The One Habit to Sharpen Your Critical Thinking with Steve Pearlman
Do you want to expand possibilities, unlock creative solutions, and push boundaries? Perhaps you want to expand your career potential.
In order to anticipate problems, strategize for the future, and make agile decisions, critical thinking is essential. In this episode, we discuss how to ignite ideas that will help you turn roadblocks into stepping stones and create impactful solutions for any challenge or task.
In This Episode, You Will Learn About:
Critical thinking misconceptions
The one habit that enhances critical thinking
Critical thinking habits that hinder us
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About our guest:
Since 1992, Steve has taught critical thinking and writing in higher education, including elite liberal arts colleges and state universities. In 2011, Steve founded one of the United States’ first departments in higher education specifically focused on teaching critical thinking skills. His work resulted in something exceptionally rare in academia: documented, campus-wide improvements in critical thinking.
A premiere expert in critical thinking, Steve has presented at countless educational institutions, conferences, and businesses about improving critical thinking and related habits of mind. He is frequently found in national and international media, including CBS Atlanta, The Hill, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Connecticut Today, First Coast Connect, The Nation Speaks, The Atlanta Journal Constitution, and Point of View Radio.
Devoted to the idea that everyone needs access to elite critical thinking skills, Steve founded The Critical Thinking Institute to bring his unique, proven methodology to the general public.
In addition to academic articles, Steve is the author of America’s Critical Thinking Crisis: The Failure and Promise of Education, as well as the host of the podcast (for educators), Headagogy.
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The Challenge in Teaching Critical Thinking
Let me try to synopsize my 30-year journey into teaching critical thinking and founding the Critical Thinking Institute. When I first started teaching writing and critical thinking, it really is a writing course. Originally, back in 1992 at colleges as a graduate student, I was so proud of my work and my efforts. I worked really hard. I loved teaching. I was passionate about teaching. And when I got to the end of the semester and I got my students' final papers, I realized I had not taught them anything about being a better writer or critical thinker. I wouldn't say they hadn't learned anything, but really their papers were not notably different pre and post-my intervention with them. That began to sort of my more informal practice of refining what I was doing in the classroom, looking at research, and so forth in order to move students to critical thinking. I developed a lot of very interesting things. I was a very progressive educator. And then roughly 12 years ago, a major university hired me to elevate critical thinking outcomes across the university.
Now, that sounds like something that should be obvious, that all universities have strong, critical thinking outcomes. But I'll give you a second to think about this question. Two major studies were done recently by two different organizations using two different methodologies. And what do you suppose they found was the percentage of college students who are proficient in critical thinking?
There's the thought process that maybe we are really good at critical thinking, but I often hear that sometimes the biggest challenge is for people to have thoughts flow through them because we're so clouded about all the information that's coming and being pushed to us.
That's very true. Information can actually confound our thinking process. Well, the answer is about five percent. And education as a whole has not been shown to raise critical thinking skills. Now that said, I know a lot are gonna say, well, I learned to think critically in college.
The perception from many students is that they've learned to think critically when they're tested for it. They haven't, the perception of educators is that they're teaching critical thinking, but when we actually test it and look at their methodologies, we find they're not. I was challenged to elevate critical thinking outcomes across a campus. Something that's almost really never been done. There isn't a big history of any campuses that have done this. A couple has made some decent efforts. I read all of the research that's been done on thinking from many different fields, or at least the vast majority of it, I would say, can never know if you've read everything about everything.
But this was a 10-year process. And what we found out eventually was that the reason that all these efforts to teach thinking were falling short was that people hadn't conceptualized critical thinking in a way that was natural and teachable. Then I made some breakthroughs on that, only to find out when I was so excited, we found these ways to teach critical thinking. We elevated them on our campus and so forth, and we're starting to take them out into the world to educators around the world. They weren't implementing it. My frustration was, why aren't they on the whole, I mean, there were some adopters, of course, who were doing it. Why isn't this happening? And for the most part, it's not the educators. They're very good people who really wanna make a change. But the systemic problems with our educational system get in the way of real change for critical thinking in a lot of. I said that's not gonna do it because we have found something here that's so important, I think, for everyone to be able to think critically in their lives.
