Critical Thinking in the Age of AI

see these books making their way out into the  world. And if it weren't for engaged faculty audiences, that wouldn't happen. So I guess I'll  put that gratitude out to the audience as well. Today's teas are:... Michelle,  are you drinking tea? I sure am, I've got a nice  green tea from Hong Kong. Nice. How about you, John? I am drinking a pure peppermint tea today. So far, we've got a good variety,  and I'll follow up with some black tea. I have a Lady Grey today. Very good. So we've invited you

here to discuss the development of critical  thinking skills. And let's begin by talking about what critical thinking is and any  misconceptions or missed opportunities that you've noted in your work around this issue. So this is something that I've really started

engaging with myself back when I was writing the  book Minds Online. And those who are familiar with its structure know that I try to use a really,  really simple little heuristic for divvying up the cognitive demands and some of the relevant  cognitive research and processes that are involved in the type of learning that we address in higher  education, and one of those is thinking, and even

within that is this topic of critical thinking  skills. And so I had just kind of caught myself, year after year, monitoring what was going on  in the development of research around this, of course, thinking about it in my own teaching,  but also finding myself being really reticent when I was working with faculty audiences to say, well,  this is a really kind of a, if not totally unique, a pretty specialized subset within thinking  skills more generally, and then the bigger,

broader umbrella of cognition in general. So it's  almost like the first missed opportunity is my opportunity to engage with faculty around this.  So I love it, it's this really deep topic. But that's one reason why it's hard to just say, oh,  and in five minutes, sandwiched in between five other things, we're gonna address this. And so  that's what I've kind of been reexamining myself. So when we talk about what is critical thinking,  that is actually the first really big challenge

and, or sometimes misconception around the topic.  And no surprise, there’s differences of opinion in defining things, and of course, really getting  into that challenge of how do we define a thing and pin it down, and let's all kind of debate the  definition. But critical thinking here really is a special case in that there have been quite a few  attempts to make these very general sort of top level, kind of elaborations of what it is. Think  about words like evaluate or analyze, reflect and

so on. But I don't think we have converged on one  of these as really the best across disciplines, and I kind of fall in with some other thinkers  in the sphere who've said maybe a discipline independent, context agnostic definition doesn't  exist, because maybe the phenomenon itself doesn't exist. So I've, myself, really been drawn  towards the more, I guess you'd call them, situated or contextualized definitions of what  it is. If you drill down a little bit further,

you get, for example, Diane Halpern, psychologist,  this towering figure in our field. So naturally, I would gravitate towards what she says, but  she says things like evaluating and analyzing

evidence in the service of making decisions, so  thought processes that lead to a good outcome. So that's a little bit more practical, but it still  doesn't really make it so a given faculty member teaching in a given course can say this is what  it looks like when students came in without a critical thinking skill and they leave with it.  And as with anything, if we don't have that, then no surprise that we're maybe not going to  get there, or not get there as completely as we

had hoped to. And so that's one kind of set of,  if not misconceptions, challenges or things that people often don't realize when they wade into  this issue of teaching critical thinking. And it follows from that, unfortunately, that we can  have the misconception, that we can describe it to students and they'll get it. I know, for me,  I would be embarrassed to say how many years I taught, for example, Introduction to Psychology,  which we pride ourselves on being like this is the

critical thinking class. And even if you never  take another psychology course, you're going to come away with these great reasoning skills.  And gosh darn it, I had a whole half of one class period that we discussed it, maybe, and it was  on the study guide somewhere. So we think, “Oh, okay, I'll just tell students this is important.”  Say, “think critically.” And of course, naturally,

they don't know what it is either. And  I can really see, in my mind, at least, how students could come away with the idea that  critical thinking means just sort of criticizing everything indiscriminately. It means nobody knows  anything, a total relativism, that no, that's not what we want, or in its worst forms, it can read  too as just like, agree with me. Like I can go and

say, Look, “I'm a psychologist, and I'm pretty  critical of the idea of horoscopes.” And if you think that your horoscope is going to predict your  future, you're not engaging in critical thinking,

