by John Nelson
For classroom teachers and curriculum developers
262 pages
$14.96

Although the book is based on integration of critical thinking in college classes, many of the activities can be used in upper middle school to high school.

John Nelson's book focuses on integrating critical thinking into various subject areas. He has divided this book into five major sections: Problems and puzzles; analyzes and critiques; opinions, decisions, and values; projects, experiments, and adventures; and student as teacher and teacher as student. The book contains fifty different activities and each activity follows the same format: Applications to various subject areas such as literature or computer science; critical thinking skills such as making inferences and detecting bias; a description of the activity with instructions on how to do the activity; purposes and benefits such as an expanded rationale for the activity; uses, adaptations and resources with variations on the activity and references to other articles; and related activities from other parts of the book. The activities have interesting titles such as “Who Fired the First Shot?”, “Dealing with the Devil”, and “Suddenly You are Old.” Also, after each activity title, the author includes the purpose of the activity such as “Activity 19: You Write Like a Girl (Analyzing Literature, Detecting Stereotypes)” or “Activity 30: Crimes and Punishment (Making Judgments, Defining Consequences)."

Nelson provides useful resources. Subject area teachers can find activities for their class in the “Activities by Discipline” area; for example, there are five activities for mathematics. He includes a list of critical thinking Web sites and has a comprehensive fifteen-page bibliography of critical-thinking materials.

Although the book is based on integration of critical thinking in college classes, many of the activities can be used in upper middle school to high school. For example, students can understand slanting through word choice with examples such as “I am taking medication; you are on pills; he takes dope,” and then write their own slanting statements (Activity 6, p. 35). Likewise, students can read the given passage from Zindel's The Pigman and identify the responsibility of each of the five people for the wife's death and explain their reasoning (Activity 31). With some minor modification, students can use other activities, such as creating a two-question survey to find out the views of family and friends on an issue such as their joining the military (Activity 37). Many of the activities take a reading or academic concept and then apply it to the students' lives. For example, in Activity 27, the students read “the Declaration of Independence” and then write an essay in which they sever relationships with a person or a group and explain their reasons. Likewise, in Activity 26, they trace their family back three generations and make connections between the events in their families and the events in history through documented sources.

The author helps the classroom teacher the most when he provides all the material that the teacher needs to implement the critical thinking activity, such as the questions on different viewpoints for Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Activity 14) or the Fact Opinion exercise (Activity 4). He often does not include the materials, but refers to them. For example, he tells the reader to provide students with several longer examples of slanted writing (Activity 6) or to provide them with several conflicting published accounts of the same historical event (Activity 18).

If the book had an index then the reader could find all the activities for a particular critical thinking skill such as evaluating alternative solutions and therefore, provide their students with different activities to develop this specific skill.

The book does include many different subject areas, but a large number of the examples focus on the English activities of composition and literature; Nelson often refers to activities from his Composition and Literature courses. Furthermore, the book contains very few examples of non-print resources for critical thinking. Activity 45 is the one exception since it deals exclusively with teaching online and off line with various technology such as concept maps, email, and webquests.

Nelson's Cultivating Judgment can be a reference book for a district's professional library.

Dr. Harry Grover Tuttle focuses on assessing and improving student learning through low- and high-tech tools.

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