A Critical Thinking Activity which I have implemented in a Product Development course at a technical school is to present a variety of actual industry production errors to the students. They are given all of the particulars that surrounded the production problem and asked to come up with possible actions that would have prevented this problem. They are also asked to propose immediate solutions to save production.
Critical thinking is a skill that has to be developed. I teach A&P to Medical Assistant Students and use several diseases (Diabetes, COPD etc.) for group projects for the students. In this I ask them to describe the consequences and co-morbidities of the disease, how it impacts family members, what to look for and what to teach the patient and family. This allows the student to think outside-the-box and even though at first they are a little afraid of the project, in the end I find they are very creative in their presentations. Some of them create brochures, handouts, videos etc. and seem to have fun doing patient teaching.
Kinesiology is full of critical thinking the student must memorize muscles, origins insertions, actions, innervations, one step in this process is the student creating flash cards to study.
I teach a planning course. I start out by having them close their eyes and think about something that needs fixing around the house - an everyday item, nothing fancy. Then I run them through how they would go about figuring out a way to fix the item. The different methods, the different tools, how to analyze the different methods, etc. Then by the end of "fixing" the problem, they have really done planning from start to finish. We then go into detail of the process of planning.
Some critical thinking excercises that I tend to use in a class start out with questions about reviewed subject. After I cover one of the objectives of the course, I ask the students to do the analisis how this would apply into the objectives still pending to for review.
I have been lecturing on Diseases for awhile and the students seems to understand the data and do well on test. Though when they are put in front of a patient I notice they forget what they learn. So I now have started asking more questions during clinical to supplement my lecture to see how they would answer.
Examples at clinical: This patient has been informed he has COPD so what type of medications are you going to recommend?
This CXR shows middle lobe infiltrates so what treatment do you recommend? Since I know I have already talked about it I want them to know critical think about what is the best type of treatment for this patient.
