4 tips for developing critical thinking skills | Steve Pearlman, Ph.D. | TEDxCapeMay

0:00 Transcriber: Beirys Barrientos Reviewer:

0:04 Emma Gon (Applause) Is there anything more important than how well we can think?

0:25 If you don't think so,

0:27 then I’d ask you to think about the fact that you just had to think that.

0:31 (Laughter) And as we look around the world

0:35 today at the many serious problems that we’re facing,

0:38 serious problems of war and climate change and untold political strife,

0:43 I don’t think I’m the only one who’s noticed.

0:47 As well as the very real problems we face

0:49 in our personal lives and the problems that our children will face.

0:52 Is there anyone who thinks that this is a problem of too much critical thinking?

0:58 Anyone?

0:59 Anyone?

1:00 Bueller?

1:01 (Laughter) Bueller?

1:04 I don’t think so either.

1:05 And that's why in 2011, I founded the country's first academic office,

1:10 specifically devoted to the teaching of critical thinking

1:13 and why I eventually founded the Critical Thinking Institute.

1:16 I set myself what was a rather humble challenge, a simple ambition if you will,

1:22 All I wanted to do was figure out how

1:24 to teach everybody in the world how to think critically.

1:27 Yeah, I know.

1:28 That's it.

1:30 I also have other humble ambitions.

1:32 I like tilting at windmills,

1:34 and someday think the New York Giants might win another Super Bowl.

1:38 (Laughter) But that was my goal.

1:40 I wanted to teach everybody how to think critically,

1:43 from kids through teens to adults,

1:45 through kindergartens and college classrooms and corporate boardrooms.

1:49 So what is this thing that we call critical thinking?

1:52 Well, this is just a short list of all the things that critical thinking is.

1:58 Or in fact, this is just half a short

2:00 list of all the things that critical thinking is,

2:03 and I'm sure that all of you could make meaningful additions to this list,

2:07 because it goes on and on and on.

2:11 With that being the case, how in the world can we teach a human

2:14 being to do all of these different things well?

2:19 Well, before we get to that, let's see

2:21 how well are we doing with critical thinking?

2:25 Well, the Stanford History Education Group did a study

2:28 of how well teens could think critically while they were online.

2:32 Their conclusion, and I quote:

2:34 “Young people’s ability to reason about information they see on the internet

2:38 can be summed up in one word- “bleak.” (Laughter) Don’t kill the messenger.

2:46 And The Wall Street Journal upon surveying critical

2:49 thinking outcomes of college students came to the following,

2:54 rather stark conclusion,

2:56 “Even at some of the most prestigious flagship universities,

3:01 test results indicate the average graduate shows little or no

3:06 improvement in critical thinking over four years.” I know.

3:12 And if you want to see just how bad it gets.

3:16 When researchers had college students wear portable

3:19 brain monitoring devices for a week, they found, as you would expect,

3:23 varying degrees of brain activity depending upon what the students were doing.

3:27 Whether they were studying or eating a meal or socializing.

3:31 But the place they consistently found some of the least

3:35 brain activity was when students were in class.

3:38 (Laughter) I’m sure that’s a wonderful statistic for any

3:43 of you who are currently putting someone through college.

3:45 (Laughter) So I wanted to find out why.

3:50 Why are our critical thinking outcomes so low?

3:52 And I cannot begin to enumerate for you all

3:55 of the problems we found with our critical thinking instruction,

3:59 it would take far too long.

4:00 I need a lot of TED talks to accomplish

4:03 that, but I can share with you our number one reason.

4:08 Something that no one had solved for, and something that challenged us,

4:12 in what turned out to be a decade long project.

4:16 We referred to it as “the sandbox problem.” See,

4:19 even in this simplest of sandboxes, where we have children playing,

4:23 there are an array of complex critical thinking tasks at work.

4:27 Well, who's going to get the shovel?

4:29 How are we going to get this sand out of our shoes?

4:33 How do we get this other kid to stop throwing sand in everybody’s face?

4:37 What game should we invent?

4:38 What should the rules be?

4:40 And why again, is it that we're not allowed to play in the yellow sand?

4:45 And that's just the simplest of sandboxes in which we begin,

4:49 not the metaphoric sandboxes of our lives,

4:52 sandboxes that obviously become infinitely more complex as we enter

4:57 adulthood and grapple with the challenges of the real world.

5:03 In fact, as we take a look at our list of critical

5:07 thinking skills and we overlay our sandbox on top of it.

5:10 We find so many of these already present in the simplest of sandboxes.

5:15 While they're problem solving, perhaps about how to move the sand,

5:18 they're innovating games and ideas.

5:21 They're arguing, perhaps, over who gets the shovel.

5:23 In this case, they’re inquiring about what

5:26 other kids think they should do and why.

5:28 And the list could go on and on.

5:31 So the sandbox problem for us became as this.

