Teaching Critical Thinking in Humanities and Social Sciences Courses

This workshop provides participants with concrete tools for teaching critical-thinking skills while covering required course content. By the end of the workshop, participants are able to create lesson plans that enhance critical-thinking skills based on content from any discipline in the humanities or social sciences. Participants also learn how these skills can be easily and accurately measured.

By the end of this workshop, participants know or will be able to:

• Understand the fundamentals of the human brain regarding dispositions toward critical thought, bias, use of evidence, and heuristic thinking.
• Learn precise pedagogical methods to help students think critically through structured argumentation while covering course (or agnostic) content.
• Learn precise pedagogical methods to help students deeply understand readings through best practices in critical thinking.
• Learn precise pedagogical methods to help students write quality papers by using the foundational skills of critical thinking.

Plans for Audience Participation and Interaction:
Participants work on exercises designed to help students progress through increasingly advanced skill levels. These skills are founded in best practices from the field of critical thinking and can be applied to a variety of courses such as English language, literature, writing, journalism, speech, psychology, sociology, general humanities, college-skill building, and others.

All workshop participants can obtain, at no additional cost:

• A digital badge and certificate that provide a web-enabled, verifiable documentation of your professional learning experience.
• CEUs, which are awarded by passing the post-workshop learning assessment with a score of 80% or better.