A big thank you to everyone who came along to our final Reading Club of 2024 on 13th November. It was great to spend the evening together to discuss the paper Critical by design: how learner modes impact the propensity to think critically, alongside James Blackmore-Wright, the author. A massive thank you to James for joining us!
The chat started with sharing thoughts and experiences on how the deficit model discourse can creep into discussions and ideas on student development of critical thinking. A thought-provoking question was posed that, if students year on year keep ‘failing’ to ‘be more critical’, is that a failing of them, or of us as educators? This was followed up sharing thoughts that questions whether we just carry on doing the same approaches that haven’t worked for multiple cohorts across multiple years, or should we enhance and increase our use of authentic approaches, such as role-playing activities to support students to apply critical thinking in ‘real-world’ examples and scenarios.
A key part of the paper was examining the feedback colleagues give to their students over a large period of time. This sparked a discussion on how / if there was resistance from staff to share their feedback for this type of analysis. However, James outlined that there was a genuine desire and appetite amongst colleagues to change and react to the study’s findings. James also discussed the steps they followed to ensure the study was conducted sensitively and carefully, such as anonymising the feedback and being explicit on the purpose of the work (which was note to ‘judge’ individual practice).
The next Reading Club will take place Wednesday 8th January at 17:30.
Please book a free ticket via the JLDHE website. You will be notified in advance of the meeting with a selection of JLDHE articles for you to choose from. We will then confirm the piece with the most votes. The Zoom link, to access the meeting, is provided via your ticket.