you're wrong. So that's what we want to get away  from. And where I think that it can be this really great fertile ground for faculty if they step back  and say, “Okay, what does this really mean at that more actionable level,” and then start to align  instruction to that, because it's gonna take a lot more than half a day, I'll tell you that much. Seems like you're suggesting that it would be helpful for students to be able to identify  specific behaviors or specific practices that

we would identify as critical thinking. But if  they know what the beginning, middle and end of an action is, they have a better idea of what  that looks like and what that feels like. Yeah, absolutely. And that's also a pretty  psychological way of coming at it as well. Like, okay, of course, this is something that happens  in your mind, out of view, between your ears, but I want to see what happens on the page or the  decisions that you do make in the world that align

with what I would consider to be evaluating and  analyzing evidence in a powerful way. And yeah, when we get into a little bit more of the  challenges, I mean what I've laid out for faculty, and again, really drawing on a lot of research  that's been out there for a while, even beyond that defining issue, which, yeah, that's going to  challenge faculty. It's going to get in the way of designing the activities. It's going to challenge  students. They don't know what they're trying to

aim for to meet this thing that's on the syllabus.  It is also what I would almost call a cueing problem, or someone's just kind of off the cuff,  called a “when to” versus a “how to” problem with a lot of the skills that we are helping students  develop. It's “Okay, here is how you break this down. Here is how you conduct the statistical  test. Here is how you read an APA style research article.” But this is something that's  like, “Okay, here's how to find, for example,

issues with correlation versus causation  in the interpretation of a study.” Great, we can do that. But are you going to know to do  that when you're writing your paper? And even a more far transfer of that as you're scrolling  through whatever social media feed of choice is, and you get the like, well, I drank a cup of lemon  juice a day, and now I'm healthy as a horse. It's sort of the same problem. Am I going to have  that sort of inclination or disposition to say,

“Oh, right, this is when I need to do this.” So  there's that. A lot of folks have talked about effort as well, part of this running theme of  cognitive miserliness, that our brains and our minds really seem to run in high-efficiency  mode, where we save time and save energy over

getting to a more idealized solution. And  also, as a lot of folks have talked about, a motivation to maintain beliefs, whether  it's a very profound thing, like, “I don't want to critique this belief because it's really  foundational for intellectually or emotionally or spiritually,” or even just dumb things like,  “Oh wow, I really want to buy this thing I just saw an ad for. And maybe I just won't take a look  at all those negative reviews,” or “I'll assume

that the reviews that all have these wonderful  five stars are perfectly reputable.” So all of those things form quite a steep set of challenges  for students and for faculty alike, right? Very much so. And what makes it more complex,  and I think you alluded to this, is that each

discipline has its own definition of what critical  thinking skills are. I remember I spent about 10 years on faculty assembly one semester where  they were coming up with a new Gen Ed curriculum, and one of the main issues was, how are we going  to build critical thinking into our requirements? And ultimately, it was left up to the individual  disciplines because there could not be a consensus

formed. Each individual department had a very  good definition of what they believed critical thinking was, but it differed quite a bit from  what other departments thought were important skills. So it makes it somewhat challenging  for students when they're faced with this wide variety of definition of critical thinking in  terms of being able to develop those skills. What you're describing, what a perfect example.  I mean, it sounds everybody went in good faith,

had this really strong set of ideas going in. But  I don't see this as just like, “Oh, there go the academics again… consensus… they can't reach it.”  I think that they were probably running into a real issue. And again, there's a couple things at  work here. I think that there's also this sort of flawed metaphor that I think it's flawed, and I  think it runs through a lot of cognitive aspects of learning, of the muscle metaphor, of like, “Oh,  there's a critical thinking muscle in your brain,

and if you just build it up, then it's gonna be  strong for a really long time.” And most things in the mind actually don't totally work like that.  They again, are more situated or contextualized. But I always say to faculty, I'm like, if we go  in, we can sort of say, “That's okay, that's all

right.” And hopefully more institutions will do  what it sounds like may have happened more or less by default in this particular example of like,  well, okay, we're gonna go back to our colleges social sciences and so on, or we're gonna go  back to our individual disciplines and try to operationalize it there. So I look at it,  and I see that this is a very rich spectrum.

