Unit 3 Learning Activity 2 Rank-Talk-Write

The texts I selected were two web pages on The Foundation for Critical Thinking’s website: the pages entitled College and University students and Being a Critic of Your Own Thinking. I was really proud of myself for being able to summarize my notes into the following summary of key ideas in both articles. I found this to be a VERY useful exercise and I will use it in future!

1) Your thinking plays a powerful role in your life; thinking ‘well’ brings positive rewards while thinking ‘poorly’ brings negative consequences

2) The extent to which we become better quality thinkers is determined by the amount of time we dedicate towards this development, the quality of intellectual thought processes we engage in, and the depth of our commitment to becoming better quality thinkers

3) Four examples of ways to improve the quality of your thinking are: clarifying your thinking, maintaining relevance in thinking, questioning deeply and striving to be more reasonable in thinking

3a) -clarifying one’s thinking involves 2 things: clarifying your understanding of what others are saying and being aware of how clearly you are communicating to others

3b) -sticking to the point means being able to separate information that is relevant to the issue at hand from information that is not relevant

3c) -deep questioning involves asking questions skillfully to be able to get at the root of the problem or to fully understand a problem

3d) -being reasonable involves paying attention to when you or others are being unreasonable in a particular situation and asking yourself what the reason is for the behaviour. e.g. is a viewpoint being overlooked? Are there inherent biases? Am I really taking the best course of action for all involved? Are there better ideas for handling this?