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How to Sharpen Your Critical Thinking Skills

People find that they need to hone their critical thinking skills more so than ever. Complexities within a rapidly moving, technology driven environment require more advanced problem-solving skills. No matter if you find yourself a teacher or professor, a student in the classroom or an employee in one of numerous fields where you make decisions daily, you will experience improved performance if you sharpen your critical thinking skills. Although definitions of critical thinking can appear lengthy and complex, the Foundation for Critical Thinking offers a brief: "Critical thinking is the art of analyzing and evaluating thinking with a view to improving it."

Things You'll Need

  • Notepad
  • Pencil or pen
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Instructions

  1. Continual practice

    • 1

      Analyze, evaluate and think of ways to improve things you encounter daily. For example, classify books you are considering reading. Arrange tasks for the week in a logical manner. Design your perfect office space and diagram it on paper.Figure out how to improve upon your design. Evaluate decisions you make through careful analysis, synthesis and understanding of criteria you set up. Ask yourself how you can streamline or achieve even better results.

    • 2

      Add Benjamin Bloom to your reading list. Bloom classified levels of intellectual behavior as it relates to learning in 1956. His levels consisted of knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation, the last three of which serve as components of higher-order thinking. Education specialists at the University of Victoria stress the importance of improving skills across Bloom's levels of thinking.

    • 3

      Analyze patterns that you see while reading, such as recognizing that this poem has 14 lines and that one has 14, too. Ask yourself if the poems are alike in any other ways. Notice their rhyming patterns and that they both deal with time. As you take your afternoon walk each day, notice the different colors of the sky. Name those colors: azure, gray, charcoal, robin's egg blue or quite a different hue.

    • 4

      Take other perspectives. If you're a Democrat, debate an issue from a Republican standpoint. Play the devil's advocate in your Sunday School class. Spread out a quilt on the lawn and examine the world from a child's perspective once again.

    • 5

      Name as many types of houses as you can (or trees or flowers) while you are driving. Compare different neighborhoods and place them into categories you create. Imagine what kinds of people live in individual houses. Discuss with your children why the red light signals "stop" and why it is at the top. Prioritize hobbies or volunteer work.

    • 6

      Make connections to what you already know. Synthesis means "bringing together." This type of thinking occurs when you create new ideas, make predictions and formulate conclusions based on previous thinking and analyzing. When you combine, modify, plan, rewrite, devise or reorganize, you are synthesizing information. Help with the church bazaar, devise ways of completing a task more efficiently or reorganize your pantry or paper files to improve this area of thinking.

    • 7

      Volunteer for activities and jump at the chance to take advantage of opportunities to improve critical thinking skills. Such opportunities shout at you throughout your day. Sharpen your mind and enjoy the journey.

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