Doing critical thinking to others
Philip Kerr,
Adaptive Learning in ELT,
Apr 21, 2022
Philip Kerr says "some sort of reasoning must be involved" for an activity to be a part of critical thinking, but to me this is a misunderstanding or misrepresentation of critical thinking. To me, critical thinking is picking up on a phrase like "it seems highly unlikely that the students' ability to notice or express opinions will be developed" and wondering on what basis such a statement was thought to be true. This is a , or if well-internalized, a disposition, and it's on this basis that I reject conclusions such as Sweller's "education researchers have spent over a century searching for, and failing to find evidence of, transfer to unrelated domains by the use of generic-cognitive skills." To say that there is no evidence of transfer of, say, language skills, categorical reasoning, deduction, or mathematics, is to say something that is on the face of it absurd, and it makes me wonder why it would be said. It seems to me that it expresses a desire to ensure 'everybody stays in their lanes', or some such thing.
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