Critical Thinking in Social Work

Ray Woodcock
University of Michigan School of Social Work
March 30, 2010

Educational Policy (EP) 2.1.3 of the Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards (EPAS) of the Council for Social Work Education (CSWE) (2008, p. 4) requires social workers to use critical thinking (CT). There are a number of models and measures of CT (see Brunt, 2005; Simpson, 2002). Unfortunately, the concept of CT itself is not settled or defined, either in general or in the EPAS. Starting from the EPAS, this paper seeks to contribute to a theoretically measurable understanding of what CT can and should be within social work education.

CSWE’s View of CT

EP 2.1.3 falls within section 2 of the EPAS. The title of that section is “Explicit Curriculum.” EP 2.1.3 presents CT as one of the ten core competencies (i.e., “measurable practice behaviors”) whose mastery contributes to the preparation of the graduates of a (BSW or MSW) program (CSWE, 2008, p. 3) for the practice of social work. The other core competencies address such matters as professional behavior, ethical practice, and applied knowledge of human behavior and the social environment. For each core competency, the EPAS describe the “characteristic knowledge, values, skills, and resulting practice behaviors that may be used to operationalize the curriculum and assessment methods” (CSWE, p. 3). These elements of the program’s explicit curriculum generally emphasize knowledge, values, and skills that can be cultivated, in students, in conscious and deliberate fashion.

The specified knowledge required of social work students under EP 2.1.3 (CSWE, 2008, p. 4) is knowledge about “the principles of logic, scientific inquiry, and reasoned discernment.” The specified values are CT itself, “augmented by creativity and curiosity.” The specified skills are “synthesis and communication of relevant information.” The several practice behaviors that manifest CT are, briefly, the skilful use of multiple sources of knowledge, analysis of applicable theoretical models, and the demonstration of “effective oral and written communication.”

In the exercise of critical dissection, one might find EP 2.1.3 somewhat tangled. First, it seems odd to treat “logic, scientific inquiry, and reasoned discernment” as matters of knowledge. (By the way, exactly what is “reasoned discernment”?) Wouldn’t the student want to have some actual skill in the use of logic, for example? Even as a matter of knowledge, to cite one oft-abused principle of logic, do social work core courses really develop awareness of ad hominem arguments? Moving to the area of skills, is synthesis (as distinct from analysis) really a component of critical reason? Likewise, while one might be expected to be able to use the outputs of critical thought in one’s communications, surely oral communication skill is not a necessary ingredient of the capacity for such thought, else non-native speakers of the local language, and people with speech disabilities (e.g., Stephen Hawking), would tend to be deemed non-critical across the board. As a final example, the skilful use of multiple sources of knowledge would seem to be a skill, not merely a possible outcome.

Some such problems follow from the structure of EPAS section 2, which forces a straitjacket upon all core competencies. That is, the CSWE thus obliged itself to invent unnecessary distinctions between knowledge and skills relevant to CT. Even without that additional burden, it is difficult in any event to define CT. In short, EP 2.1.3 plainly compels one to look elsewhere for guidance in an informed discussion of CT.

CT as a Linear Process

Different intellectual traditions have used the concept of “critical thinking” in profoundly divergent senses. For example, Brookfield (2009, pp. 296-297) cites its contradictory uses by professors of business, on one hand, in studies aimed at increasing corporate profitability (but see Mingers, 2000, p. 222) and, on the other hand, by Neo-Marxist social theorists, who are interested in critiquing that kind of profit orientation.

For clarification of what might or should be involved in a concept like CT, the sophisticated reader commonly turns, first, to Wikipedia, if only to see whether there are ways in which one could improve its entry on point, assuming one had the time to do so. That source (as of 11:34 AM, March 28, 2010), paraphrased, says that thinking critically is the act of determin­ing the meaning or significance of a datum or the justification for a conclusion. Thus, CT may entail the ability to detect that a Wikipedia definition may lack justification. But then it may also entail the ability to recognize that criticisms of Wikipedia can be overdone.

The scheme envisioned in that Wikipedia (2010) version is, roughly, that there is the thing we are thinking about, there is the thinking about the thing, and then there is the thinking about the thinking. In this view, one might construe CT as a “What? So what? Now what?” (Borton, 1970) type of process – as, in other words, simply the sequential identification of a datum, the analysis of its meaning, and the derivation of consequences or next steps from the analysis (see Eyler, 2002, p. 528). Schön (1983, p. 277) calls this sort of process “reflection on [past] action” (emphasis added); D’Cruz, Gillingham, and Melendez (2007, p. 83) call it “critical reflection.” In an attempt to add some clarity to such terms, this paper will tend to refer to it as simply “reflection,” with the understanding that it does have a critical orientation.

