1. Julia Smith READ 3262 Fall 2011
2. Critical Thinking: From Understanding to Teaching Practice and Back 275
   1. General strategies to encourage discussion and debate:
      1. The discussion web: a cooperative learning activity that involves all students in deep discussion of readings. Debates: used to help students practice making claims and defending them with reasons even when others defend different claims. Value line: a cooperative learning activity that is an extension of the debate procedure. It is for questions that have more than two good answers, and students who may have a range of answers with a continuum. Creative Dialogue: a way of having students investigate issues in a story and relate them to their own lives.
   2. Factors that unpack the structures of narratives: Following dramatic roles, exploring the hero cycle, behavior and rewards, reading for structured opposites- interpreting stories by looking for their contrasts, ask what things are similarly contrasted in other stories, and then find parallel contrasts and tensions in our own lives. Questioning the author.
3. Thinking Critically About Texts
   1. The Web of Narrative and "The Way It Is": mythos: the collection of texts becomes familiar and understandable because they say the same things again and again. Also includes logos, an understanding of "how things are" and "how things work"
   2. Dramatic Roles: story grammar: a set of rules that help readers make sense of who is doing what and what the actions means.
   3. Characters As Stand-Ins For Other People:
      1. Horizontal dimensions to depict the relationships between characters within a story, and once we see who occupies the slots in those relationships, we use the vertical dimension to show categories of other people in the real world ho relate to each other in similar ways.
4. Critical Thinking and "The New Literacies"
   1. 1. Identifying important questions 2. Locating information online 3. Analyzing information (sources and content) 4. Synthesizing information 5. Communicating information
      1. Teachers can help students develop for online literacy which includes five essentials:
5. What Do Critical Thinkers Do?
   1. Questions have a critical attitude: allows students come up with their own responses, and that the meaning of a text can be scrutinized and challenged, an possibly rejected in favor of better ideas.
   2. Discussion allows for the responsibility of making meaning: students provide ideas, and the teacher doesn't put herself in the position of the evaluator of their ideas, or as the authority on the story's meaning
   3. Teacher treats the meaning-making as a social activity: she encourages students to interact with each other, sometimes to build on each others ideas and other times to critique them in order to work towards sophisticated meaning.
   4. Teacher thinks hard about the text herself: has examined the text for the issues it raises that might be important to the students and the attitudes and assumptions it conveys. Also has constructed a general idea of wats the discussion might go.
   5. All of this allows students to: offer insights, behave as if they feel free to question and to doubt, follow the ramification of ideas, offer support for their assertions, and listen carefully to each other and build on each others ideas.