Productive thinking	177

Summary: Petty

				Relevance for
Purpose and structure		Some key features		teachers and learning
Main purpose(s):		Terminology:		Intended audience:
•	to encourage	•	very clear	•	students
	practitioners to		and jargon-free	•	teachers
	understand and			•	trainers
	foster creativity as
	a ‘how-to’ skill
Domains addressed:		Presentation:		Contexts:
•	cognitive	•	full of examples, both	•	education
•	affective		graphic and textual	•	work
•	conative	•	practical strategies	•	citizenship
			offered under	•	recreation
			sub-headings
Broad categories		Theory base:		Pedagogical stance:
covered:		•	cognitivist	•	learning as active
•	self-regulation	•	Maslow’s		meaning-making
•	reflective thinking		hierarchy of	•	guided discovery
•	productive thinking		human needs	•	practice and
•	building				repeated success
	understanding				are important
•	information-gathering
Classification by:		Values:		Practical illustrations
•	psychological process	•	humanistic:	for teachers:
			people need to	•	worked out in
			explore and express		some detail
			meanings and to
			make things
		•	self-direction and
			self-improvement

Bailin’s intellectual resources for critical thinking

Description and intended use

Bailin is interested in philosophical enquiries into critical thinking, creativity and aesthetic education and she considers critical and

178 Frameworks for Thinking

creative thinking to be overlapping concepts. Her work is aimed at establishing clarity regarding the concept of critical thinking and suggesting proposals for an appropriate pedagogy. She has concentrated on demonstrating a framework for critical thinking rather than a systematic taxonomy. Bailin does not offer lists of characteristics, as this would be inconsistent with her essential position that critical thinking is a highly contextualised, normative endeavour, but she does identify necessary intellectual resources. Whilst she is concerned with the pedagogical implications of her work and has provided guidelines for policy makers (Bailin, Case, Coombs and Daniels, 1993), she has not produced any teaching materials, although her colleagues (Case and Daniels, 2000) have edited a collection of materials for use in schools.

She argues that if critical and creative thinking are to be developed, then, ‘educators need a defensible conception of critical thinking and a perspicuous account of the characteristics or qualities necessary for being a critical thinker’ (Bailin, Case, Coombs and Daniels, 1999b). Her stated purpose is to provide a robust conceptual basis for critical and creative thinking; one which demonstrates the flaws in approaches to critical thinking that favour a pedagogy based on identifying and teaching specific skills.

Bailin defines competence in critical thinking as having the required intellectual resources to accomplish certain tasks adequately along with the habits of mind to apply them appropriately. The intellectual resources she identifies are:

•background knowledge

•knowledge of critical thinking standards (these are described as ‘cultural artefacts’)

•possession of critical concepts

•knowledge of strategies/heuristics useful in thinking critically

•certain habits of mind.

She provides a representative list of these habits of mind, which she says have been drawn from a number of sources:

•respect for reason and truth

•respect for high-quality products and performances

Productive thinking	179

•an enquiring attitude

•open-mindedness

•fair-mindedness

•independent-mindedness

•respect for others in group enquiry and deliberation

•respect for legitimate intellectual authority

•an intellectual work-ethic (Bailin et al., 1999b)

As such, her approach conceptualises critical thinking as involving the cognitive, affective and conative domains. She locates her work alongside that of Ennis, Paul and Lipman, but also claims some distinctive aspects based on her emphasis on the role of intellectual resources and the need for infusion of critical thinking into the curriculum.

In her work, Bailin sets out what she considers to be the limitations and misconceptions inherent in the cognitive, psychological and philosophical approaches to critical thinking which use the language of skills and processes. For Bailin the ambiguity and abstraction of terms such as ‘skill’ and ‘mental process’ are the main source of difficulty in establishing a sound basis for critical thinking in education (Bailin, Case, Coombs and Daniels, 1999a). When ‘skill’ is understood as proficiency, being a skilled thinker is relatively unproblematic, but the positing of general skills in thinking presents difficulties because it suggests a separation from the intellectual resources employed in critical practice (Bailin, 1998). It also has unfortunate consequences for pedagogy as it suggests that critical thinking can be improved by simply practising the skills. Bailin also objects to the idea that critical thinking consists of mental processes, on the grounds that this view of thinking fails to accommodate reasoned judgment which is the essential characteristic of critical thinking (Bailin, 1998) and cannot be made routine (Bailin et al., 1999a). Processes serve no useful purpose in pedagogy as they are an example of: ‘unwarranted reification – reading back from outcomes to mysterious antecedent processes’ (Bailin et al., 1999a). Whilst it may be the case that critical thinking situations may have common features, speaking in terms of processes is of no value.

180 Frameworks for Thinking

Critical thinking as the utilisation of general procedures fares no better in the critique of Bailin and her colleagues on the grounds that it understates the significance of contextual factors and begs the question of the quality of the outcomes of their application. The critical thinker is someone who can make judgments with reference to criteria and standards that distinguish thoughtful evaluations from sloppy ones, fruitful classification systems from trivial ones, and so on. Whilst she does include knowledge of strategies or heuristics in her list of intellectual resources, Bailin also stresses that they should be those deemed to be useful in thinking critically and suggests that most procedures or heuristics are likely to be either so vague as to be pointless or so specific as to have little generalisability.

Bailin claims that an approach to critical thinking focused on intellectual resources rather than on skills reframes the issue of generalisability. The question is not, then, whether a certain supposed mental ability transfers to a variety of contexts but rather, what constellation of resources is required in particular contexts in response to particular challenges? (Bailin, 1998). Critical thinking is coterminous with increased competence in the mastery of the standards for judging what to do in a particular context.

Essentially, critical thinking for Bailin is the induction into the public tradition of enquiry, so educators should focus on the induction of students into complex critical practices developed within ‘our culture’ for disciplining thinking and increasing its fruitfulness (Bailin et al., 1999b). Critical thinking is emancipatory in the sense that it enables students to deploy a carefully articulated set of intellectual resources, enter into critical discussions and so make reasoned judgments. Although initiation into cultural critical practices begins long before children attend school, Bailin sets out the implications for pedagogy:

What is essential is that appropriate habits of mind and appropriate use of intellectual resources are exemplified for students, and that they are given guided practice in critical thinking in appropriately rich contexts. (Bailin et al., 1999b)

She outlines three components of a critical thinking pedagogy: