Looking both ways

I am often asked by my students what the best ways are to demonstrate critical thinking in their essays. The answer is quite simply to look both ways. Providing a balanced and objective argument where opposing perspectives are considered, is always a good foundation for criticality. But we can do much better than that. Critical analysis is where students can understand several ideas or theories, and can show how they are related. Critical evaluation is where they take the synthesis (coalescence) of these ideas and judge their collective and individual worth, in the context of the essay question.

This is one reason why I strongly suggest that students don't indiscriminately pepper their assignments with direct quotations from the literature. They are then left with an essay that seems disjointed. It looks as though they have arbitrarily selected several quotes and have placed them in their essay, hoping for the best. Often, the essay just doesn't flow naturally. They need to judge the worth of any theory or idea they include in their work. Inserting lengthy quotations into text tells me that the student is struggling to pad out their assignment, and may even have run out of time. It looks much better, I argue, if students embed these ideas as paraphrased statements into their commentary. It takes more energy to do this, but it looks a lot more cohesive. If they do this, they demonstrate to the reader (and marker!) that they not only found the idea and can understand it, but that they can also contextualise it. For me, that is a much more impressive approach to answering an essay question and leads into a more convincing argument and conclusion.

Ultimately, we ask students to demonstrate criticality to show that they have not only assimilated the knowledge that is associated with their studies, but also that they can apply it in contexts that are defensible and that they can achieve objectivity. Taking several perspectives into consideration also sets them up for a life of professional practice. If you can't discern, you will find it difficult to critically reflect on your own practice, and that is the essence of being a professional.  It's funny - you wait for a long time for a theory to come along, and then suddenly two appear at once. Look both ways.

Photo by Raddaquii


Looking both ways by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.