What in our lives isn't better? If we can think better, what goals can't we achieve better? What happiness can't we achieve better? If we can think better? I broke out and founded the Critical Thinking Institute and decided that this knowledge and these techniques have to be made available to everyone in the world.
What is Critical Thinking?
I think critical thinking is sometimes these words that we can conceptualize but not necessarily truly understand. So before we dive into critical thinking and possibly the habits that we can create to become better critical thinkers, will you please define what critical thinking is?
The problem with critical thinking, and this is one of the things that got in the way of it being taught in colleges, is that you can throw so many different words at critical thinking. They're not wrong in the sense that they're not a part of what we do. When we think, if you say, we're gonna analyze, we're gonna evaluate, we're gonna look at the evidence, we've gotta be more objective, we have to be logical.
We can say all those things and we can continue on with another 50 words. None of those things are wrong. But are they really helping us understand the root of what's happening when we think? This is how we unpacked what critical thinking really is, not as a series of ideas and words that we want to get our heads around, but something different.
Humans think by their nature. That's why we're all alive, right? Your ancestors thought well enough to survive so that you're here and mind did the same thing. We weren't faster than the bear, okay? We weren't bigger than the bear. We didn't have bigger teeth than the bear, but we could outthink the bear, and that's why we're all here. We're thinkers by nature, that is our dominant skillset as a species. The problem is that we do certain things to think that are good for thinking, but our brains also evolve to do a number of things, perhaps more things to do when we think that are poor for thinking that actually interfere with good, logical, creative thinking. And that's their survival mechanisms at play there, essentially.
Critical thinking: we don't want to think about it in terms of adopting just a little objectivity or adopting a better way to look at the evidence or adopting an ability to read better. We want to think of critical thinking as understanding what our brain does when it thinks. Mastering control over our brains so that we're able to accentuate the things that our brain does that are positive for thinking and minimize the things that all of our brains do that interfere with a good thought.
Good Habit for Critical Thinking
I just read the Atomic Habits by James Claire, and so I've thought that I was good at goal setting, but I've also found that there are ways that we can create good habits and there are ways that we could avoid some of these bad habits. I wanna hear, I mean, you've implemented some of these programs to help people create good habits for critical thinking. What are possibly three habits that we can implement into our lives to improve our critical thinking?
I'm only gonna give you one because it's the mother habit in a sense. And then everyone will pick and choose other things that they're naturally gonna do out of that.
The best thing that we can do, if we want to be better thinkers, you can go online, can find courses that are gonna teach us a few logical fallacies or how to do some systems thinking, and things like those are fine, and they're useful tools, but they're not really what we need to do as a species to think better. What we want to do is I want everyone to start keeping a journal. It can be a written journal. I prefer handwritten, not typed, because our brains do different things when we write by hand than they do when we type. It's a very different kind of experience for our brains, or even if you just want to think about it and meditate on it for five minutes a day, you could do it that way if you don't want to actually formally write it.
But what we do is what we encourage people to do, and then at the institute, we teach people how to do this very specifically is, keep a journal, not of what you did that day, not of what other people said. Not of what you felt about things, not any of those things. Those are nice journals too, and people can keep those. Those are wonderful things to do.
We keep a metacognitive journal and metacognition is the idea of being self-aware of our thinking, so it's, another way to put it is being able to think about our thinking while we're thinking it. That is another way to think about what metacognition is, and what we encourage people to do is to start picking one or two decisions or ideas or something that they did cognitively that day and write down what happened in their brain to lead to their conclusion.
What negative thoughts came in?
What emotions came in? What fears and concerns came in?
What evidence did you look at?
Why did certain pieces of evidence or information carry more weight with you than other pieces of evidence or information when somebody else, might not have looked at it that way?
How did your background influence your thinking?
We all are biased. We're all making assumptions all the time. Our brains are predictive mechanisms. Really. That's the main thing they do, are they predict what's about to happen and they're trying to solve it. So we're always making assumptions about what's gonna happen, what assumptions were you making about the people involved, about the nature of the reality that you were facing.
As you start to become self-aware of those things, now you're starting to understand in an informal way what your brain's doing when it thinks. Then you can start to control it. At first, just start keeping a log of [what happens. And then I promise you, it's gonna take only about a week of doing this daily. And after about a week, for some people, it's two weeks, but about a week usually, you're gonna start to be more aware of your thinking when you're doing it, not when you're reflecting on it later at the end of the day. Then you're gonna be able to start to control that process better. That's the first big step into real critical thinking.
