Decisions, Decisions

Critical thinking? If you’re a modern, hip, with-it, switched-on teacher (and who isn’t?), you’ve heard, seen, or workshopped something about critical thinking. It’s not a new concept. We’ve all participated in undergrad and postgrad degree courses. 

Critical thinking played a vital role in how we engaged with those courses. By the way, was there a gathering, organising, communicating process lurking in the background as well?

You bet!

We gathered info through lectures, online summaries, course notes, tutorials, seminars, workshops, practical participation, and presentations. Then came the assignment, where we needed to comb through our info and make decisions about communicating it to our professor, lecturer, or tutor.

Combing through information doubles as organising. And it’s where critical thinking rises to the surface. 

Critical thinking requires decision-making.

Decision-making requires critical thinking.

You can try one without the other, but the process grinds to a halt. Which one comes first? Ah, the chicken and the egg problem. Or, the horse and cart if you prefer.

The thing is, you can’t do one without the other. They are co-dependent. Once you have gathered your information, you need to organise it. To organise it, you must choose what, who, why and how much to include or exclude. Choices require a decision. Decisions force choices on us. 

We like to make choices for kids easy. It pushes the learning forwards and brings everyone along. We are also making it easier on ourselves.

A Yes/No decision is easy. It’s 50-50. The nature of critical thinking requires more in-depth choices. Hence, more in-depth decisions.

Welcome to higher-order thinking, folks.