The Stages Of Critical Thinking

Critical thinking is when you conduct an unbiased examination and assessment of an issue to form an opinion. There are certain stages you must go through to be considered a critical thinker. Those steps consist of the unreflective thinker, challenged thinker, beginning thinker, practicing thinker, the advanced thinker, and accomplished thinker. The idea of critical thinking goes hand in hand with the concept of metacognition as well. Before we attempt to become critical thinkers, we must first understand the stages of critical thinking.

The first stage of critical thinking is the unreflective thinker. People in this stage are unaware of role and problems that ideology plays in everyone’s life. “Unreflective thinkers lack the knowledge that

It is during this phase where you begin to see the importance of development as a thinker and actively thinking across multiple aspects of their life. “Thinkers at this stage recognize that they have basic problems in their thinking and make initial attempts to understand better how they can take charge of and improve it” (Elder and Paul, 2010). However, even though they attempt to improve their thinking they lack an organized strategy, so the hard work they put in to enhance fails. Thinkers in this state also learn to take in criticism about their thoughts. The next stage is when someone is a practicing thinker. These thinkers begin to develop awareness of the need for exact repetition in thinking. Practicing thinkers have enough skill to start to monitor their thoughts regularly and create habits that take charge in their thinking. They have enough expertise to begin to control their thoughts frequently and can often recognize their egocentric

Advanced thinkers habitually critique their plan for organized repetition, and advance it as well monitor their thoughts. During this state, they also understand the qualities of their thinking. By this stage, thinkers have established good habits and can evaluate their thinking and have significantly more profound insight into problems. “The key intellectual trait required at this stage is a high degree of intellectual humility in recognizing egocentric and sociocentric thought in one’s life as well as areas of significant ignorance and prejudice” (Elder and Paul, 2010). However, it is unlikely to obtain this thinking status before college. The last stage of becoming a critical thinker is the accomplished thinker. They are considered the top tier of thinking meaning they taken charge of their thinking and continually monitor, revise and re-think it for constant improvement. “Accomplished thinkers intuitively assess their thinking for clarity, accuracy, precision, relevance, logicalness, etc.” (Elder and Paul, 2010). Once you go through this process, you the skills and abilities to critically think about any topic in life without being egocentric or prejudice by your own