Critical thinking is often at the heart of what we hope students take away from our courses, but defining it, teaching it, and assessing it? That’s where things get tricky.

The California Commission on Teacher Credentialing found that while 89% of faculty considered critical thinking a high priority, only 19% could confidently define it. Even more telling: over 75% struggled to reconcile content delivery with fostering critical thinking (Paul, Elder, & Batell, 1997).

Questions That Still Linger

Some of the key questions educators continue to wrestle with include:

  • Are skills from Bloom’s taxonomy the same as critical thinking?
  • Can students critically think without strong content knowledge?
  • Do critical thinking skills transfer across disciplines?
  • Is critical thinking a universal skill or domain-dependent?

These questions have fueled decades of debate among theorists, particularly around two dominant perspectives: fluid vs. grounded critical thinking (Kaminske, 2019).

Fluid vs. Grounded Thinking

  • Fluid critical thinking assumes that students can develop habits of mind that apply across contexts. This view focuses on reasoning, logic, and decision-making as transferrable skills.
  • Grounded critical thinking, by contrast, argues that critical thinking cannot exist outside deep content knowledge. According to this view, students need to be immersed in a discipline to think critically within it.

In practice, we may need to blur these lines. Helping students become confident, analytical thinkers means cultivating both general habits and field-specific understanding.

So, What Is Critical Thinking?

Multiple definitions exist, but common threads include reasoning, reflection, and purposeful analysis:

Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information... as a guide to belief and action (Scriven & Paul, 1987).  

It’s not just about "thinking hard." It’s about improving the quality of thought through structure, habit, and self-discipline (Paul & Elder, 2008).

Recognizing the Signs: Effort, Habit, and Practice

According to Paul and Elder (2008), we can recognize critical thinking in students through:

  • Effort: Metacognition, holistic information gathering, and reasoning.
  • Habit: Consistent engagement in cognitive processes and self-monitoring.
  • Practice: Applying frameworks across contexts to guide belief and action.

However, barriers still exist. Students may default to agreement in discussions, jump to conclusions, or reject alternative perspectives (Isaksen & Treffinger, 1985; Isaksen, 2019).

Creative Problem Solving: A Structured Path Forward

To support critical thinking, we introduced the Osborn-Parnes Creative Problem Solving (CPS) model. This six-stage process builds in both divergent and convergent thinking, offering students a practical path from problem identification to implementation:

  1. Mess-Finding—Identifying the right issue
  2. Data-Finding—Gathering and analyzing information
  3. Problem-Finding—Crafting a focused problem statement
  4. Idea-Finding—Generating and building upon ideas
  5. Solution-Finding—Evaluating and selecting solutions
  6. Acceptance-Finding—Developing a plan for action

This linear yet iterative process balances creativity with criticality, providing a clear structure to guide students toward higher-level thinking (Isaksen & Treffinger, 1985; Osborn, 1963).

Facilitation Matters

Facilitating critical thinking isn’t passive. Instructors must model the process, manage group dynamics, and avoid brainstorming pitfalls like production blocking and social loafing (Diehl & Strobe, 1987).

Effective facilitation strategies include:

  • Managing interaction norms
  • Using electronic exchanges for idea development
  • Teaching the language of CPS explicitly
  • Reinforcing divergent/convergent phases of thinking

Creative problem solving, when implemented well, helps students move beyond intuition and guesswork to structured, reflective decision-making.

Final Thoughts: Cultivating Critical Thinkers

Critical thinking is not a mystery. It’s a teachable, observable, and essential skill. But it requires clarity, intention, and structure. Whether we lean toward fluid or grounded models, our job is to create space for students to:

  • Wrestle with complex problems
  • Explore unfamiliar perspectives
  • Apply structured thinking across real-world contexts

As facilitators, we must help students not just "think better" but think with discipline, empathy, and precision.