Sharpening our Critical Thinking Skills
Well, this year has started with a lot of chaos and in between this pandemic, we started our new academic year with full grit! This year Critical thinking has been one of the elements that I have chosen to work upon in professional and personal life. So far the journey has been interesting. The first thing that I have understood is that we all think and we all think critically too. But the catch is that we need to rewire our beliefs and value and paradigms to make our critical thinking skills more useful.
In our journey of critical thinking class so far we have got to know about the types of cognitive biases we all use in our day-to-day life. It is just that all of us think differently about different things. From the sharings, I can infer that all of us go through a lot of different experiences and that molds our ability to think critically in certain situations.
What I’m interested now in is to learn is how we can sharpen this saw of critical thinking skills by applying different strategies. Like ‘Murder your darling’ was a really interesting activity that makes you forcefully keep your emotions, likings, and beliefs aside and look at things in a more 360-degree manner view to better make decisions. Look forward to more interesting learnings!
I agree that in this situation of pandemic the art of critical thinking has become even more important in our personal and professional lives. I do also agree that before making decisions a 36-degree approach will help by looking at the pros and cons and a good balance between being gullible and sceptic will also do. Also the belief and paradigms can be adjusted so that we are clear about belief, opinion and facts.
I agree with your statement,” We all use it in our day-to-day life. It is just that all of us think differently about different things.” Yes, we all do go through different situations every single day and get different experiences which are enhancing our critical thinking skills but applying it in every circumstance against certain beliefs and paradigms can be a task at times but a conscious effort will definitely help us get clarity over our belief, opinion, and facts as said by Abheek sir.
“the catch is that we need to rewire our beliefs and value and paradigms to make our critical thinking skills more useful.”
– I always felt the way my mother has taught me things are the best and most useful of all, and certain things my mother in law does are sheer waste of time. Once We discussion about “Confirmation bias” I introspected, it was “me” who was looking for reasons which holds my belief true.
Well said Khushboo ma’am, critical thinking has become a tool or necessity for decision making in our daily life and I am also on the same lines.