What is Critical Thinking?

Critical thinking is the ability to think clearly and rationally about what to do or what to believe. It includes the ability to engage in reflective and independent thinking. Someone with critical thinking skills is able to do the following :

• understand the logical connections between ideas

• identify, construct and evaluate arguments

• detect inconsistencies and common mistakes in reasoning

• solve problems systematically

• identify the relevance and importance of ideas

• reflect on the justification of one's own beliefs and values

Some people believe that critical thinking hinders creativity because it requires following the rules of logic and rationality, but creativity might require breaking rules. This is a misconception. Critical thinking is quite compatible with thinking "out-of-the-box", challenging consensus and pursuing less popular approaches. If anything, critical thinking is an essential part of creativity because we need critical thinking to evaluate and improve our creative ideas.

​

Our focus for this year:

• Understanding Inductive versus Deductive logical

• Learning logical fallacies

• Understanding necessary versus sufficient