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What I learned about critical thinking

Critical and Creative Thinking

Critical thinking is the ability to apply reasoning and logic to new or unfamiliar ideas, situations, and opinions. Thinking critically involves seeing things in an open-minded way and examining an idea or concept from as many angles as possible. This allows people see past their own views and to better understand the opinions of others (Corporation, 2003-2013).

The Main things that I am taking from this course in how to be a better critical thinker would be to avoid assumptions, apply curiosity, habits that hinder thinking, and how to overcome those habits. Avoiding assumptions is an important part of becoming a better critical thinker. To assume is to take something for granted, to expect that things will be a certain way because they have been in the past or because you want them to (Rugglero, 2012). Apply curiosity. This increases awareness of problems and issues, enabling you to feel dissatisfactions and annoyances more consciously and to regard them more productively as challenges and opportunities (Rugglero, 2012). I have also enjoyed learning about habits that hinder the thinking process. There are six important habits: mine-is-better, face saving, and resistance to change, conformity, stereotyping, and self-deception. All six of these are habits that I am trying to keep myself from doing. I know I see my children doing a lot of the “mine-is-better”, but they are still under the age of 6. This is a natural phase for them. I understand that the book tells us that we grow out of this phase as we get older, but I see a lot of adults suffering from this habit.

When starting this course I rated myself as a Beginning Thinker. To get from Beginning thinking to Practicing Thinking you have to be able to recognize basic problems within your own thinking and try to fix them. I placed myself there because I don’t think I thoroughly understood everything that goes into thinking, and...