Critical Thinking

Paul & Elder(2007) state that critical thinking is an art of analyzing and evaluating the learning that takes place in our daily life. It enables a person to formulate purposeful question and gather and assess the relevant information. He comes to conclusions and tests them against preset criteria and rethinks about other alternatives. He communicates with others in finding the solution of complex problems.

A critical thinker always identifies the exact problem or asks for clarity or illustration. He thinks about the accuracy of the statement. He verifies the statement and for precision he seeks the problem to be specific. Relevancy is another issue that always strikes to the mind of critical thinker. He ensures that the quantitative and qualitative aspect of the statement. A statement might look very simple and can be said in a few words like “Say no to smoking.” A critical thinker always considers the complexities of the problem and goes into the breadth and depth of any statement. He evaluates and analyses the statement from others’ view point and ultimately comes to logical conclusion in which different thoughts are combined appropriately.   

Learning is a complex process. It can become long lasting if a learner develops critical thinking. The leaner will gain confidence and get better engaged in the learning process if he knows the answers of three questions:

              1.       What?

              2.       Why?

              3.       How?

Although these questions are equally important in learning but a learner develop critical thinking when he asks himself and the educator “Why.”

References:

Paul, R., & Elder, L. (2007). The miniature guide to critical thinking concepts and tools. Retrieved from

http://www.d.umn.edu/~jetterso/documents/CriticalThinking.pdf

Pedagogical Approaches

A teacher has a number of pedagogical approaches at his hand. The question of choice of approach/es is always debatable. What should a teacher do? The answer lies in the nature of learners. A teacher should understand his learners at the first stage and devise learning strategies accordingly.  

Ten pedagogical approaches suggested by LSIS are

Source: LSIS

As it has already been stated that learner should kept at the centre place while selecting a suitable approach. In general it would be better to say that successful learning process can occur by applying a combination of approaches. It cannot be justifiable to say that one approach is better than the other. But it would be right to say that one approach is better than the other in a particular context with particular learners.

I would like to mention the approaches that could be used with Learners pursuing Engineering Mathematics at Diploma level. The learners are diverse in terms of age, previous experience, numeracy and gender mixed.

Differentiation: Tomlinson (2001) states, “Differentiation allows students multiple options for taking in information, making sense of ideas, and expressing what they have learned.  A differentiated classroom provides different avenues to acquiring content, to processing or making sense of ideas and to developing products so that each student can learn effectively.” This approach considers that individual learners. My learners need individual attention. Some of them face difficulties in basic calculation and on the other hand some are advanced and need challenging questions.

Co-operative Learning : Johnson& Smith (1998)states that it is essential to improve information acquisition and retention, higher level thinking and interpersonal communication skills. In my workplace the students can be divided into small diverse groups. During the assignment they discuss their difficulties in the group and individual members suggest different solution to the problem and as a team they agree on an appropriate solution and shows collaboration.

Learning Conversations: Learning conversation acts as a scaffold to help learners reflect constructively. My learners not only converse with the teacher but also with peers to review their progress and accordingly decide what to do next. When they face difficulty in understanding the complex integration problems, they use to converse with the teacher.

Similarly the other suitable approaches that can be used are multi- sensory learning in which the students use different senses to grasp knowledge and e-learning in which the information and learning is available to the learners conveniently.

References:

Johnson, D.W., Johnson, R. and Smith, K. (1998) Active Learning: cooperation in the College Classroom. Edina, MN: Interaction Book Company. Retrieved from

http://tlp.excellencegateway.org.uk/tlp/pedagogy/assets/documents/qs_cooperative_learning.rtf

 Laurillard, D., Stratford, M., Luckin, R., Plowman, L. and Taylor, J. (2000) Affordances for learning in a non-linear narrative medium. Proceedings of the American Educational Research Association Conference Retrieved from

http://tlp.excellencegateway.org.uk/tlp/pedagogy/assets/documents/qs_learning_conversations.rtf

Tomlinson, C. A. (2001) How to differentiate in mixed-ability classrooms. 2^nd ed. Alexandria, VA. Retrieved from http://tlp.excellencegateway.org.uk/tlp/pedagogy/assets/documents/qs_differentiation.rtf