It's like in business, I've been trying to  compile all these different examples, and if I'm a business major identifying pattern that  suggests some kind of financial mismanagement, don't take the company's word for it. What  does it look like? One hears that's critical thinking there. If I'm in healthcare, being  able to look at relevant research findings, and try to translate that into selecting the right  kind of interventions. Engineering has its applied

systems thinking and so on. And so if we come at  it the right way, that can be a strength, not a weakness, I think, and I may be a little unusual  in that, but that's what I come away with.

One of the things that you mentioned earlier about  knowing like when to do a thing really makes me think a lot about a move in some disciplines, and  I know this was true in design and art a bit is to focus a bit more on process rather than always on  outcomes, so that you can see some of the thinking and really build in when to do things and when to  implement particular techniques to work towards a

particular goal, and slowing things down a bit so  that we could emphasize some of those things. I think that that is also a really important and  strong approach. And here, too, I've heard across lots of different disciplines as well, sitting  with faculty and kind of grappling with lots of,

to me, interesting teaching issues. They'll say  like, “Okay, yeah, I taught that how of how to work their problem,” or, like, “if I'm teaching  students how to do statistical analyzes in their research projects,” like, “Okay, I can go through  and conduct the steps for a t-test or an ANOVA and so on.” And I'm not dismissing that, that's  important stuff that is important to be able to do, but I've heard so many variations on “But  they can't set up the problem. Once it's set up,

we're good to go.” And that's where, instead of  kind of saying, “Ah, our students can't,” well, what are their opportunities to do that? So let's  build in more of those really messy this is more about watching you do it and having you explore  different approaches then you have to check all the boxes exactly right. There's a time for  checking all the boxes exactly right. Again, not knocking that, but yeah, of putting our  students more systematically in those situations,

we might see some real growth there. One of the challenges, I think, that we're facing is that we're seeing so much  misinformation being shared on social media and AI tools provide increasingly realistic, deep-fake  multimedia files with audio and video. And there's a lot of politicians out there who seem to  have little regard for centuries of science, for example, where they are questioning things  like whether or not vaccines are useful,

despite over a century of evidence on this.  How can we help students develop their critical thinking skills they need to navigate this  environment where there's so many opportunities to be misled by all this information. Oh my gosh, yeah. You've really brought this together, and it's such a powerful way. I  mean that really says it, right? And as you're describing this, absolutely. Talk about a perfect  storm. Talk about an absolute perfect storm.

So here we have something that runs off of low  effort, and I don't buy into it, like, “Oh, people these days are cognitively lazy.” I think that's  just an overriding feature of human cognition that I feel like, if there have been changes, that's  been a drop in the bucket, but I do have access to something that is incredibly easy to use, click  it open, start scrolling. And so it really biases

us towards low effort. It biases us towards speed  too. I mean, Instagram has never kind of been my thing, but those who really like it, it is amazing  how that that's what is sort of designed into that system, the ability to just whiz through and  visual processing is so fast, and that's great and all, very entertaining. But here I am in  that fast, quick, low-effort mode, as you said, it's now multimedia. That is also what makes it so  compelling, is the visuals and the audio and “Oh,

guess what just came along?” Really great ways  to fake that. And is anybody else doing it? Is there that? Can I see anybody else who's cueing  me and saying, You know what? Maybe we should authenticate this video before we post it 48  million times? No one is. And last of all, you've thrown motivation to maintain our beliefs into  the mix. Wow. And so if I am inclined, if I've always had a bad emotional feeling about vaccines.  And I'll just say that, as a psychologist, I kind

of think that that's where some of it comes from.  Vaccines are weird. They're not pleasant . They're okay to think about, and I haven't liked it. I  don't want to get one. Last year's flu vaccine made me sick and made my arm hurt. I mean, it  does not take much to knock me straight off into. To okay, I'm posting it, I'm believing it,  and that's where we are. So that's what I see when

