WHR: a method for critical enquiry

Some years ago, a colleague and I started thinking about novel ways to teach critical thinking. We wanted to offer heuristics for critical thinking that could help students improve generalizable critical thinking skills, without claiming a lot of curricular space. We also wanted these heuristics to emphasize process while giving space to substance.

We started from the assumption, rooted in cognitive science research, that humans are potentially good reasoners and that blind spots and biases can be overcome, either by becoming aware of them or through conversational reasoning. In a way, our approach was an application of interactionist accounts of reasoning (e.g. Mercier & Sperber, 2011).

However, we also had enough experience with classroom debates and group discussions to see that natural dialogue had a way of running into dead ends. We identified lack of clarity about key concepts, matter-of-factliness and tunnel vision as the main culprits and decided to set up a structure to the dialogues, the so-called what-how-really (WHR) structure.

1. Time is taken to elaborate on ambiguous concepts, aiming towards higher precision (what do you mean?).
2. Time is taken to not just pose facts, but explicate them through mental imagery (how do you see this working?), or argumentative or empirical support (how do you know this?).
3. Time is taken to step back and consider alternative explanations or questionable assumptions (are you really sure?).

We counted on students bringing in their own world knowledge to critically engage with content. We also had them bring in their own issues that required critical examination. That is, we created space for substance, even though our teaching focused on process. We did encourage students to bring in wicked cases, so that we could steer clear of formulaic approaches. Students would then form dyads and would go through three rounds, corresponding to the above three steps. One student would then ask questions that were aimed at getting the other student to explicate thinking.

This proved to be a fruitful approach for examining definitions, elaborating on thoughts and identifying assumptions and alternative explanations. However, it skips a vital important of critical thought, namely making judgments. Once you have competing ideas on the table through step 3 (whether competing explanations or competing action-plans), you will have make an informed, rational choice between them.

That choice may not be obvious at all, something I’ve called the weighing problem in an earlier post. While there have been rumors that your unconscious can handle this problem for you, I hope that I’ve made the argument that this isn’t really the case.

And so thus far, the WHR structure has mostly been effective as a critical exploration tool, to avoid confirmation biases and ease students into taking multiple perspectives. It’s not a very good critical decision tool — or at least not yet. The question then is whether there is a clear solution to the weighing problem that is not domain-specific and can accomodate for whatever wicked problem students bring in — we are still looking for a generalizable, teachable method, after all.

References

Mercier, H., & Sperber, D. (2011). Why do humans reason? Arguments for an argumentative theory. Behavioral and brain sciences, 34(2), 57-74.