Obviously, that game can continue. One can think about the thinking about the thinking – can engage, in other words, in analysis of what counts as a good justification. For that matter, one can ask what counts as a good analysis, or simply what counts. Some of this might fall into the realms of metaphysics or philosophy of science. That is not to say that such activities necessarily take place at a superior or more definitive level. It is possible to do metaphysics poorly. Hence, it may be useful to treat philosophy, not as an invariably sophisticated, nth-generation level of analysis, abstracted to a high level from the original datum, but rather as a shift in focus from a basic datum of real-world experience to a recherche datum of something in the realms of language or consciousness.

Seen in those terms, CT – regardless of its quality – may be construed as having a horizontal rather than vertical emphasis. That is, from a CT perspective, when we go to that nth level of thinking about thinking, we may not have moved up to a higher level; we may instead have just moved on to a different question. The very existence of additional vertical levels (whether characterized as metaphorically “higher” or as “deeper”) becomes dubious when one observes the dissimilarity of the nomenclature that five authors use to describe them, as cited by Mann, Gordon, and MacLeod (2009, p. 598): are there two such levels, for example, or are there instead three, or four, or five? According to Mann et al., those five authors have managed, among themselves, to generate 17 different (and in many instances seemingly incommensurable) terms for such levels, with “critical reflection” being the only such term adopted by more than one of those authors.

Surely the parsing or processing of experience varies markedly from one instance to the next, in terms of the quantity and quality of time and effort devoted to the task, and also in the interest or usefulness of the results achieved. Such variations seem likely to depend on investigatory skill and resources, difficulty of the subject matter, and other factors – but not, generally speaking, on a reified structure of levels. The interpretation offered here, with respect to those putative vertical levels, is that their forms of reflection occur within a time dimension and are thus not literally (in a cognitive sense) vertical – that is, they do not build straight upwards from present-moment experience, but rather continue on into the subsequent unfolding of present-moment experience; and as they continue, they tend to augur a morphing of the original question into an assortment of other (broader, narrower, or simply different) questions about the same or different events.

CT as an Iterative and Indefinite Process

The objections just offered lead to a different way of understanding CT. Traces of this perspective go back a century, to John Dewey, who – according to Fisher (2001, p. 2) – is “widely regarded as the ‘father’ of the modern critical thinking tradition.” Dewey’s (1910, p. 6) term for CT was “reflective thinking.” As the word “reflection” implies, Fisher says, Dewey considered such thinking “persistent and careful.” Similarly, in another classic definition cited by Fisher (p. 3), Glaser (1941, p. 5) echoed that CT is “persistent” and “thoughtful.”

Dewey’s views find a parallel in those of his contemporary, Edmund Husserl, who reportedly insisted that rational thought (see Wachterhauser, 1988, p. 245) requires “going back, again and again” (Sheets-Johnstone, 1999, p. 141) in an attempt to find the essence of what one has experienced (Buytendijk, 1967, p. 358).

[Footnote] Those multiple citations are offered as a substitute for the citation of the text in which Husserl actually used the quoted term. Several scholars seem convinced that he said it. Unfortunately, thus far I have not been able to verify that.

Whether one will ever find that essence – whether it even exists – is neither certain nor important. The important thing in this perspective is, instead, that the components of Borton’s (1970) What, So What, and Now What are apt to keep evolving, both with the passage of time and with the mutating perspectives of iterative reviews. The datum is not examined and then left behind; it is repeatedly revisited in hermeneutic, iterative, or looping fashion. This approach, as it has developed, can be termed “reflection in [present] action” (Schön, 1983, p. 277, emphasis added) or “reflexivity” (D’Cruz et al., 2007, p. 83).

When D’Cruz et al. (2007, p. 84) describe reflection on action as a search for generalizable knowledge that can be applied again in the future, they seem to equate it with quantitative research methods. Without denying the importance or interest of contrasts between quantitative and qualitative research, it may be more useful, for present purposes, to reframe the contrast in terms of the kinds of on-the-fly CT skills that MSW students are more likely to need. In such terms, there is a useful difference between an analytic ability to parse a specific past event at length as an observer, on one hand, and a continual engagement in present-moment questioning of oneself along with (indeed, as part of) the ever-changing phenomena of interest (Daley, 2010, p. 79; Weick, 2002, p. 894).

Even in that phrasing, however, one is still left, to some extent, with the criticism that trying to pin down a phenomenon precisely enough for reflection (as distinct from reflexivity) produces “a strange type of [social] science” (Yalom, 1980, p. 24) in which the certainty of the findings tends to correlate with their real-world irrelevance. A countervailing criticism is that, in the constant effort to be aware of one’s own everyday impact upon and coloring of that familiar world – “to encounter the familiar as new” (Antonacopoulou, 2010, p. S7) – one may be publicly obsessing upon matters that many readers find relatively peripheral (Weick, 2002, p. 894).