I kind of spin that scenario out. So there's lots  of things that we can look at as far, and we'll probably delve into a little bit further, as  far as kind of the instructional strategies for critical thinking. But in this one instance, let's  take that perspective of instead of starting from 50,000 feet with critical thinking of, let's have  a general definition and then try to figure out a

way to have it filtered down. Let's do bottom up.  Let's say, “You know what? If critical thinking looks like stopping the feed and before I hit  post, if it means at least some proportion of the time I ask about authentication, if I'm applying  what I should know about the potential for AI deep

fakes. If that's what it looks like, then that's  the practice that students will need.” And I would throw it out to the ever creative and always  innovative faculty across disciplines to say, “All right, if this is something that is relevant to  thinking in your discipline, or something that you just want to reinforce in your students, how can  we have students exercising that and build that from the bottom up?” And then maybe that 50,000  foot view of critical thinking and that bottom up,

“Okay, I learned to at least process my feed in a  more critical way. Now I'm looking at how I read things. Now I'm really looking at media literacy  and so on, and so maybe those things will meet in the middle.” This is an audio only podcast.  I'm making all these gestures here, my little hands getting closer and closer together, but  that's what I see when I look at that issue.

I hear a lot of scaffolding and backwards  design in what you're suggesting. Can you talk a little bit more about some of these  practical strategies that we can use in the classroom to address critical thinking? Yeah, and it's another really tough one to communicate with faculty maybe why I've been so  like, squeamish in some of my work with them,

just because you kind of have to start with a  negative message. And that's why I share of like, “Oh yeah, me and my whole one half of a whole  day on critical thinking,” because that's the thing. you first have to know, this is a big,  long journey, and I'll throw out a metaphor. Some of you know that I spent a lot of time here  at the Grand Canyon in Arizona, and I'm always on forums discussing all the big hikes and so on and  what we always see is like, “Oh my gosh, I'm gonna

go to the river and back. I'm gonna hike from the  north rim all the way to the south rim. What am I in for?” It's like you need to know that this is  gonna be no walk in the park. Really wrap your brain around what's involved with this. Worth it?  Totally, absolutely, an incredible accomplishment if you get there. So hopefully I can infuse a  little bit of that spirit in it. So first of all, go in forewarned, don't walk to the bottom in  110 degrees with one bottle of water and figure

it's going to be okay. So with that, yeah. And  then reflecting, we always want to do this with thinking skills. But again, backing up and saying,  “all right, what does this look like?” Free yourself as much as you can from “Oh no, it has to  look like somebody else's definition.” Or is this general or all encompassing enough? Just really  get concrete about that, and then focusing on the why. And that's also been a running theme here.  When you talked about process, that to the extent

that things do work, and there are no silver  bullets in this arena. We don't have anything, unfortunately, like that. But to the extent  that there are things that we can say, yeah,

that was really effective, it's where the focus is  on the why and not the answer. Whether it's just a multiple-choice question of, “Hey, if you got  a question wrong, come and explain it or discuss it and maybe recover some of your points,” or  something very, very big, like we're having a big debate in class about two approaches to an issue,  and one of the big things I'm going to want to look at is your reasoning. And sometimes this is  talked about in cognitive psychology as focusing

on the deep structure of a problem. So all those  kind of things that make similar problems link them together, like all those correlation versus  causation problems that I can see as an expert, but the novice is just like, these are all totally  unrelated instances, but when you start to say, “Okay, but here's the sort of working parts  underneath that, the mechanism,” that can move the needle a little bit. And direct practice.  Students almost always need more practice over

time. And the research that's out there that I've  seen is showing like more like a couple of months of practice instead of a couple of hours or a week  or two. So if that's what we mean. So practice, practice. And lastly, that motivation to maintain  beliefs. That's a really tricky one. Most of the folks in the field seem to say you got to take  careful and indirect approach. If I come in again and be like, “How could you think that horoscopes  could possibly…?”, you know, if somebody asked me

my sign on a first date, that would be the last  date. You come in with that kind of attitude, well, naturally, people shut down. So going with  respect and sometimes asking the questions of, “why?” Okay, so explain to me how this works.  That can be a better thing than just mowing it down. So be direct in the practice, and be  indirect and use a light touch when there's a possibility of those kind of things  that are maintained by motivations.

