January 24, 2017
More than 30 Critical Thinking Videos from YouTube That Will Boost Your Brain
"Good reasons logically support the beliefs or conclusions one adopts—from degrees of probability to absolute certainty (a rare condition indeed)."
If you're interested in learning more about critical thinking, we've got something amazing to share with you today. Josh Jones has provided a list of no less than 32 in-depth animated critical thinking videos in an engaging article featured on Open Culture. These critical thinking videos are the work of Geoff Pynn, a philosophy professor at Northern Illinois University. Pynn got some help from students at other universities as well, such as Yale and Duke.
We've talked a lot about critical thinking here at the Global Digital Citizen Foundation. It's one of the most valuable sets of skills we can both practice as adults and teach to our students. It's amazing witnessing the push towards exercising these skills that we are seeing in the global schools we work with every day.
It's always nice, however, to look at how others view critical thinking skills, and Pynn's work is exceptionally detailed. According to Pynn, part of critical thinking consists of having "good reasons" for your beliefs. The "good" he refers to concerns logic, the coherence of thought, and elements of truth rather than moral goodness.
These lessons on critical thinking are entertaining and easy to understand, considering the amount of information on hand here. The introductory video in this series of critical thinking videos is below.
Flip Your Learning with Critical Thinking Videos
We urge you to explore Pynn's list of 32 critical thinking videos and share them with students. They're great flipped learning tools you can refer back to as often as you like.
The entire list is set up nice and neat on the YouTube channel Wireless Philosophy (WiPhi). You can also find Pynn's critical thinking videos on Kahn Academy. Next, explore doing some challenging exercises with our ever-popular resources the Critical Thinking Workbook and the Ultimate Critical Thinking Skills Cheatsheet.