5:34 Given the complexity of even the simplest sandbox of all of the critical

5:39 thinking acts that are taking place in even the simplest sandbox among kids,

5:45 How do we simplify the teaching of critical thinking enough so that everyone

5:49 in the world can learn it easily

5:52 without undermining the complexity of critical thinking itself?

5:56 the complexity that we see in even the simplest of sandboxes.

6:01 (Sigh) Well, that challenged us for years.

6:06 And whatever research we did, we couldn’t find anyone that, to our satisfaction,

6:10 had solved for this sandbox problem.

6:12 Simplifying the teaching of critical thinking

6:15 without undermining the complexity of critical thinking.

6:20 Well, then I had an idea.

6:22 It occurred to me that if we were ever going to solve the sandbox problem,

6:27 we would only be able to do so,

6:30 if we relied on how the human brain evolved to think in the first place.

6:35 Instead of contriving some conception of critical thinking,

6:39 and then trying to get brains to do it.

6:41 What if, instead, we figured out how the brain was designed to function?

6:47 We looked at its most basic operating system,

6:51 and we built a critical thinking system on that.

6:55 To figure out how the brain was designed to function,

6:58 to understand its most basic operating system,

7:01 the system that’s operating no matter where we are and what we’re doing,

7:04 the system that is operating as you’re listening to me right now.

7:08 We had to trace back the origin

7:10 of how the human brain evolved to think critically.

7:14 And when I say we traced it back, I mean,

7:16 we traced it back, pretty far, to primordial ooze.

7:22 It’s an actual picture of primordial ooze from billions of years ago by the way.

7:27 (Laughter) So we traced it back to primordial ooze,

7:29 because what evolutionary biologists tell us is that from the moment

7:34 single-cell organisms came to life in that ooze,

7:37 they were already capable of four thinking acts.

7:41 Four thinking acts that are the foundation for all

7:44 of the more advanced critical thinking that we’re able to do today.

7:48 Quoting neuropsychologist Stephen Hughes, those four acts are as follows:

7:54 They could perceive their environment.

7:56 Sense danger and reward.

7:59 Decide between danger and reward.

8:02 And act on the decision.

8:05 In essence, simply put, what's going on around me?

8:09 What's out there that I might want to eat?

8:11 What's out there that might want to eat me?

8:14 How do I weigh some of those pros and cons,

8:16 and how do I ultimately act upon the decision?

8:19 You already been through this same process thousands of times already today.

8:24 You did it when you decide what to have for breakfast.

8:27 There are an array of choices available

8:29 to you in your environment that you surveyed.

8:31 You weighed some pros and cons about different

8:34 things in terms of their health benefits perhaps,

8:36 or how they tasted and what mood you were in.

8:38 You made some decisions and put some things on your plate,

8:41 and then you ate your breakfast.

8:43 You did it hundreds of times if you drove here today,

8:46 whether or not to change lanes, how fast to go, where to park.

8:50 And we do it when we make even the most high stakes decisions in our lives.

8:54 Well, decisions around parenting and our children,

8:57 career choices and what we do in our careers every single day.

9:02 So that is the most basic function that’s

9:05 operating in our brains all of the time.

9:09 And the question became,

9:10 would it be possible to convert that into a system for critical thinking?

9:17 Would that solve the sandbox problem?

9:20 Would it simplify critical thinking enough so that everybody could learn it,

9:24 while maintaining the rich complexity that we need critical thinking to be,

9:28 to contend with the rich problems we’re facing in the world?

9:32 So here are four steps.

9:35 Well, it took us a number of years,

9:37 and it took a number of iterations in order to be able to figure out

9:42 which were the correct overlays that worked

9:44 for students in learning this to make it easy.

9:48 We took “perceive the environment” where

9:51 the brain is already in an observational mode,

9:54 making an assessment of everything that’s going on around it.

9:57 We said, well, what if we harness that power and we augment it?

10:02 So we taught students techniques for detailed analytic observation.

10:07 Okay, that’s just a fancy way of saying, teaching their brains to extract more

10:11 details from whatever it is they’re observing.

10:13 Now it doesn’t matter if they’re observing a Shakespeare play,

10:16 a nursing simulation, a business proposal.

10:19 What is being observed is not the point.

10:22 Conditioning the brain to use that step

10:25 to extract more details from it is the point.

10:28 We took the second step and we said,

10:30 if the brain is already in a mode of asking what’s a danger and reward,

10:34 what’s a threat and what’s something to value,

10:36 then why don't we take that step, harness it, and augment it?

10:41 So we taught students techniques for complex question clarification.

10:46 We took the next step to decide between danger and reward.

10:50 We said if the brain is already

10:52 in a reasoning mode making determinations between different things,

10:55 what if we harness that step and augment

10:57 it and give students techniques for multivariant evaluation?

11:01 Another fancy way of saying being able to weigh lots

11:04 of different things against each other at the same time.

11:07 And we took the final step to act on a decision.

11:09 And we said, well, if the brain is already in a mode of drawing conclusions

11:13 let’s harness that capacity and augment it

11:17 and give students the ability to form complex conclusions,

11:20 the kinds of conclusions that do justice

11:22 to the complex situations that we face in our lives.

