Discussion: View Thread

  • 1.  Training/teaching Critical Thinking Skills/Improved Judgement

    Posted 03-08-2021 09:11

    Dear colleagues,

     

    I hope you are well and managing to re-balance life.  Has any of you had the chance to create or teach a course on how to improve accurate detection of signals (e.g., differentiating false alarm from actual threat), help professionals judge incoming information more logically and get better at separating facts from inference? I may have an opportunity to design and deliver training for a major multinational to a team that deals with detecting threats. The company wants these highly skilled professionals to be able to improve their judgement in various situations related to assessing information and its meaning and potential importance.

     

    I teach mostly at the Masters level and, while these themes are close to my heart and I introduce them in between the lines when I teach organizational behaviour (or other management courses), I never designed a training that is focused on that, especially for experienced professionals, so I am curious to see if there are any materials out there.

    Thanks for any tips!

     

    Warm regards,

     

    Jacob

    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

    Dr Jacob Eisenberg, Associate Professor

    A close up of a logoDescription automatically generated

    Tel:  +353-1-716 4774

    Email: Jacob.eisenberg@ucd.ie

    UCD Innovation Fellow 2021

     



  • 2.  RE: Training/teaching Critical Thinking Skills/Improved Judgement

    Posted 03-09-2021 09:47
    Hi Jacob,
    that's a brilliant initiative. I teach MSc course called "Actionable insights from research", in which I address some of the issues you are interested in.
    I can't recommend enough the book I am using as a core text for this course, Barends, E., Rousseau, D.M. (2018) Evidence-Based Management: How to use evidence to make better organizational decisions. Kogan Page. It's written for practitioners, explains some of the quite complicated concepts in a very accessible way, and has lots of "checklists" - the questions a decision-maker is recommended to ask themselves to improve the quality of their judgements and decisions. You may also want to check CEBMA website  for more materials.
    Another useful resource to explore is a project Calling Bullshit: The data reasoning in the digital world by Carl T. Bergstrom and Jevin West - it is a course taught at the University of Washington, here is a syllabus and more materials. It's not focused specifically on management/business decision-making, but many of the examples and ideas apply very well in business context. They just published a book on this. 
    I hope this helps, and I am very interested to hear what others do in this area. In particular, I am looking now to collate a list of podcasts for my students to listen as additional material for this course. So if anyone can recommend some specific podcast episodes that you really like, I'd be very grateful (Jacob, I hope you don't find this additional question as a deviation from your main theme!)
    With kind regards
    Tatiana

    Dr. Tatiana Andreeva
    Associate Professor in Management and Organisational Behaviour

    Research Director 

    Maynooth University / School of Business
    Maynooth University, Maynooth, Co. Kildare, Ireland
    E: tatiana.andreeva@nuim.ie



    ------------------------------
    Tatiana Andreeva
    Maynooth University
    Maynooth
    ------------------------------

    Original Message


  • 3.  RE: Training/teaching Critical Thinking Skills/Improved Judgement

    Posted 03-25-2021 16:30
    I teach at the doctoral level, myself.  I've taught at several universities.  Some have the individual critical thinking type course such as epistemology and ontology, some do not.  I currently teach at one that is not.  However, I've done quite a bit into research on developing critical thinking skills and have learned to embed the techniques into my student responses and feedback. The most classic technique is Socratic questioning.  I really answer a question outright, but rather pose questions that encourage the student to go out and dig deeper, while providing some suggested resources to do that.  
    While I have not worked with International teams in a long while, I do some nonprofit coaching and mentoring.  Socratic questioning as a great way to get them to think of threats versus facts and short and term consequences of actions.  I have found Socratic is a great way to overcome the inevitable tunnel vision, particularly when most members have an undergrad degree.  I

    I have three older go-to sources,  because I have not found anything substantial better at  teaching critical thinking skills.  7 I'd be glad to work with you on developing a training program.  I have quite a bit of experience with training and curriculum development to include PM of pre assessment, developing training, implementing training, and then evaluating it.



    ------------------------------
    Barbara Turner
    Professor
    Walden University
    APO AP
    (830) 357-8533
    ------------------------------

    Original Message