What IS Critical thinking?

I’ve been doing research on Critical Thinking skills all my life, I can surely define critical thinking as the ability to see new perspectives, put reasonable questions, put forth solid arguments and supporting details, make valid and rational choices. Critical thinking taps predominantly on metacognition i.e. to realize your knowledge potential and to mindfully construct something new that will be valuable and objective in the specific sphere of expertise. Giving and receiving feedback is one of the pivotal conceptual components of CR.

Sometimes students wonder what we view as critical thinking skills. They all ask the same questions: Do they have to criticize somebody or something to get to the bottom of any subject matter? Do they have to be critical towards themselves? I’ve been always trying to explain to my students that there’s no need to criticize smb. or to express doubts towards smb./smth., or completely confide in smth/smb., but that actually means that you process the info not as it is presented (TV news, for ex.,) but you tune yourself into the process thinking, stimulate your brain to work hard and as a result, you get the most of it or this info will add value to your background knowledge.

I tend to teach the stages of CR explicitly to my students:

1. A challenging issue or problem to solve is introduced to students, Ss are asked come up with their own ideas, ideas might be reflective or based on Ss’ background knowledge; in other words, students are exploring their intellectual capacity first. So, we are embracing the challenging issue/grapple with it (or we are aware that we have to deal with some kind of a problem);
2. Then comes one step further, we are dealing with the same challenging problem/issue but relying on strategies, techniques and related technologies;
3. At the third stage, we reconstruct what’ve discovered, and then construct/negotiate a brand-new perspective.
4. By the 4^th stage we have already gained insight and now it’s high time we developed new concepts, discovered new insights and perspectives, we are ready to ambitiously present results of the subject matter.

Critical thinking can be learned and taught though we have to explicitly instruct our students how to develop critical thinking skills (through activities or equip our students with critical thinking strategies) and some related soft skills that are rendered as 21st-century competencies. Critical thinking skills pave the way to flexibility, persistence, readiness to study and set goals, awareness, choose not just between two options but be open-minded and be able to see not just the whole forest in the big picture but trees as well.