Decoding the Disciplines: A Model for Helping Students Learn Disciplinary Ways of Thinking

In the last twenty years, the call for faculty members to focus on critical thinking has led to a laudable effort on the part of faculty members and teaching support professionals to move the focus of courses to the higher levels of Bloom’s (1956) classification of learning behaviors. But efforts to help students learn at the levels of analysis, synthesis, and evaluation may be impeded by a mismatch between the kinds of thinking actually required in specific classes and generic formulas for encouraging higher-order thinking. In fact, the notion of a unified “critical thinking” runs counter to an important strand in current thinking about teaching that stresses the disciplinary nature of knowledge.