I don’t know about you all, but I used to pride myself in being intellectually on par with my peers and on having sought-after critical thinking skills. However I would say with the age of social media, and spending more time on it than I would care to admit. I’ll say it…
I’ve gotten dumb
For me, this has been things like lowered attention span, asking less follow-up questions and consuming more opinions from others than fully forming more of my own and making it multilayered.
According to Merriam-Webster:
Dumb (adjective) – lacking intelligence
My added-on:
Lacking critical thinking skills
Critical thinking is our way of analyzing, interpreting and evaluating facts and information to form our own judgement and opinion and make decisions. We’re in a time where I see a lot of the same thought pieces being thrown around and a lack of thinking.
Plainly, the critical thinking process of seeing through the BS and being a skeptic and I’m not seeing enough questioning the world as I’d like to see, myself included 😉
Critical thinking is a skill vital beyond that. It’s what keeps us from being carbon copies of each other, it’s how we foster change and at a more basic level it keeps us from falling for scams or staying in situations that aren’t for us like bad jobs or relationships because we stop and ask, “is this really serving us?”
So, I did some heavy lifting and found 2 major practical steps to help us get our brains working again, plus the obvious. There are definitely more than 2 steps, but we can go deeper over time let’s just get the ball rolling.
Practical Steps to Build Critical Thinking
Ask Open-Ended Questions
A study by Jaswal and Behera mentioned how the use of open-ended questions helps to build the skill and it’s not only a technique to be used in the early exploration phase of getting into a new topic but critical for lifelong learning.
Reflect On Your Thinking
Reflecting on what you learn is another skill that helps you solidify it. There’s no one right way to do this. You can create a presentation, talk it out loud like you’re explaining it to someone else, or just journal it down. Go through it and don’t assume you have it all remembered. Take your time.
The Obvious
Here’s the obvious tip that I think a lot of people try to skip by and that’s that all the open-ended questions and reflection in the world won’t fix it if you’re still feeling the scroll for hours a day loop. A simple swap is taking that extra scroll time and turn it into a walk instead. let your brain actually reflect instead of just consume.
Now, brief review:
What’s critical thinking in your own words?
Now let’s test this:
What color is the sky?
Basic, I know… but is it?
Did you have follow up questions?
Did you ask if I want to know the color of the sky you see or mine?
How about the age-old on: If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around did it really make a sound?
Which lens did you approach the problem in?
Vibrations or something being heard?
There’s no right answer, just checking to see if you continued thinking or just gave up.
From this post as a whole, any follow-up questions? I would love to know
Reference
Jaswal, P., & Behera, B. (2024). Blended matters: Nurturing critical thinking. E-Learning and Digital Media, 21(2), 106-124. https://doi.org/10.1177/20427530231156184