/

Comment by Vlad on September 13, 2011 at 8:09pm: Some interesting input on CTS on POEM:

http://www.poem-massage.org/category/wiki-tags/critical-thinking-sk...

Comment by Vlad on August 23, 2011 at 10:20am: So the last link I posted was from here, which also has a lot of other great information on CTS within the nursing profession - some of which could conceivably be applied to the MT profession:

http://hsc.unm.edu/consg/critical/

The sections on evaluation and it's relevance to clinical reasoning is pretty important, I think.

Comment by Vlad on August 22, 2011 at 8:03pm: I stumbled across this document, which refers to critical thinking measurement in nursing education:

http://hsc.unm.edu/consg/media/pdf/critical/evaluation.pdf

It would be cool to see something along these lines within our profession, where there is some emphasis on evaluating critical thinking skills.

I especially liked the line:

- develop the art of “questioning” at higher levels of analysis, synthesis and evaluation to increase your knowledge and understanding

I don't know why I just love that phrase "the art of questioning", but I do.

Comment by Vlad on August 8, 2011 at 10:12pm: Here is a post on critical thinking on a new site that is in beta testing at the moment. I hope people will check the site out since it has some useful resources regarding the development of CTS.
http://poem-massage.org/content/critical-thinking-critically-important-0

Comment by Vlad on August 8, 2011 at 1:14pm: Yes, reasonable doubt is a good thing - but so is effective communication, especially if someone states something as *fact* when it isn't (such as "something *causes* something"). You might think it's not worse in our profession that others, I think the opposite. This is my third career and the amount of opinions/theories stated and taught as fact is *way* higher than the other two.

There is also much less questioning done.

But your point of "it's up to us" is key. Maybe the questioners are secretive , quiet and fly below the radar.

Comment by Daniel Cohen on August 8, 2011 at 12:47pm: I agree it would be interesting and I have no doubt that all 30 could be found. But it isn't limited to massage. Today's journalism encourages such misdirection to sell everything from surgery to the evening news. The arrival of the sound bite did nothing to help.

For promotion and advertising we have laws but they are rarely enforced. There is also the legal profession which keeps many employed looking for ways for clients to mislead without committing fraud or other violations.

Is massage worse at this than other professions? I suspect not. Should we cleanup our act? Yes I think so within reason. At the same time a person making statements without specific reference should be understood to be saying "in my opinion" or "as I understand" without having to state such. Reasonable doubt should be part of reading/hearing anything. It is up to us to believe or not.

Comment by Vlad on August 8, 2011 at 12:31pm: Here is another little interesting document (that I have taken from Bodhi's fb page)(but that doesn't mean that I'm a *follower* of Bodhi in any other way):

http://www.astunit.com/astrocrud/flaws.htm

It would be interesting to take each of those and find examples of them in the massage world - in magazines, class materials, books, websites (a-hem) etc.