Being Self-Aware of What We Do When We Think
I was listening to a TED Talk this morning that speaks to exactly what you were saying. They were talking about some of the successes of some of the top CEOs, and what they do is every time that they make a decision, they write down what was the decision they made? Why did they make that decision? What impact did it have on the people around them? What emotions did they feel when they were making that decision?
Then at the end of the year, they looked at what decisions panned out well and what decisions did not pan out well, and that's what they take to help improve their self-awareness and their critical thinking for the decisions that they make in the future.
That's a very similar idea. The idea is we have to become self-aware of what we do when we think, and then we can construct to control that, what we do when we think. And it's amazing if you think about it when we really look at it and we put it so simply that most of us, although we think all the time, have no idea what our brains are doing when we're doing it. We know what our heart's doing. We know how to exercise better. If we wanna learn how to run, we know how to exercise and train our bodies to run a long distance or do a marathon or what have you. I'm a martial artist, so I train my body for martial arts, but the same thing, right?
But how many of us ever take the time to train our brains to think better? And isn't it weird that we as a species, certainly as a culture, certainly as an educational system, haven't come up with really what is, an owner's manual for our own brains, which should be the foremost thing that everyone in the world learns? Because everything else that we learn might be nice and we need some knowledge and so forth, but everything else is gonna be determined by how well we could think about it.
And the most important thing that we can all do is think better, but we're never trained in how to do that. It's really weird if you think about it. That's not the emphasis of what we do as a species whose primary skill is thinking.
A lot of times there are so many people out in the world that talk about the benefits of mind shift and going from negative thoughts to positive thoughts, but there are a lot of benefits to that. There is a missing element out there right now how can we train our brains to have critical thinking so that when those times of uncertainty happen or maybe big life events happen, it sounds like we can take them with the approach of the highest level of self-awareness.
That's right. And think about one of the things that a lot of people say to us, that's so true, is thinking about how much stress it relieves people to have more confidence in the fact that they're making sound decisions. Even if we train people in critical thinking, everyone's always gonna make the best possible decision, and everyone's not always gonna make the right decision if there's a perfectly right decision to be made. And very often there's no perfectly right decision to be made.
That said, think about everyone's trying to do these problem-solving. They're trying to go through life and they're trying to go through their careers, thinking their way through it, with no assurance that they're exercising good practices in the path of what they're doing, whatever it is. Think about the stress that suddenly comes off of us when all of a sudden we can at least know that we're in control of our minds to a certain degree. We know what our brains are trying to do. We're able to master that process and at least put forward some effective measures in order to get to where we wanna be.
Wouldn't that take the burden off so many, so much in our lives? Look, maybe I didn't make the perfect decision, but I know that I went through some good practices to get to the decision that I did make.
You're taking it from a little bit more of a methodical approach because you have a higher level of self-awareness, which in the end, there's always gonna be times where maybe our decisions that we make don't always pan out well, but at least we know that we've taken it with an active approach to that decision.
Exactly. And unfortunately, what we know is that not only do most people not take what is always an effective approach, but very often our brains are controlling us and doing terrible things to good decision-making. And that's because our brains are wired to keep us alive. They're not necessarily wired to do what is the best thing they're wired, to do what is immediately convenient for our survival. And those can be very different things. For example, we are tribalists by nature, we've certainly seen that play out recently, but even in businesses, we see if people are working in teams or they're part of this group or that group, that their tribal thinking has a great impact on what they decide to do in terms of their careers and how they act and the decisions that they make. That's not necessarily good for the business at all. It's not necessarily good for their career at all for us to be tribalistic, but that's inherent in our brains. We're hardwired to be that way. How do we become aware of when we're being tribalistic and what mechanisms in our brain are making us want to do that? And then how do we start to break free from those things that we're doing that are caging in our good thinking process?
How We Can Improve Our Critical Thinking
We've talked about good habits, this overarching best practice that we can improve our critical thinking. Are there any habits that we could possibly avoid so that we are doing less of the bad habits and moving more towards that one amazing habit?
