"We should be teaching Students how to think.  Instead, we are teaching them what to think"  (Clement and Lochhead, 1980)

I will be adding some CTS resources to this group, please feel free to add any tools or recommendations for developing CT in the classroom.

Also, any tools or aids that people might find useful for everyday use of CTS are also welcome. 

5 people in this group - wow!

I guess development in CTS isn't all that popular!

OK, so from a different thread where I had posted resources to CTS skills:

Here's a FREE eBook book on CTS:

And some other links that are pretty good:

http://www.insightassessment.com/pdf_files/What&Why2010.pdf

http://www.skepdic.com/essays/haskins.pdf

http://philosophy.hku.hk/think/critical/

I'm wondering if anyone has any information or good resources for educators, sort of along the lines of "how to bring CTS into the classroom". 

If anyone has any that they'd like to share, please do.

I think this is a great little introduction into what CTS is about. 

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Some interesting input on CTS on POEM:

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

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/

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.

Over at the POEM site there is a substantial list of good online resources:

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

A general course on critical thinking is now available online.  It's not geared specifically towards our profession, but it may be worth taking.  I cannot comment on the quality of it since I haven't taken it, but you may also want to look at the feedback on the course to see what others think.  I think it's interesting that we need to critically evaluate the content.  I've a suspicion that most people would be swayed by the fact that the lecturer and creator  is very well known in some circles.

http://www.thegreatcourses.com/tgc/courses/course_detail.aspx?cid=9344

The preview was not very impressive. Is there anything substantive in the course on being a critical thinker? I wonder how much impact it can have in changing a person's approach. Of course first a person must want to have the skills and recognize they are not critical thinkers. I think for most who think critically it was learned over years in classes. Much of my 7 years in college and graduate school was on critical thinking and how to assess information.

As I said, I don't know how good the course is, and from the feedback it looks like there is an emphasis on assessing evidence.  I think the free eBook might be better fitted for most people (the one I've posted on here before), mainly because it's geared towards asking questions and very often we may not get those questions answered. 

You hit on a good point there, Daniel, and that's that most people would generally regard themselves as good critical thinkers, but then again, a good one would recognize that they could always improve, so there is a lot of self-reflection and intellectual humility involved.  One thing that I've noticed is that in order for me to be a better critical thinker I need to be better at understanding another person's point of view and to recognize how they have come to have that. 

You were lucky to have been exposed to development of CTS at college and grad school.  I sometimes see people that have gone through both and wonder why they didn't learn some basics, like "how to figure stuff out on your own" - seems to me that's the main reason for going to college, but that's just me being a cranky old woman in a "get off my lawn" way.

An aid to identifying logical fallacies:

http://www.yourlogicalfallacyis.com/home

Most teachers will probably be aware of Bloom's taxonomy, but even if you are not a teacher, this shows the levels of it pretty well.  It's good to look at the questions involved at each level and because a number of us are continual learners, it's good to have this as a tool to examine the information that we are subjected to:

http://farr-integratingit.net/Theory/CriticalThinking/revisedcog.htm

Hi Vlad the critical thinking skills DVD is on special offer here in UK so will order a copy and forward to you for the group when done. £55 ! :)

http://www.greatcourses.co.uk/ttcx/coursedesclong2.aspx?cid=9344

I've just finnished studying this one http://www.thegreatcourses.com.au/tgc/courses/course_detail.aspx?ci...  again special offer $70 instead of $255  this is a fantastic way to learn. Their web sites are definately worth keeping an eye on for ed. 

http://www.thegreatcourses.com/tgc/courses/course_detail.aspx?cid=9344

18th may link should take you to Steven Novella's Critical Thinking DVD on special offer. I already own and highly recomend. :)