L530: Critical Thinking for Teachers
3 Credit hours
Designed by Snea Thinsan

General Information

Goals

This course is designed to achieve three major goals: to encourage pre-service and in-service teachers from around the  world to explore the different dimensions of critical thinking, to help them blend critical thinking principles with their  personal ways of thinking, and ultimately to help them integrate their refined version of critical thinking into their lesson  plans that employ teaching approaches introduced in the course.

The participants will be invited to experience and reflect on the various modes of critical thinking skills, exchange ideas through web forum discussions, and then create appropriate lesson plans for their classrooms.

The instruction

The instruction is composed of two major parts. The first part includes exploration of basic elements of critical thinking, including Clarification, Basis for decision, Inference, Advanced clarification, and dispositions. The other part promotes exploration of critical thinking teaching strategies and lesson plan generating or revisions under the principles of Questioning Strategies, Scaffolding Strategies, and Collaborative Strategies. While the focus is placed on the first part during the first five segments, the students are encouraged to explore teaching strategies earlier and to write reading responses that reflect their ability to understand the elements of critical thinking for each segment as well as how they can be tied to the teaching approaches that they have read.  In efforts to address recognition of prior knowledge, skills and cultural values of the target audience, the instruction will ask the learners to think about, compare and validate their critical thinking strategies and critical thinking teaching strategies, too.

Assignments

Assignments for the first part comprises Personal narrative, Website evaluation, Critiquing selected texts, and Analyzing news of own choices, and writing argumentative essay. The second part will require the participants to work on a discussion forum, as well as to refine and create lesson plans based on the strategies introduced in the course. Essentially, the instructors will  elicit examples of critical thinking strategies from the students for every assignment.

Readings

The readings include relevant chapters in the set texts:

Ennis, R. H. (1996). Critical Thinking.  New Jersey: Prentice Hall.

Paul, R. and Elder, L. (2002). Critical Thinking: Tools for Taking Charge of Your Professional and Personal Life.  Prentice Hall.
(Order at: https://www.criticalthinking.org/bookstore/bookorder.html);

The readings will also include a list of online resources available on the U.S. Statement Department website and elsewhere. For a full list, please visit http://sthinsan.netfirms.com/CT/resources.htm.

Book buying

If you are around the IUB campus, you can buy the set texts by referring to the following details:

To order your readings from the IU Bookstore, just call Brenda Young at 1-800-553-6471 or (812) 855-4668 and state that you are a Distance Education student and provide your class number(s), or contact her via email at bkstext@indiana.edu.

 To order your readings from TIS Bookstore, call 1-800-238-1229 or (812) 332-3306, extension 251, or send an email to John Wigley at jwigley@tisbook.com.

 If you are elsewhere, you can buy the set texts via the internet. The two books are:

Ennis, R. H. (1996). Critical Thinking.  New Jersey: Prentice Hall.

Paul, R. and Elder, L. (2002). Critical Thinking: Tools for Taking Charge of Your Professional and Personal Life.  Prentice Hall.
(Order at: https://www.criticalthinking.org/bookstore/bookorder.html);

How to register

If you are a current Indiana University graduate student, use the regular course registration process.
If you are not a current IU student, you can refer to the Web site of the IU School of Education's
Distance Education Program for more information.