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“If students are to learn to think, they should be encouraged to ask critical questions.” Critical thinking is a broad concept that has been taken into account for many philosophers that talk about that form many different worldviews. Some think that it is constituted by particular skills, such as the ability to assess reasons properly, or to weight relevant evidence. For others it is constituted by substantial knowledge of particular content. And some others argue that it is more important to have a critical attitude or disposition, such as the tendency to ask probing questions. Paul (1982) emphasizes two senses of critical thinking, the weak and the strong sense. The first one implies the ability to think critically about other’s position rather than one’s own. And in the second one, is the ability to think critically about one’s own position. Moreover, critical thinking is also a thought or believe of culture-based difference in patterns of reasoning and cognition, but critical thinking also include normative cognitive pluralism, that is, that there are multiple, divergent, standards of reasoning, for example logic people that reason through logical inferences, from most probable to least probable, in terms of prototypes, etc.
Popper combat is the demand for precision in concepts as a prerequisite for criticism or problem-solving. In order to deal with a problem that a problem may sometimes demand we should learn to ad hoc; in other words, we should try to reformulate our original formulations with a view to avoiding those misunderstandings which have arisen or which we may foresee (it is impossible to speak in such a way that we may not be able to be understood).
Popper combat is the demand for precision in concepts as a prerequisite for criticism or problem-solving. In order to deal with a problem that a problem may sometimes demand we should learn to ad hoc; in other words, we should try to reformulate our original formulations with a view to avoiding those misunderstandings which have arisen or which we may foresee (it is impossible to speak in such a way that we may not be able to be understood).
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Trying to teach students how to think critically may be misunderstood because they tend to critique the person and not the position or the arguments of that person. Another implication for teaching critical thinking is that students, for cultural aspects, tend to defend their thoughts over their classmates’ even though sometimes somebody else’s arguments are better thought. Students should be taught to be more aware of the natural and cultural contexts in which their thinking styles are embedded.
However, for students to think critically, we need to take into account that human beings are different, so they think differently. We need to be aware of the ways students analyze and reason about situations because some of them think according to the relation they find between the problem and their own daily experiences, that is, they think based on cultural issues with many worldviews. Also, we need to bear in mind student’s beliefs, desires, intentionality and rationality. Some are good at well structured problems, but others just focus on one or two aspects of them. Some others reason by trial and error, from internal critique or logic.
Given that critical thinking is based a lot on moral education what actually limits students while trying to criticize is the power of the brain and also our limitation to predict the future course of our history. We are not able to build deductive logical reasoning only if we learn to discover what our theories imply, and thus where contradiction lies.
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It would be good if students are taught to be tolerant, in other words, it is necessary that they learn to respect other persons´ ideas before they learn to think critically about that. In this regards, teachers may also ask students to think beyond what is expected, that is to provide creative solutions in particular circumstances before they get to critic other´s arguments.
A useful technique that we can use is Ad Hoc, which is the fact to learn how to reformulate our original formulation in order to avoid misunderstanding and to avoid people to formulate new meanings over what we really try to say.
The fact of valuing diversity gives teachers the opportunity to begin developing his critical thinking through relating or comparing his/her students’ different points of view to his/her own way of thinking in order to make his teaching more effective to make meaningful learning to take place. Moreover, he can send students a signal about the different kinds of thinking that they can encounter and be in agreement or disagreement with, or that they may also create their own arguments.
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Critical thinking offers the possibility of learning about other cultures and ways of thinking what benefits students so that they can see and analyze things from other perspectives and realize that there are many types of reasoning that may be equally correct according to cultural aspects.
Another positive aspect of critical thinking is that it is not something that you acquire and it is done. You cannot develop critical thinking from one day to another, but you can improve it. This means that once you have gained critical thinking it does not mean that you have reached the top. The process of that development implies life-long learning.
According to Popper, one learns little by simply rehearsing what is already known: new knowledge develops by critically falsifying the known. That is, we have to prove our knowledge in order to improve our reasoning because if we accept things just the way we know them we are not actually thinking out of the box, whereas if we somehow falsify the known, new knowledge is developed by trying to look for other options in a given situation.
We as teachers should learn better strategies in order to teach our students how to think about various conclusions or responses to problems and challenges at the same time. Critical thinking is broadly seen as the kind of logical thinking that helps us to analyze and make sense of, or interpret, all forms of situations or information so that the conclusions we draw from our interpretations are sounds.
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Rationality and critical thinking form an ideal appropriate to all education and to all students. Our society tends to classify all the people that have certain degree in education as critical thinkers what makes the ones with lower development in that area feel frustrated because the fact of going to school doesn’t mean that they have been taught how to think critically. This can be shown by observing the situation in which we have two kinds of students: the active and the passive one. The first one seems to be the one who has his/her critical thinking highly developed. However, it may be that the passive learner, since he/she takes some time to think before giving an opinion, results as being more critical than the active learner is. But keep in mind that this is not a set rule; it can be just the opposite.
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From all the aspects we have been talking about, we can conclude that critical thinking is an important skill that we as teachers have to develop in our students so that they can become autonomous learners. This book might empower the teaching skills of any pre/in-service EFL/ESL teacher because teachers need to develop the critical thinking skills themselves before trying their students to do it. Critical thinking helps teachers set goals that are going to go further the school environment and that will help students not only get a degree but also have meaningful learning that will be helpful for the rest of their lives.
Both, pre-service and in-service teachers should develop this skill. The first ones need it because he/she will be prepared enough to face situations that require critical thinking response. So do the second ones because critical thinking is way of improving the teaching skills. Moreover, they will gain more experience to critically innovate the EFL/ESL classroom.