Broadly speaking, we do want people to also move away from emotional thinking and we think emotionally before we think intellectually. There's a little part of our brain, it's called the amygdala. Amygdala is a Latin term for almond because this little part of our brain looks like an almond. But it's a tiny part of our brain that it's extraordinarily powerful. It's a switch and it either turns on the thinking part of our brain, or it turns on the emotional part of our brain, the survival part, the fight-flight-free or fawn response that we all have.
Anytime the amygdala feels threatened, it feels like we're under some kind of stress, our lives are in danger, and it turns on our survival brain. Don't think, fight or flee, right? That's what we gotta do right now, the problem is that our amygdala evolved to do this when we're under actual threat, physical threat, we're the other guy's trying to kill us or we're being attacked by the bears physical threat. It doesn't understand. That a work decision isn't the same kind of threat. Now we can teach it to do that. We talk about some strategies for that and I'll give you one, but the first, the best thing that everyone can do is just try to acknowledge when they're feeling emotional in any way about their decision, and try to acknowledge what those emotions are, take a few deep breaths and put them aside.
Let me tell you something amazing about how powerful this is. They took students in college who were taking a test, high stakes test, and they had two groups of students, same tests, same class, the same population in essence. They had one group of students just sit quietly before the test and relax, and they were the control group. The other group of students before the test gave them five minutes and said, we want you to write for five minutes about any stress you're feeling about the test, why you're feeling that stress, what emotions you're feeling, and so on and so forth. Just write it down for five minutes. Say whatever you're gonna say about that.
The students who wrote down what was stressing them out about the test did two grade steps better than the students who didn't in five minutes because they were able to effectively take that amygdala, which was freaking out a little bit and creating a vent. They vented out some of that negative emotion. It calmed the amygdala down. The amygdala then literally turned on more of the thinking part of the brain. Then the other students had a going on because too much of their emotional brain was functioning. They were able to get better test results just from doing that.
Venting our amygdala out, acknowledging our stress, acknowledging our emotions, speaking them out loud, writing them down, and giving that voice calms down the amygdala and lets us think better.
Importance of Language in Critical Thinking
I can see how that can play out in multiple ways in the workplace. I've done an episode, a little while back where we talked about workplace toxicity. Often when we're in an environment where it's a toxic work environment, our emotions come overflowing. It's always not the greatest approach when we're taking it from an emotional stand.
The advice that was given in that particular episode, was very similar: take a piece of paper, and write down all of your emotions. Get them out on paper because when you put words towards your emotion, you're able to process it better. If you're having maybe a hard time processing what those words are that you can Google the emotional wheel, which will provide a lot of words, to you can kind of pick and choose from.
Once it's processing the emotions, then it's about taking a factual approach to the events, what happened, and what was going on. You're taking it more, less from an emotional level and more from a factual one, which helps if you need to have those conversations with HR.
I've also seen it for those people that are recently been laid off. And I know that that's happening a little bit right now. What happens when we go through a job layoff, there's a lot of emotions evolved. There's discouragement, there's frustration, there's anger, there's shock, there's depression. If we're going into the next part of the job search with those emotions lingering in, those are subconsciously gonna show up in our interview. As that's taking the time, putting the emotions down on that piece of paper, and then what I'm hearing you say is then you can take a critical thinking approach to put together the next steps in building a job search strategy and helping you get there.
You're so right about that, and also you brought up a great point about the power of writing and words. We have language baked into us from the time we're young, we're language users by nature. Because we are language users, in fact, this is interesting. The first term in the English language, in old English, for a human being was Rayor de Barron, and Rayor de Barron meant language bearer. The thing that our ancient ancestors did when they first had language was named us, those people who have language, those creatures with language. That was our distinctive feature. I
If we look at things like neurolinguistics, We can't think except through language we can react without language. But real processing and real intellectual thought happen linguistically and they are tied to our emotions. You're absolutely right. If we're able to put words to our emotions, we're able to start to control them, give a name to them, and seize power over them.
I thought of that other one because it's also very relevant to burnout. The times that we are overwhelmed and we're stressed out, and sometimes it's putting the words to those particular emotions because it's gonna be really hard to navigate through what changes we're gonna make in our lives and taking a critical thinking approach to making adjustments in our lives if we don't first process the emotions. And that's what I'm hearing you say that's loud and clear give that amygdala time to process the emotions so then you can switch to that critical thinking and start to move forward.
