Reflection and Professional Practice
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American College of Education *
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5253
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Philosophy
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Apr 3, 2024
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docx
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6
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Bloom’s Taxonomy and Critical Thinking:
Reflection and Professional Practice
American College of Education
ED 5253 – Cognition and Critical Thinking
Dr. Tara Stabile
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Bloom’s Taxonomy and Critical Thinking: Reflection and Professional Practice
At the beginning of this course, students were asked to identify assumptions they hold concerning Bloom’s Taxonomy and critical thinking. Then as the course progressed students were required to analyze and evaluate those assumptions. Part of the process of analyzing the assumptions was to identify the category of assumption as paradigmatic, prescriptive, or causal. This was an important part of the reflection process as it is important to know what informs the assumptions. After that students were asked to evaluate their assumptions against new knowledge to see if their assumptions would stand. Later, students were asked to reflect on how their assumptions had influenced their learning and personal life. Now, students have been asked to reflect on how their assumptions influence their professional practice and how they can apply what they have learned to improve critical thinking and learning in their practice. To do this students have been asked to identify the assumptions that are guiding their practice at this point, explain which challenges were strong enough to challenge their assumptions, identify assumptions they hold about the individuals with whom they work, and identify assumptions they hold about their colleagues’ attitudes toward critical thinking. In this paper, I will cover the above tasks but first I need to provide some background information on my practice as I am not an educator in the typical sense of the word. Background, Assumptions, and Reflection
I am a financial educator and counselor. I teach a class twice a week to around one hundred soldiers on personal finance. Each week I have a different group of soldiers. I also provide individual desk-side instruction, mentoring, and counseling in forty-five to sixty-minute sessions eight hours a day four days a week. I typically only see an individual soldier three times.
I see them in the two classes and then in their individual counseling sessions. Since the time I
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spend with each soldier is so limited it is difficult to teach them critical thinking. However, critical thinking is an essential skill when it comes to making sound decisions concerning a soldier’s personal financial situation. Even though my work is not typical of education, there are still some assumptions about critical thinking that guide my practice. They are that it is necessary
for the soldiers with whom I work to have a foundation of knowledge to think critically about their personal financial situations and to make well-reasoned decisions concerning their financial
future and that I must differentiate instruction and approaches to ensure all soldiers with whom I work have the opportunity to make informed and well-reasoned decisions even when they are coming from a position of limited financial knowledge and understanding. To address the issues of limited time and potentially limited knowledge and still encourage critical thinking I try to model critical thinking and use questioning that will help a soldier to think critically. Oyler and Romanelli (2014) discuss the importance of Socratic questioning in encouraging critical thinking in learners. One aspect of Socratic questioning that Oyler and Romanelli (2014) discuss that I use in my practice is helping learners arrive “at judgment through their own reasoning.” I do this by asking questions of perspective, relevance, logic, and importance. Another technique I use in my practice to encourage critical thinking is asking the soldiers to imagine different scenarios and their outcomes. According to Hodgdon (1996), using imagination in the critical thinking process allows the learner to bring harmony to the affective and cognitive states. In other words, it allows the thinker to recognize emotions and integrate them with rational perspectives. This brings about deeper thinking and helps the soldiers with whom I work visualize a path to financial success. Finally, the last strategy I use to encourage critical thinking in the soldiers is modeling metacognitive skills. According to
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Lumpkin (2020), metacognitive strategies are essential to critical thinking as they help move learners from lower-order thinking to higher-order thinking necessary to critical thinking.
Colleagues’ Attitudes and Critical Thinking In my field, I find that my attitude as well as the attitudes of my colleagues toward our soldiers has a direct impact on the amount of effort put forward to encourage critical thinking. Rashid and Qaisar (2017) express the importance of the instructor in facilitating critical thinking in students. They suggest that many teachers are only concerned with the transfer of factual knowledge and indeed that is what I often witness in my coworkers. They also address our assumptions about students and how that can impact our affective states toward students. I know when some of my colleagues see a soldier come in with an attitude of disinterest, they are often less likely to take the time to educate them in depth about their finances and they are not likely at
all to encourage them to think critically about their situations. I try to remember that those soldiers with an attitude of disinterest likely feel uncomfortable discussing something as personal
as their financial situation. I then approach the instructional time as an opportunity to model compassion and empathy as well as critical thinking through imagination and Socratic questioning.
Conclusion
Critical thinking requires a foundation of knowledge as seen in the lower levels of Bloom’s taxonomy as well as the metacognitive skills to analyze and evaluate that information. Critical thinking also requires an open-minded attitude and a willingness to engage in reflective learning. Finally, a positive affective state is necessary for critical thinking and even more necessary for teaching critical thinking Rashid and Qaisar (2017). I think critical thinking should be taught at all levels and in all subjects. It should be approached differently depending on the
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required outcomes of a course. In my practice, I encourage soldiers to think critically through discussion, imagination, Socratic questioning, and modeling metacognitive strategies. I will continue to reflect on my practice and evaluate my assumptions to improve my ability to teach critical thinking to my soldiers and encourage my colleagues to be aware of the impact that affective states can have on their practice and the thought processes of the soldiers.
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References
Hodgdon, David Glenn, "Critical thinking: A voyage of the imagination" (1996).
Doctoral Dissertations
. 1892.
https://scholars.unh.edu/dissertation/1892
Lumpkin, A. (2020). METACOGNITION AND ITS CONTRIBUTION TO STUDENT LEARNING INTRODUCTION. College Student Journal
, 54
(1), 1+. https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A622369821/AONE?
u=nysl_oweb&sid=googleScholar&xid=229ab08c
Oyler, D. R., & Romanelli, F. (2014). The Fact of Ignorance Revisiting the Socratic Method as a Tool for Teaching Critical Thinking. American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education
, 78
(7), 1–9. https://doi.org/10.5688/ajpe787144
Rashid, S., & Qaisar, S. (2017). Development Of Attitude Through Critical Thinking Sumaira Rashid And Shahzada Qaisar.
Pakistan Journal of Education, 34
(1) https://go.openathens.net/redirector/ace.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/
scholarly-journals/development-attitude-through-critical-thinking/docview/2364372165/
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