A Brave Writer's Life in Brief

Our in-person lives tend to put us in relationships built on agreement.

The internet, however, introduces us to people we would never meet in person. That’s both wonderful and challenging. We never know the condition of a person’s mind, heart, or personality when we encounter them online. Others come to us without context.

Yet we also have the chance to learn perspectives that would otherwise be completely hidden from us if we didn’t have online life together with so many different types of people and experiences.

The trouble is…

We’ve been conditioned to believe that if we declare a “fact” with a source of authority, everyone will fall into line and agree with us. Isn’t that what happens in school? One right answer for each test question, established by the authority, enforced by that teacher, regardless of who you are.

So we are struggling to adapt to a world where lots of answers with many sources of authority compete for space and truth value. It’s a huge adjustment! It will take time to overcome.

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Also, for extra support in the process, my book Raising Critical Thinkers goes into much more depth about these ideas.

Have you ever felt like someone was pressuring you to take their viewpoint? They may:

• use coercive language,
• shame you,
• be condescending,
• or criticize your character.

That’s not critical thinking. That’s group think. That’s the pressure to pick sides or to prove your loyalty.

I use these five principles to help me when I feel slammed by pushy messages, comments, or remarks from family or friends.

5 Principles

1. Critical thinking starts with caring.
2. We believe we’re sharing facts, when in fact (ha!) we’re sharing interpretations of facts.
3. Knowing you’re biased is half the journey to self-aware critical thinking.
4. Underneath our desire to have the correct point of view is a drive for sameness—the certainty of agreement rather than the discomfort of difference.
5. Deeper thinking depends on the ability to expand the field of vision, to notice our emotional reactivity, and to assess the judgments we’ve made on that basis.

My book for parents, Raising Critical Thinkers, and workbook for teens, Becoming a Critical Thinker, were written for these exact reasons. Thinking well is risky, emotionally volatile, and deeply important.

In the era of social media news, every parent of teens I talk to is worried that their kids are being schnookered!

• How will their kids sort accurate data from misinformation?
• Why do teens feel strongly about ideas that seem dangerous or unimportant to their parents?
• What can teens do to improve their ability to think for themselves rather than following along with their peers?

These are the kinds of questions I address in my new workbook: BECOMING A CRITICAL THINKER.

I wrote it because I know how much teens are capable of becoming capable, nuanced thinkers if they are given the right tools. The practices and processes in this workbook are enough to fill an entire school year with activities that will deepen and expand how well your teens critically think about everything from their favorite music to issues of the day to how to form their values.

BECOMING A CRITICAL THINKER is out now!!

Celebrate with me as I talk about the workbook on a special episode of the Brave Writer podcast!

This workbook is consumable so you may want one for each of your kids between the ages of 12-18.

Because I know you’ll ask: yes, adults can use this workbook too. Just be aware that the tone of the writing is directed to teens, even though the activities themselves work for any age.

If you are new to my work: you may also like RAISING CRITICAL THINKERS which is my nonfiction book for parents to help them be effective thinkers themselves all while teaching their kids to think well too.

Editor’s Description

At a time when we’re constantly flooded with contradictory information and opinions, critical thinking skills are more important than ever. This accessible workbook is full of valuable insights, thought-provoking questions, and useful exercises to help teens and preteens expand their perspectives, skillfully navigate thorny issues, recognize bias, identify misinformation, and become more comfortable with dissent and differences of opinion. Becoming a Critical Thinker offers essential tools for students to mature into thoughtful, curious, and empathetic learners.

While I have you here: Thank you for supporting the work I do in the world. It means so much to me to be able to share what I’ve learned in my three decades of examining thinking—

• why we think what we do
• why we think we’re right and the “other guy” is wrong
• why we get so unsettled when someone we love doesn’t think the way we wish they would

Critical thinking is essential for our teens especially. They are bombarded with loud, clanging information that has the appearance of truth but may simply be manipulation. We can help them learn how to tell the difference.

There is no better course you can give your teens than the tools to think well about every issue under the sun—including the ones that concern you most as their parent.

I hope you and your kids enjoy working with these tools! I can’t wait to hear how it goes.

I’m grateful for you.

I spoke at a conference once where we talked about how to think well. One of the questions came up about certainty, and how you could know something for sure.

What we know is that even an objective fact gets shared by a subjective self. No matter how much people can agree that something is real and true, factual and verifiable, it’s how we talk about the “objective truth” that shapes our shared reality. Your interpretation immediately impacts how that fact is received: “It may be raining: one of us is happy about it and the other pissed off!”

Another Way

Here’s what I said in my book, Raising Critical Thinkers:

The alternative to certainty is intimacy. Intimacy means knowing more of the subject with more of yourself. It looks like a greater and greater tenderness toward a field of study— a hunger to become close to it, to know its compelling contours and unavoidable flaws. It means reading the subject’s ardent fans and listening with patience to its detractors. Intimacy leads to both a fascination with and protection of a subject’s inherent value. There’s inscrutability and mystery within every subject. Intimacy in learning means developing an ongoing relationship to that discipline, allowing it to morph and change, which requires humility. Mastery is a myth.

Intiimacy means when you feel tweaked or smug or concerned or urgent, that’s the moment to get curious. What else is there to know? Why does the other person see the same information so differently?

BIG NEWS! Introducing BECOMING A CRITICAL THINKER (for ages 12-18). I took the exercises that were inside Raising Critical Thinkers and added a slew more. I included journal prompts, checklists, ranking bars, and boxed spaces for kids to write directly in the book. BECOMING A CRITICAL THINKER is open for presale and will publish on May 7!