TEACHING AS IF YOUR LIFE DEPENDS ON IT
Teaching Critical Thinking Workshop

by Jackie Alan Giuliano, Ph.D.

Tissue box in doctor's waiting room in Century City, California

We have many individuals in our society that can perform a water quality analysis, but few who can perform a "quality of life" analysis and many education programs in every discipline lack a unified, cohesive set of goals, motivations, and ethics to share with students.

Ever growing numbers of students come to the classroom unprepared to perform a critical analysis on the problems affecting us today. John Taylor Gatto said it well when he wrote (in Dumbing Us Down) that students are products of an educational system that has taught them to be indifferent to almost everything except the diversion of toys and violence. So many students are mistrustful of intimacy, they hate solitude, are cruel, materialistic, dependent, passive, violent, timid in the face of the unexpected, and addicted to distraction.

All curriculum must be remodeled to include not only experiences that teach critical thinking and reasoning skills, but that underscore the importance of our intimate connections to the natural world and the interconnectedness of all life.

Participants will practice ways they could remodel their own curriculum to include these principles and include participatory, experiential learning experiences in all subject matter. We will explore and practice techniques for teaching our students how to analyze and reason and how to turn a strong opinion into a critical analysis.