One of the things that's been happening is that  with the increasing use of ChatGPT and other AI tools, there's a lot of concern that students  are using it to offload some of the cognitive processing that they might normally do while  they're reading texts or analyzing materials.

And there was a study by Michael Gerlich  at this Swiss Business School earlier in January that found that students who used AI  tools more, tended to do a bit more cognitive offloading of these tasks, and that there seems  to be at least some correlation with the decline

in students’ critical thinking skills when  they rely, to a greater extent on AI. What types of learning activities can help students  develop critical thinking skills so that they can more critically evaluate the types of output  they're receiving from generative AI tools?, Yeah and here too, that could further decompose  into different multiple issues. There's critiquing

output you get. And I've heard some really clever  assignment ideas where that's part of it is like, “Okay, go ahead and generate this essay,” like I  heard a professor, there was a very cliched topic that her students were always coming back to,  and instead of just forbidding it, she's like, “Okay, have ChatGPT write that essay, and then you  critique it.” And then there's the more process

and then critical thinking skills. This is a  research area that absolutely I hope that we kind of build out on. But there's some things that I  have curiosity about and want to kind of at least have people pump the brakes a little bit, because  this is one of these dynamics that can happen, maybe a little bit of motivated reasoning here. If  I like, “Ah, AI, is this issue in my classes? I'm

really wrestling with it. We're wrestling with it  on campus. Oh, AI, kills critical thinking.” And this is the dynamic that I feel like we've seen  a little bit before, for example, with the flap over laptops and whether those degrade learning.  And boy, people ran away with that in ways that were not supported by the original study, and  then even with what the author said about the study. So a couple of things that we should keep  in mind with that research, which, again, I'm

really glad they conducted it, and I hope there's  more research like that. This is not a laboratory study where we're assigning people to groups,  of course, and saying, “Here's what happened to critical thinking abilities,” and this was a multi  age study. Was also we want to be cognizant this wasn't like in a class or educational setting, for  what that's worth. There's a lot of self report

here. I always have an issue with that in lots  of research on technology. So if you ask people, how often do you use AI to, I think, it was answer  questions or solve problems, which also a couple different things are covered there in the original  study. If you just ask people that, I don't know that people can track that, that's different  than actually measuring that. It's a start. But

know what you're kind of getting there. And I mean  cognitive offloading too. This is the thing I've really noticed this tilt towards interpreting  cognitive offloading as a bad thing, and that I don't think is in the spirit of how it was  originally intended. It can sometimes be a good thing. It's a neutral thing. And everything from  using Post-It notes to GPS on your phone to using an abacus or counting on your fingers are all  instances of cognitive offloading. So this is not

something that just started. So there's a couple  of things there. So does it predict a decrease in critical thinking skills? And again, here, this  is self report using some good measures adapted from decent established instruments. But here,  again, we weren't watching to see okay, here's students who are actually grappling with academic  problems or making decisions in real life. So I would absolutely encourage folks get out there and  read the study itself and make your own decision,

also it’s very much in the spirit of what we're  talking about here. So there is that. But I do think that a lot of experts who are looking at the  development of AI in higher education, they're all saying some variations of the same things, like,  you can't send students home with something and say, here's a really difficult effortful thing  that I know is important for you to engage in. Maybe you know that, maybe you don't. Here's a  trap door that you can evade the entire thing with

AI. You cannot assume that students are going to  get what they need to get out of that assignment anymore. So that is a real question that we had.  So let's not run away with the idea that, “Oh, AI is there, and it's going to destroy critical  thinking by its very existence.” But let's really be thinking through what we're assigning  students to do. And I'm hoping we'll hear

more from faculty, sort of in the field, say, “You  know what? I was really transparent with students, and here's how I got them on board with ‘Yeah,  we're actually going to read these articles, even though ChatGPT can summarize them for you.’“  Or here's how I just closed that trap door up and actually made it work that way. So that's a  complicated take on a complicated issue. The onset of AI in teaching and many other  things have led to a lot of faculty overwhelm

around a wide variety of topics, and AI is  certainly just one of them. Have you seen this? And are there things that might help  faculty as they navigate new technology, new policies, many new things in their work? Yeah, and the issue of overwhelm, I mean, this is one that just kept coming up into my mind  again and again, as I've done at least my first

little modest set of things that I've written  about and shared with folks. A couple of things, and some of these are going to, no doubt, rub  some people the wrong way, but I'm going to put them out there anyway, because I think they're a  really practical way to go. The first thing is, I think that a really important starting point is  always going to be our own professional practice, and again, discipline independence, just like  critical thinking, it's really hard to say,

