Reasoning helps me make connections between information. It also helps me use logic to reason things out and decide what is important information I need to make an informed decision. Reasoning helps me solve problems, sometimes it takes a little bit of time to reason everything out, but in the long run it is worth to be able to make an informed decision.
Reasoning is an integral part of the critical thinking process because the student has to learn the importance of common sense or reasoning when making decisions. An example would be a nursing student faced with witnessing a car accident and now faced with critically thinking what he/she can do to help. Reasoning must tell them that they can only help within the scope of their training and not try to do heroics of treatments that they see on television.
Dario,
Glad to hear the information has been of help to you in your professional development. Individuals that can think critically and problem solve are going to be valuable in the workplace. By helping your students to understand how valued they will be with this skill set you are helping to open up many opportunities for them to explore as they get ready to go into the workplace.
Gary
Gary Meers, Ed.D.
Thank you for this well described critical thinking definition and process. This is what critical thinking should be about. Students need to have sufficient experiences through activities such as case studies to acquire the basic steps of problem solving so they can expand their expertise as critical thinkers once they enter their career area.
Tracy,
Common sense is a form of reasoning that problem solvers need to use. This is why your definition is so important to use and understand with students.
Gary
Gary Meers, Ed.D.
Reasoning allows for the topic to make sense. When thinking through a problem, taking it step by step with reason helps the solver make sense of the problem.
Elizabeth,
Reasoning and the development of skill in the area of reasoning helps with problem solving and student success. Students need to see how reasoning will help them to advance their careers through their ability to think critically..
Gary
Gary Meers, Ed.D.
Mabel,
Good point about reasoning. It needs to be a part of the critical thinking process as does consequences. Using the example you cited means that when they skip school they will pay a form of consequence of being behind or missing some critical content.
Gary
Gary Meers, Ed.D.
When we work in our clinic the students need to process all the information that is gathered from the patients and create a treatment plan for them. Reasoning plays a major part in this process because they have to create a plan that meets their needs as well as meets their ability to follow the treatment, In other words, students being able to formulate the treatment plan that is do-able for the patient.
"Peasoning" is an important part of critical thinking. It causes us to look at and evaluate the reason for something, or someone performing a certain way.
Reasoning should have a purpose and attempt to figure something out or settle a question/dilemma.
All reasoning has consequences, i.e., I decide to skip school today, then am overwhelmed with the amount of material I need to make up.
Roxsie,
Reasoning or "common sense" needs to be a part of every learning experience you provide your students. They will need to be able to reason through and do reflective thinking about situations if they are going to develop into critical thinking problem solvers. The more opportunities to do such the better prepared they are going to be.
Gary
Gary Meers, Ed.D.
We use reasoning to think about the possible solutions to a problem, compare different outcomes and use our judgement to pick the best one.
Teresa,
Your last sentence really captures the essence of becoming a critical thinker. Experience is so important and often times experience requires a lot of effort to acquire. Many students want to become experts and team leaders without paying the necessary "dues" to acquire the expertise needed to work in high stress critical thinking settings such as trauma units.
Gary
Gary Meers, Ed.D.
Eduardo,
This is true and students need to have experiences that will enable them to work through the experiences required to become critical thinkers and problem solvers.
Gary
Gary Meers, Ed.D.
Reasoning is key when managing a caseload of patients. Education helps the students differentiate between normal and abnormal assessments. However, managing the outcome of abnormal scenarios requires gathering data from many sources (through experience) and drawing conclusions. This is a skill that generally requires interactivity or "hands-on" with many different patient outcomes. For example, rarely would a novice nurse be asked to work in the trauma emergency environment without several years of critical care experience. It seems that time and repeated engagement are requisite to managing critical thinking scenarios.
Reasonings are assumptions one makes over a certain subject or situation. Our assumptions helps our deductive skills to come to a conclusion. All these steps are connected and are needed for an analytical critical thinker.
Stephen,
Well said about high-paced and high-stress. Having observed a number of kitchens over the years while supervising externships I am amazed at how you chefs do what you do and do it so well. Students have to be able to think quickly and problem solve if they are going to make it in the field. You are doing them a great service with your efforts to help them develop expertise in this area.
Gary
Gary Meers, Ed.D.
The culinary world is such a high-paced and high-stress work environment that the ability to critically think and problem solve is essential in your everyday work. Situations are constantly occuring that would require a generous amount of levelheadedness and rational thinking in order to keep yourself and your co-workers "out of the weeds". It can be easy to be overwhelmed when the day gets at its busiest, so thinking things through one step at a time will become priority and eventually almost second nature. If something goes wrong dont freak out, dont waste time trying to figure what went wrong or who is responsible,just think it through reasonably and solve the problem.
Lloyd,
Reasoning is essential as you mention. The more students gain skill in being able to think critically and solve problems the more value they start to associate with reasoning.
Gary
Gary Meers, Ed.D.
As stated in the course and much other text, reasoning is an essential part of critical thinking and it has a purpose. Reasoning is the thing that should put all things in true prospective. Since this will be involving problem solving, this is something that will need time to be develop and be worked on continuously. Reasoning is based on a lot of things like data, facts, assumptions, concepts, ideas with the attempt to figure something out and or just solve some type of problem. What should also be noted is that practical experience will help out greatly with this process; as well as the timing of the issue.