11:25 So we took all of these things,

11:27 and we distilled critical thinking down to just four primal acts,

11:32 four acts that your brain does thousands of times a day.

11:38 Have you ever thought about the fact that we

11:40 teach students math and we teach them how to write,

11:42 and we teach them how to read,

11:45 but we do not teach students how to think critically.

11:48 That seems particularly odd, doesn't it?

11:51 Well, let me explain to you why that might be.

11:54 We know the foundation, the core act of teaching people to read.

12:00 Well, there's site recognition, there's vocabulary, potentially.

12:03 There’s phonics, things like that.

12:05 All the things that you learned when you learned to read.

12:08 And you use all of those same foundations

12:11 no matter what you read today as adults, whether you read things as a doctor,

12:16 whether you read poetry, whatever it is you read,

12:19 you do so because you have mastered those core skills of reading.

12:24 Well, we don't teach people to think critically because perhaps

12:28 until now we had not identified the core skills of thinking.

12:34 But what if those four steps that I described to you are,

12:37 in fact, those four core steps of thinking?

12:43 If we look at our list here,

12:45 what we discovered was that when we taught students those four steps,

12:51 all of these other things came along for the ride.

12:53 Oh, sure, if you’re going to engage in innovation,

12:56 there are certain additional things that we want your brain to do.

13:00 But the simple fact of the matter is that you cannot engage in problem solving

13:05 at all without making a detailed observation

13:08 of factors that might matter to the problem,

13:11 formulating a correct and complex, insightful question about that problem.

13:18 Weighing out different pieces of information as they

13:21 relate and impact your conclusion to that problem,

13:23 and ultimately drawing a complex conclusion.

13:27 Nor can you engage in strategizing, nor can you engage in innovating,

13:32 nor can you do any other of the critical thinking acts that we mentioned,

13:36 nor any of the critical thinking acts that you might be thinking of right now.

13:40 They all depend first and foremost on that primal skill

13:44 of critical thinking that we taught students how to do better.

13:48 Something that anyone can learn.

13:52 Well, how did it work out?

13:56 We had first and second undergraduate students,

14:00 undergraduates who, after just one course,

14:04 wrote papers that, when we presented them to colleagues at other universities,

14:08 were typically rated as graduate level work.

14:14 Just a two week intervention at a high school in Harlem,

14:17 New York, not only saw wonderful increased gains in critical thinking,

14:21 but something that we didn’t even teach

14:23 the students increased complexity in their sentence structures.

14:28 Class discussions became richer and more invigorated,

14:32 with students often being the ones to take the lead.

14:35 Students who respected one another’s ideas more whether or not they disagreed,

14:41 sometimes, especially if they disagreed.

14:44 Because regardless of what we thought,

14:46 we all know that we could respect one another's reasoning process.

14:51 Something that might be important in the world today.

14:57 And it only worked in every discipline in which we tried it.

15:02 As noted by faculty in those disciplines and faculty across the discipline,

15:07 who said they'd never seen such complex critical thinking in their lives.

15:14 But it also worked outside of class.

15:17 I can't tell you the number of comments

15:19 in person and in course evaluations that we

15:22 receive from students who talked about how

15:24 this affected how they made decisions in their lives.

15:28 And I got this one note slipped under

15:30 my door at the end of a semester, which said,

15:33 “It helped me deal with my personal issues and my relationships because

15:37 it gave me a new way to think through things like never before.

15:42 This has changed how I think forever.

15:44 This is one of the few classes I had

15:47 that isn’t just about school.” What’s better than that?

15:54 So, we solved the sandbox problem because we

16:00 built critical thinking on a way that’s natural,

16:04 that leverages our natural, most basic,

16:07 most instinctive brain function and turned

16:10 it into an intellectual set of skills.

16:13 We made it something that everyone in the world can learn,

16:16 regardless of their age, regardless of what you do,

16:19 regardless of whether or not you get a fancy education.

16:25 We found a way to teach critical thinking that was at once easy to learn.

16:29 Yet not only did it undermine

16:32 the complexity of critical thinking, it augmented it.

16:37 Listen, researchers tell us this- the single biggest determinant

16:42 for the decisions our kids make in their lives,

16:45 high stakes decisions with respect to drug use,

16:49 peer pressure, career choice is not their raw intellect,

16:53 it’s not how smart they are, it’s their critical thinking skills.

16:58 And a recent survey of 1000 employers said

17:01 that the number one skill they are seeking,

17:03 but do not find enough of in employees is critical thinking.

17:11 Well, we figured out how to teach critical thinking.

17:13 We figured out how to teach everybody,

17:15 and we can teach it in elementary school classrooms,

17:19 corporate boardrooms, and everywhere in between.

17:22 And given the problems facing the world today,

17:25 I think we could use a little more critical thinking.

17:28 What do you think?

17:30 Thank you.

17:31 (Applause)