Think Toolkit

Critical thinking skills are vital to our personal and professional lives. Critical thinkers can gather interpret, evaluate, and analyze information to make well-informed decisions and solve problems. Our communities needs strong critical thinkers to address challenges in our changing world. Critical thinking skills also help students in their chosen careers. The National Association of Colleges and Employers' Career Readiness Initiative included Critical Thinking as one of eight vital career competencies.

The Think Toolkit includes tips for teaching critical thinking skills and a range of tools that can be adapted or used as-is. The ideas presented in the toolkit do not require an overhaul of your course or program. These are small changes and additions meant to be easily integrated into courses and activities. We approached creating this toolkit with equity and inclusion in mind but would always appreciate feedback and ideas on how to make these approaches work for all types of students that are in our courses.

The Teaching Critical Thinking Skills section is a list of best practices for teaching critical thinking skills. When possible, the teaching tip links to an item in the Toolkit that can be adapted or used as-is. You are not expected to adopt all of these tips at once! Instead, consider adopting just one new practice.

The Assessing Critical Thinking Skills section suggests ways to provide feedback on students' critical thinking skills.

Visit the Examples section to learn how Seattle Central faculty and staff are teaching critical thinking skills in their areas.

Do you have ideas to add to the Toolkit? Please send a message to Emily Castillo at emily.castillo@seattlecolleges.edu.

Teach Information Literacy Skills

Explicitly teach students how to evaluate sources, analyze arguments, and identify biases. Seattle Central librarians are excellent partners for integrating information literacy instruction into classes. Consider consulting with your library liaison to talk about information literacy in your courses. Seattle Central librarians have also created these helpful resources:

Tools

Amplifying Marginalized Voices & Citing Diverse Sources encourages students to consider whose voices and perspectives are privileged in research. 

Fake News offers tips for assessing quality and accuracy in reporting. 

Visual Literacy is a guide to help students locate, interpret, and evaluate visual resources

Model Critical Thinking

Faculty can teach and model critical thinking in their disciplines. Talk through your thinking process as you address an argument, problem or issue in your discipline. What questions do you ask yourself as you work through the problem? What are you thinking about as you encounter new information? How do you connect new information with what you already know?

Tool

Questions to Provoke Critical Thinking provides a set of questions we might ask ourselves as we work through information or an issue. 

Use Concept Mapping

Concept maps are visual representations of information. Creating maps can help us connect new information with what we already know and explore how ideas are connected. 

Tool

Dr. Catlin Tucker shares examples of concept maps in the blog post Concept Maps: A Powerful Meaning-Making Tool.

Teach Argumentation and Persuasion

Making arguments and persuading others encourages students to explain their ideas, consider alternate opinions, and evaluate arguments. Debates and persuasive writing assignments provide opportunities for students to build these skills.

Tools

Logical Fallacies by LearnFree introduces common logical fallacies.

Seattle Central College librarians created Controversy and Opinion: Pro/Con Topics & Research Resources to help students build skills in "evaluating sources, comparing points of view, fact checking, and understanding the motives of writers".

Using Rhetorical Strategies for Persuasion, by the Purdue Online Writing Lab, introduces persuasive strategies for supporting claims and responding to arguments.

Problem-Based Learning

Problem-based learning is an approach in which students work collaboratively to solve a real-world problem. Students use their critical thinking skills to define the problem, consider what they already know, evaluate evidence, evaluate solutions, and assess the effectiveness of a solution. Learn more about Problem Based Learning in Problem-Based Learning: Putting Problems into Practice by Laura Rigolosi and Sherrish Holloman.

We periodically review student work to ensure that students are learning the skills we’ve promised they would learn at our college. This is assessment. We assess students' work for two reasons:

1. To provide student feedback
2. To ensure that our instructional methods are leading to student learning.

Assessment is often tied to grades, but it doesn’t need to be! You can assess student learning on ungraded assignments and activities.

Assessing Critical Thinking Skills

Students can demonstrate critical thinking skills through written assignments, presentations, projects, and self-reflections. 

Consider using multiple approaches to assessment. Not all assessments or assignments will work equally well for all students. It is important to provide opportunities for students to show what they know in different ways and not to "privilege specific ways of knowing or preferred ways to demonstrate knowledge" (Montenegro & Jankowski, 2020). 

Student-centered assessment practices engage students as partners in assessment by giving them voice and choice in how they are assessed (Giving Students a Say: Smarter Assessment Practices to Empower and Engage by Myron Dueck). Consider co-creating assignments and projects with students and offering elements of choice in how they demonstrate critical thinking skills.

Documenting Student Achievement of the Learning Outcome

Faculty document the number of students who have demonstrated success in our College-Wide Learning Outcomes through Ensure Learning. Faculty can use the Seattle Central College Think Rubric to determine student levels of success. Faculty may choose to adapt the rubric to describe discipline-specific critical thinking skills.

Dueck, Myron. Giving Students a Say: Smarter Assessment Practices to Empower and Engage. ASCD, 2021, https://www.ascd.org/books/giving-students-a-say?variant=119013.

Haber, Jonathan. Critical Thinking. MIT Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.seattlecentral.idm.oclc.org/lib/seattlecentral/detail.action?docID=6142274.

Rigolosi, Laura, and Sherrish Holloman. “Problem-Based Learning: Putting Problems into Practice.” Center for the Professional Education of Teachers, Teachers College, Columbia University, https://cpet.tc.columbia.edu/news-press/problem-based-learning-putting-problems-into-practice

Tucker, Catlin. “Concept Maps: A Powerful Meaning-Making Tool.” Dr. Catlin Tucker, 15 Oct. 2024, https://catlintucker.com/2024/10/concept-maps/.

Ventura, Matthew, Emily Lai and Kristen DiCerbo. Skills for Today: What We Know about Teaching and Assessing Critical Thinking. London: Pearson, 2017.

Faculty from across Seattle Central College came together in summer 2025 to discuss our shared college-wide learning outcomes. Faculty read about approaches to teaching and assessing the learning outcomes and shared their ideas and expertise. Their ideas form the basis of the Think Toolkit. The Think Toolkit will be updated as we continue to learn about critical thinking together.

Contributors

Nichelle Alderson, Counseling

William Berry, Accounting

Emily Castillo, Director of Assessment

Carolina Forero, English as a Second Language

Marina Halverson, Biology

Asefeh Houshyari, Economics

Alyssa Jocson Porter, Library

Qing Kovarik, Business

Francois Lepeintre, Physics

Jay Mclean-Riggs, Biology

George McGuire, Biology

Noah Neighbor, Carpentry

Margaret Pak, Business

David Quintero, Spanish

Heather Soriaga, Seattle Colleges Institute of English

Sharon Spence-Wilcox, Library

Tony Vo, Human Development

Nate Weston, History