How does the average teacher instill ” discipline ” in many students who are lacking it?
First, teachers must understand what it means to be intellectually disciplined if they are to teach intellectual discipline. In other words, faculty must themselves have disciplined minds. They must be able to analyze thinking, to assess what they analyzed, and to reconstruct thinking (so as to improve it). One of the misconceptions about critical thinking is that we can somehow easily teach for it without much explicit knowledge of critical thinking on our part, that we can employ strategies that lead our students to think without our having thought through the content we are teaching. But critical thinking is a rich set of concepts that can only be internalized over years of working on one’s mind. Having said this, faculty must begin somewhere, and the Miniature Guide For Students on How to Study and Learn, along with the Miniature Guide to Critical Thinking Concepts and Tools, is a good place to begin. Both of these guides provide structural ideas that foster critical thought. Take
