I believe critical thinking is a learned skill. Every teenager has probably asked a parent, why do we go to school? It’s after the teen graduates, when they are presented with several choices, one is to continue to attend school or not, maturely reviews why to continue.
School teaches us skills that are guided by our thoughts and actions. Nicholls et al.(1985), surveyed US 9th and 12th grade students to examine their views on the purposes of schooling, perceived causes of school success, and their orientations to learning. (Widdowson, D. A., Dixon, R. S., Peterson, E. R., Rubie-Davies, C. M. & Irving, S. E., 2015, p. 474) As predicted, they found that belief in the edification purpose of schooling was associated with greater commitment to learning and task engagement, and also belief in the importance of effort, interest and striving to understand for school success, whereas, belief in the socio-economic purpose of schooling was associated with a preference for work avoidance and belief that success involves a commitment to surpassing others’ achievement, luck and impressing the teacher (Widdowson, et al., 2015, p. 474). Nicholls’ et al.’s (1985) study suggests that students hold different beliefs on the purposes of school that relate to differences in beliefs about the nature of learning and academic motivation (Widdowson, et al., 2015, p. 474).
Coming from a family of educators, I would see the behind the scenes effort from educators and the amount of time involved to prepare for a weeks or months of planning material to teach. I believe any educator desires at the end of every lesson, for the student to apply what they learned day by day with the support of a parent, completing their assignments and expanding their knowledge.
I have similar beliefs when it comes to expanding my thinking skills. At first, my desire was to improve my technical and leadership skills since college, but taking this course MSLD 500, I find that a lot of my personal growth stems from thinking. I have settled with the fact that I’m a person that doesn't like to express my thoughts, out of concern that, I would be misunderstood and unable to get my point across. Settling doesn’t mean I will not change, but more of a realization much so that it happens a lot at work since I’m a forward thinker. Forward thinking in the sense of thinking of the next steps while still pondering initial steps or objective, jumping from topic to topic in my mind. For example, it’s like explaining a concept or steps in doing an activity without defining the relationship as to why the activity is important for one to learn and perform as shown. Some people are fine with working through the motions, after instructed on how to perform a task, and I’m more interested in understanding why and also sharing why this are the selected motions. I generally find myself breaking the system to make it more efficient in terms of bring attention to details, including accepting various methods for measuring performance.
Increased attention to formal documentation of processes in my current role has me engaged in documenting process I’m not entirely responsible for but I see a need to help bridge the gaps between groups converge information. I tend to have some of the most problematic work circumstances within my team the encourages me to think through my issues by analyzing root cause, then engaging with teams through personal contacts to ask questions and assistance to escalate issues to resolution. Most of my communication is verbal and I would find my self providing history of the issue multiple times, especially when involving team members not involved but should be aware of in the times I’m unavailable.
At the start of this class, I had a strong belief that my thinking skills were above average, even to a point when I was debating with a co-worker about the lack of quality workers being hired. To conceptualize this more, a quality worker could be someone whose able to think on their own without much supervision, reason through issues, make sound judgement calls based on factual knowledge, allocate time to work priorities, not lend on excuses and be accountable. The concept of employee integrity has significant and direct impact on the quality of job performance (Osibanjo, Akinbode, Falola,& Oludayo, 2015, p. 110). Views of related job performance to ethics is below adapted from (Osibanjo, Akinbode, Falola,& Oludayo, 2015, p. 109). Pinpointing ethical behavior relates to developing thinking skills beyond skills required to perform a specific job role.
I say all of the above to say this, factors that influence my thinking is my attitude, ethic behavior, and beliefs, that I realize continues to mature as I continue to take this course. I find my thinking to be more clear when noting my opinions that I continue to work on framing my thinking to incorporate the 8 elements of reasoning and 7 standards of critical thinking. In regards to the figure above, I tend to have a little bit of utilitarian, moral-rights, and justice view when it comes to performing job duties, able to set aside my individual interest. My self interest aligns more with personally developing skills as oppose to being an opportunist.
One change in my thinking has been to incorporate various points of views when writing my thoughts to make them more credible in reference to existing works of literature when sourcing for information. At times my attitude encourages me to think one way, something that may continue to be a lasting impact as I continue this course. To make changes last, would be to continue to practice expressing my opinions incorporating the elements of reasons and standards, explaining the stages of thinking.
Widdowson, D. A., Dixon, R. S., Peterson, E. R., Rubie-Davies, C. M. & Irving, S. E. (2015) Why go to school? Student, parent and teacher beliefs about the purposes of schooling. Asia Pacific Journal of Education, 35(4), 471-484, DOI:10.1080/02188791.2013.876973
Osibanjo, A. O., Akinbode, J. O., Falola, H. O., & Oludayo, A. O. (2015). Work ethics and employees' job performance. Journal of Leadership, Accountability and Ethics, 12(1), 107-117. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.libproxy.db.erau.edu/docview/1726797758?accountid=27203
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