“Okay, make sure you evaluate evidence and make  that somehow stick across a curriculum.” I've really pushed against the like, “Well, there's an  AI future and AI workplace,” and I don't know what that is, but I can prepare students for careers  that are related to psychology and future lives that are very well informed by all the wonderful  things that psychological science has revealed for us. That I can do, and I do that every day,  and so really kind of narrowing, in a good way,

the focus and the scope here. I hope our leaders  are getting this message as well. We'll put out fewer of these like, here's “AI for everybody,”  and more like, “Okay, I want to know how you're going to be preparing students in social science  for uses of AI that are appropriate to them in the

future.” And part of that is getting in there and  using the tools yourself. And I will tell you one really important thing, even more so, believe it  or not, than all the other ed tech I've seen come and go over the years, the level of hype and over  claiming that seems to just get by is astonishing, and it falls apart very rapidly when you sit down  with the tool yourself. And I think that's where we faculty will actually really, really shine.  I won't name too many names right now, but like,

“Oh, wow, AI can do that for me.” And that's  terrible. I'm not gonna recommend this to my students. And other ones where I am like,”Oh,  okay,” and only a disciplinary expert knows this. And to give like, an example, I was working  with a faculty member in a workshop. She was in pharmacology. Wow, talk about something that's way  out of my field, and so I'm a little odd. And she talks about “And I made this assignment, and part  of it is to critique some AI output.” I'm like,

“Oh, I know where this is going.” She's gonna  tell me that “Oh, AI is gonna tell me bizarre things about medications.” And now she's like, “Oh  no, no, no. I use it to generate some scenarios.” It was something involving, like rare toxins,  a really cool assignment. She's like,”Oh no, no. For this particular tool, it taps into this  particular database. I happen to know that that's really, really strong, and I haven't seen a  problem with it.” So that's where we can really

get in there and start to craft things. So you  can start it at that level. And another really, probably unpopular piece of advice, but one that  I think is important at this juncture, is, okay, we have these big questions of the ethics of AI  use: How did this stuff get built? Who's going

to be regulating it? I think that's incredibly  important. And I would imagine that pretty much everybody listening to this podcast would agree  with that, however, going and saying like, “I have to figure that out myself before I start writing  an AI policy for my syllabus” or trying some of the tools, so that I can talk intelligently  to students about the pros and cons. That's an issue. So I would say those kind of have to go  on parallel tracks if we're going to make some

immediate progress. And I feel like, and I felt of  myself initially, of like, “oh my gosh, all these big issues.” Well, that's not my job to solve.  It's great if I can contribute to that and support solutions and approaches that I think are ethical,  but I'm not the one who's going to figure that out all by myself. So here's some positive things  I can do with my students in the meantime.

One of the things that Michael Gerlich suggested  in that article is that in case there is some issue with a decline in critical thinking skills,  we probably should assume that students are going to be experimenting with AI tools, and he suggests  that maybe we should focus a bit more on training students to apply critical thinking to the output  of AI, because if they're going to use it anyway,

we might as well use it as a tool to help develop  these skills that we'd like to improve. Does that seem like a reasonable strategy at this  point, with a lot of experimentation going on by a lot of faculty right now in trying  to integrate this into their practices? Yeah, and I think higher education faculty  are in a great position to do that, because from industry, we get this kind of kind of  cutesy pooh, “Oh, it's hallucinating.” It's like,

no, it's wrong. It's inaccurate. If this was a  book, you would roast it in an Amazon review if it was just wrong. So we can get away from  that. We can also not fall into the “Well, use it, but don't use it, trust it, but maybe not  so much.” And that starts to remind me of like all the terms of service. Like, well, read the terms  of service when you click into something, but we

