Educating for critical thinking: thought‐encouraging questions in a community of inquiry

Abstract

This paper presents one method for educating for critical thinking in Higher Education. It elaborates Richard Paul’s method of Socratic questioning to show how students can learn to be critical thinkers. This method combines and uses the wider pedagogical and critical thinking literature in a new way: it emphasises a thinking‐encouraging approach where the academic teacher scaffolds students to think for themselves, rather than leading them to understand a body of knowledge, and is based on isolating and articulating critical thinking by ‘reverse engineering’ the questions expert critical thinkers ask. The result of using this method is that students will be immersed in the practice of making critical judgements where they will hone their critical skills, cultivate a critical character and begin to speak, act and think like expert critical thinkers.