Experience is the foundation of our critical thinking skills
We use our personal life experiences everyday when we use critical thinking, from our earliest life
experiences during childhood to something we may have experienced yesterday.
experiences during childhood to something we may have experienced yesterday.
Below are several pictures of my son. In each picture he is using his
experiences to gain new critical thinking skills!
Here he is painting. He is using the experience of painting to learn basic universal truths, such as how the paint looks when applied, and how mom feels when he gets paint on table!
Panning for gold at the Science Center lets him use his experiences with motor function to develop critical thinking skills, if he shakes the pan too hard, everything comes out, not hard enough and all the sand stays in.
Our experiences in the kitchen can provide many opportunities for developing and refining our critical thinking.
Here he is playing a game and developing reasoning skills. Many of our experiences (good and bad) during early adolescents shape our critical thinking skills for the rest of our lives.
Part of our personality development comes from critical thinking skills developed from experience. For example, here is my son hamming it up for the camera, he has learned that acting funny can get him positive attention (and sometimes negative!)
Perhaps more than any other experience, it is our interpersonal experiences that build our critical thinking skills the most. Throughout these experiences, we learn what to expect from others as well as what others expect from us. These critical thinking skills shape our behaviors.
I used my son in these examples, but fundamentally, all ages use experiences to build critical thinking in the same way. As we grow older we develop more and more tools to use to analyze and interpret our experiences. Learning from experience is probably the easiest way to gain new critical thinking skills. Applying critical thinking takes more than experience though, especially in the real world!
What about after school? What do we do with all we've learned from our life experiences and these new critical thinking skills?
The below is a link to an online article by Jimmy Hovey that he posted on his on-line marketing blog. Here he discusses how people pull from their life experiences to use critical thinking in the business world.
The below link is to another article about recent research that reveals how much employees are lookiing at critical thinking and problem solving skills. Studies like this are the reason that for many jobs you now have to do an evaluation on-line. Employers are looking harder than ever at their potential employees. Make sure you make the cut!