know you do didn’t really. I have no patience  for that. So really being able to nail down the limitations, and particularly, again, situated in  these disciplines where we are incredibly skilled experts at knowing where it is likely to trip up  and what sorts of mistakes are a problem and which are less of a problem and guiding students  into that. So if we can design those ideas, and yeah, sometimes we can take it in another  direction and use the power of the tools for

our own purposes. And that's also where I get  a little nervous about the like, blanket, “Oh, AI will kill your critical thinking.” Well, I  wouldn't want a faculty member to say, “Well, then I'm not going to touch it, because if there's any  way that it's sort of contaminated my assignment, that's bad.” I don't think we'd consciously  think that, but it can start to imply that.

So I'm looking back when I used to teach research  methods, one of my assignments I was very proud of was their final exam was I wrote beginning to  end a fake study with fake data that was full of all kinds of problems that spanned everything  from study ethics to degrees of freedom in the statistics module. So I had maybe two practices,  and then, for their final example, they went in and spotted the problems. They didn't have to  spot all of them, but they had to justify and

say what's wrong with it. And students would go  wild over this, even though they know that I made this thing up. They would go crazy with all these  issues. And it was perfect, if not perfect, I loved it, because that's what we want students to  come away with, but the labor that went into that, and I find myself like reusing the same scenarios  across semesters. Okay, we're gonna have this one be practice, and it was just so hard. And today,  every student in the class could have a new one

every day, and so it could do that work. I come  in and here we go. Here's these rich scenarios with students grappling with the messy problems,  focusing on the why, but in the middle of it has to be a faculty expert to make all that work. There's just some great points and great fun use

of AI for sure. I know that I've used it for  scenarios and other things in my teaching and in other contexts, as well as we work with  leadership on our campuses, thinking about policies and other ways to approach AI and making  sure that we're not losing sight of critical thinking and any kind of deep thinking what  kinds of recommendations should we be making? Ah, for leadership, and I love it, the receptivity  to new ideas that's definitely going to be key?

Well, I'm gonna probably rehash a few of those  points of be very careful about convening, like, say, a big, expensive task force to find the one  consensus, to converge on the one solution. There are probably situations where that is absolutely  what needs to happen. But one of the things that I think we've seen, too, you don't really like  to talk about it that much, I don't think, but

higher education is spectacularly unprepared to  deal with just the pace of change here. And yeah, partly, industry is sort of driving the bus and  the pace of change, and we don't always have to accept their timelines. But the fact of the matter  is, is that you go to sleep, you wake up, and

there's a new version of something, and so I was  really surprised. I shouldn't have been, but I was pretty surprised by, like, how it unfolded in my  local context, and just among what I could see of, like, “Okay, here's a little PowerPoint that I can  take around,” and then two weeks later, I'm like, “I can throw that away?” I'm not used to that. So,  yeah, higher education, our deliberative nature is not a bad thing, necessarily. That's good.  It's kind of like that's what you pay us for,

is to take the long view that's grounded in  a lot of evidence. But in this o ne instance, it makes it really, really hard for us not to feel  like we're flat footed. So beware of those sorts of things, and it's demoralizing for faculty  who well meaning, they're interested in this, they're excited about it, they want to contribute,  and they spend four months doing something they can't see how it played out. So my gut tells me  that going for that college level is going to be

important. So maybe I don't want to chase down  every single department or every single course to say, “How is AI going to be involved here,  especially around critical thinking issues,” but saying, “Okay, the School of Engineering,  or the School of Earth Sciences, the School of Social Sciences, Literature and Humanities,  however, it's sort of organized.” I think that

that's a pretty powerful sort of organizational  approach there. And that's something where too, it's enough to where we can get some multiple  voices in there and get some buy in, but it's specific enough to where I'm not trying to align  what I'm doing in psychology with something that people are doing in art history, with what  forestry is doing, which, again, I think is

