On teaching critical thinking. Some reflections

Abstract

What is critical thinking and how does one teach it? How does a teacher, often dragooned into teaching critical thinking, identify, develop, implement, assess and report on a capability that is often ill-understood, commonly feared, but widely acknowledged as
being one of education’s core business? In what follows, I detail three notable developments in our understanding of the pedagogy
of critical thinking: the uptake of community of inquiry practices, the advent of argumentmapping and the use of a questioning type that demands the enactment of higher-order thinking. I argue that questioning remains a critical thinking teacher’s primary pedagogical tool.