Critical thinking at college and university level education is a mandatory skill that helps the students to cater their various academic commitments responsibility and effectively. Moving in further details, students develop their critical thinking ability through reading and writing sessions.
As for this discussion, let’s talk about how you can initiate with the critical reading sessions for your courses.
It’s time to get started
Reading sessions assigned in your degree program is all about active reading. Your teachers expect you to read much more than the words on the textbook page or an online article. In other words, you need to critically examine each word or phrase and consider the possible perspectives that could be associated with them.
Each teacher in your teacher most probably have his/her own instructional strategy. Some might talk about the preliminary considerations regarding the topic to be started, ask questions from the students, or conduct a short activity to generate curiosity.
The entire purpose is to help you identify and stay trail without getting lost in the plethora of facts figures, clauses, and concepts in your courses.
Consider the story of Hansel and Gretel, the children used to drop breadcrumbs to retrace their way back home through the congested, dark woods.
The above analogy makes you those children, in this case the student who needs to stay connected with the reading material to comprehend the entire topic as meant and make relevant associations with the things learned in the class.
Many students, even teachers at times, get lost when starting to read complex, challenging topics. This is where your powerful critical thinking skills will come to use for guiding you through the subtopics, make connections, understand the material in a nutshell, and conclude the reading session with providing you enough content to start your writing task.
The entire process of reading session passes through three major phases: preparing, responding, and reading critically.
As for this discussion, we are going to focus on the first phase and see how students can get ready before beginning the actual reading session.
Preparing to read
Prior to the actual reading time, you need to understand how to approach the reading phase, i.e., how to extract the best results from your limited time allotted for reading.
Think about the purpose
Before you commence, ask yourself the following questions regarding the instant purpose of your session.
- What is the topic that you are reading?
- Why are you reading? Or, what do you want to acquire from your reading?
- What is the expectations of your taking your learning from the reading?
- Do you intend to memorize content minutiae, locate the thesis statement or core arguments, or make relevant associations?
- Does this reading relate to other reading assignments in the course through adding, contrasting, building on? If yes, then how?
There are further phases in the process like planning your follow-up, acquiring background Cheap Essay 247, and skimming the text. After going through the above mentioned phases they you will respond to the content by reading deeply, annotating, and create and maintain a journal.