really gonna neutralize us if we try to take that  approach. And also dividing it up. The last thing that makes this such a hard thing for us is that  it's just so inherently multifaceted, much more so than, for example, even when learning management  systems came on the scene and we're like, “Okay,

do we require everybody use these? Which one  do we want? How do we pick? How do we train people?” At the very bare minimum, we got to kind  of separate out academic dishonesty is over here, and it's got its own little set of policies, and  let's set a team working on that, and positive uses and preparing students for that workplace  of the future, and so on. These are separate issues over there. So yeah, be prepared to go  in and just say, “Okay, two separate things,

we're gonna deal with them two separate ways.” I  can't imagine trying to sit at home on a Saturday and craft some long email that is somehow going  to bring clarity to all the different aspects of AI. And I'm wondering if there's any sort  of resonance or spark of recognition there, as leaders, that you might see. Do you have any other suggestions on how we can help students develop  their critical thinking skills.

One little theme that pops up from time to time  in all the great stuff that's been written about critical thinking, and one that I think might  be worth its own special mention, is an element of what you could call intellectual humility,  or even, I guess, the flip side of that too, is curiosity. Think of me with kind of cutting  down some student over horoscopes in my class,

even though I find the basis for that in  psychological sciences. If I do not care at all about why a student believes that, or  what it might add to their lives to believe in, I mean, maybe it's just something fun that is like  a little Rorschach test that I wake up with every morning. If I have no interest in that, and then  I'm also not demonstrating critical reflection,

nor am I setting a good stage for a discussion  that foregrounds critical thinking. So yeah, and that is our big challenge to faculty with  our incredibly developed intellectual abilities to balance that. Yeah, evidence is important,  and some facts can be right or wrong. There's different ways of interpreting them, but  here's some areas where they have to support the analysis, balancing that with all right and  I could be wrong. I could have a cognitive bias

of my own that I'm not as aware of right now.  I kind of have to be on the lookout for always checking myself as I'm scrolling through that  feed or going through those reviews for the thing that I really do want to buy, no matter how many  one star reviews that the company suppressed. I need myself to get in the habit of doing that, and  then I can model that for my students, and again, set the stage for more productive discussion. So  I'm hoping that more research also gets into that

too. What is that wonderful, magical balance  of really valuing evidence and reasoning and then realizing and I could be wrong? Well, we always appreciate, Michelle, conversations with you. I know I always  leave thinking a little more deeply about whatever we've talked about, but we  always wrap up by asking, what's next?

Oh, thank you, and you all as well. Even just kind  of looking forward to this conversation has been such a catalyst to revisit topics and say, “Yeah,  this is something that I really want to be doing

more in.” And so that's going to be a bit of a  what's next. I have a sabbatical year right now, and I'm kind of trying to do what one ideally  does, which is say, “Okay, what do I refocus on?” And so I'm really at that very early stage  of continuing to design ways of studying, interventions that I could then share with  faculty, and just getting an ever needed sense of the lay of the land in this area of critical  thinking. So you can definitely look for more on

that. And in fact, for folks who might be  considering attending an in-person event, I am going to be speaking at a couple of upcoming  events where I know that I'm going to be talking about this particular thing, again, Rocky  Mountain Psychological Association for the psychologists out there, my people. If you want to  come out, I think it's in Denver this year, I have a featured session. So that's coming up. I'll also  be speaking at the Teaching Professor Conference,

which is in, I believe, Washington, DC, over the  summer. Some of your listeners may be regulars, or maybe thinking about that. So that's a big  “what's next” item? I continue to work on this big writing project on attention. It's still  at this kind of embryonic, or if not embryonic, partially formed stage, where I'm still working  on it. But folks can watch this space for more on

that, and that is actually related. I will tease  a little bit, that attention, what do you know, gets involved in critical thinking, because it  is involved in pretty much all other interesting cognitive processes that take place in the  mind. So that's my big what's next? Well, thank you. It's always great talking  to you, and again, as Rebecca said, it always spurs some new ideas and some new  thoughts on these topics. So, thank you.

Thank you. You as well. I look forward to your upcoming work. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please  subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To  continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page. You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com.  Music by Michael Gary Brewer.