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President's Letter |
Ferris State University’s Critical Thinking Institute is ensuring students and the campus community take an active role in their learning. Ferris State University has long been a place that stresses a hands-on education. For some, that conjures up visions of students at the controls of computerized injection molding machines, attending to patients in the Optometry Clinic or diagramming a building’s heating and cooling system. The University’s Critical Thinking Institute is taking that hands-on approach and applying it systematically to the process of thinking itself. The CTI is an organization sponsored by the Faculty Center for Teaching & Learning and is spearheaded by 11 faculty mentors, all of whom have become specialists in the use of critical thinking in the classroom. According to Elizabeth Stolarek, Institute director, the organization participates in more than 10 major seminars annually. A long-time supporter of the concept of critical thinking, Stolarek helped found the Institute in 2002 after spending a semester sabbatical drafting plans and researching critical thinking studies. Her goal is to encourage the use of critical thinking in classrooms throughout Ferris and at other academic institutions, as well. “The concepts involved in critical thinking are very old, going back to Plato and Aristotle…they were modified for teaching use by Mortimer Adler at the University of Chicago,” said Stolarek. “One of his students, Richard Paul, established the Foundation for Critical Thinking in Sonoma, Calif., where we were trained,” added Stolarek. The goal of critical thinking is to improve the quality of your thinking by analyzing, assessing and reconstructing information. All too often we fail to question what we hear on the evening news, what we learn in the classroom or what we want to do with our lives. Critical thinking is likened to taking charge of your own mind. If we can take charge of our minds, we can take charge of our lives. If we can take charge of our lives, ultimately we will be happier and more productive individuals in society. (University founder Woodbridge Ferris put it even more forcefully. “When a human being ceases to do constructive thinking, ceases to find new and better ways of livng, he is as dead as any corpse in a cemetery.”) Donna Smith, Communications professor, is part of the team working to ensure students at Ferris think more critically about what they learn and not simply accept information at face value. She wants her students to dig deeper, to investigate by asking questions essential to developing more informed and nuanced answers. This will help students not only in the classroom, but in their personal lives as well, as they subject their innermost thoughts, feelings and desires to this process something many of us choose not to do. Through weekly meetings with faculty and staff involved in the Critical Thinking Learning Community, Smith and other members assist participants in developing critical thinking modules to use in the classroom or office. “Many people have this misconception that they have to revise their entire syllabus and that’s simply not the case. You can develop a module and implement it into your class or work environment. It’s really very easy to do,” says Smith. Debra Courtright-Nash, assistant professor of English in the Language and Literature department participated in this year’s Learning Community. “The critical thinking learning community has provided me with new perceptions of critical thinking from other disciplines,” she says. “It has given me the space to practice some valuable tools, such as Socratic questioning, and offered me some useful sets of questions that my students can apply to their reading and writing processes.” She recently gave a presentation to the Learning Community on her own use of the critical thinking module. She simulated her English 250 classroom, asking audience members to analyze the types of information used as evidence in six articles from various disciplines by applying “Elements of Thought” from “The Miniature Guide to Critical Thinking Concepts and Tools.” Linda Elder of the Foundation for Critical Thinking, along with founder Paul, designed the elements to enhance a reader’s understanding. The group discussion for each article sparked a dialogue between participants, which promoted debate and discussion. She sees the same results in her classroom. “Critical thinking skills enable my students to more clearly and carefully consider the audience, purpose and sources for their writing,” explained Courtright-Nash. “It also enables them to be more efficient learners.” Stolarek and her critical thinking colleagues will soon be embarking on a quantitative research study focusing on the benefits of critical thinking in the classroom. “It will be a number of smaller research projects on which we’ll do a meta-analysis, looking for quantitative proof that critical thinking does work in the classroom,” said Stolarek. “Teachers who use it know it works, but too many people need facts and figures…so we’re going to prove it.” Ferris is one of a handful of universities that have a critical thinking learning community. “We’ve been doing this for more than four years now, and we’ve really reached a maturation level where we’re being asked to do some very large things,” says Learning Community member and professor George Nagel. “Eventually, we’ll reach that critical mass and incorporate it into the culture.” It’s a common turn of phrase in that broader culture to say that we “grasp” an idea, just as a builder might grasp a hammer in constructing a house. And just like a builder with a hammer, CTI wants the grasping of an idea to be just one step of the whole process. Think of it as constructing a critical mind. CTI Faculty Mentors: Ashraf Afifi (Business) Adnan Dakkuri (Pharmacy) Susan Hastings-Bishop (Recreation, Leisure Services and Wellness) Judith Hooper (University College) Paul Kammerdiner (FLITE) Mary Murnik (Biology) George Nagel (Communication) Marcy Parry (Allied Health Sciences) John Schmidt (Technology) Donna A. Smith (Communication) Elizabeth Stolarek (Languages and Literature) |
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