Recap of CT as Individualist and Cognitive Activity

To the extent that the EPAS provide any insight into the sort of CT that MSW students should master, they seem to emphasize the sorts of basic intellectual tools that van Woerkom (2008, p. 4) links to analytic philosophy: “recognizing logical fallacies, distinguishing between opinion and evidence, judgment and valid inference, and being skilled at using different forms of reasoning.” Despite van Woerkom’s characterization, such tools seem likely to enjoy frequent usage, not only in analytic philosophy, but in virtually any intellectual tradition that relies upon inference and argument to develop its knowledge base and/or to persuade others of its merit.

These tools are used in different ways in reflection and in reflexivity, as those two terms are defined above. Reflection emphasizes the freezing of relatively few events for detailed analysis, while reflexivity emphasizes a tendency toward real-time scrutiny of the ongoing interplay between oneself and the ceaseless flood of current data. Neither of these ambitions can ever be fully realized, because there is never enough time, knowledge, and awareness to absorb all of what happened or is happening; they differ in their propensity to reduce the unknowns by restricting the data studied.

In this sense, CT could be understood as the use of standard tools of reason (e.g., logic, inference) both within the chosen perspectival frame (i.e., upon the selected past event, or upon the present events of interest) and upon it (i.e., in critique of the remediable as well as the irremediable limits of either a reflective or reflexive approach). It seems, in other words, that both approaches have their merits and may complement one another. That statement implies that there can be no prior commitment to a belief that one’s involvement necessarily must, or need not, impair the application of CT, and that a form of useful reasoning preferred by people of a given sex, race, age, etc. should be encouraged for its strengths but should not be privileged unreasonably at the expense of other justifiable mindsets.

The foregoing remarks constitute an exceedingly brief and incomplete analysis of what has been said about CT in the individual-oriented sense in which the term is usually employed. As a single additional indicator of just how limited this analysis has been, one might consider the observation, by Deal and Pittman (2009, p. 89), that a panel of 46 experts convened by the American Philosophical Association, from institutions as disparate as the Memorial University of Newfoundland and the University of Illinois, developed a consensus statement on CT (Facione, 1990, p. 2) that is multifaceted if not predictably verbose.

[Footnote] The statement reads as follows:

We understand critical thinking to be purposeful, self-regulatory judgment which results in interpretation, analysis, evaluation, and inference, as well as explanation of the evidential, conceptual, methodological, criteriological, or contextual considerations upon which that judgment is based. CT is essential as a tool of inquiry. As such, CT is a liberating force in education and a powerful resource in one’s personal and civic life. While not synonymous with good thinking, CT is a pervasive and self-rectifying human phenomenon. The ideal critical thinker is habitually inquisitive, well-informed, trustful of reason, open-minded, flexible, fairminded in evaluation, honest in facing personal biases, prudent in making judgments, willing to reconsider, clear about issues, orderly in complex matters, diligent in seeking relevant information, reasonable in the selection of criteria, focused in inquiry, and persistent in seeking results which are as precise as the subject and the circumstances of inquiry permit. Thus, educating good critical thinkers means working toward this ideal. It combines developing CT skills with nurturing those dispositions which consistently yield useful insights and which are the basis of a rational and democratic society.

Parsing that single statement, with its supplied background information and supportive reasoning, could generate a book. And yet even that statement neglects emotional and social dimensions that, in some views, must be included in order to develop a coherent understanding of CT.

CT and the Implicit Curriculum

EP 2.1.3 appears within section 2 of the EPAS. That section’s title is, “Explicit Curriculum.” Section 3 addresses the “Implicit Curriculum.” According to EP 3.0 (p. 10),

The implicit curriculum refers to the educational environment in which the explicit curriculum is presented. It is composed of the following elements: the program’s commitment to diversity; admissions policies and procedures; advisement, retention, and termination policies; student participation in governance; faculty; administrative structure; and resources.

There are no references to CT in section 3. One may infer that, as a core competency, CT is seen to be logically separate from “the educational environment in which the explicit curriculum [including CT] is presented.” Yet no such firewall restricts diversity, which is treated as both a core competency (EP 2.1.4) and an identified part of the implicit curriculum (EP 3.1). Likewise, one could suggest that social work ethics and other parts of the explicit curriculum certainly should be acknowledged as playing important roles in the implicit curriculum.

The problem seems to be that, as above, the structure of the EPAS document locks CSWE (2008) into a rigidity in which it must either replicate numerous parts of the text awkwardly, across multiple sections, or else leave important things unsaid to preserve some brevity. Whatever the solution to that problem may be, it is not likely that CSWE does, or should, intend that schools of social work should support CT only in the classroom.

For a sense of the role CT may play, both in and outside of the classroom, one might return to EP 2.1.3 – but not to its reference to communication. As hinted above, communication is best understood as a separate skill. There have been great communicators (e.g., Ronald Reagan) who have not been especially celebrated for their CT. That said, CT surely does require an ability to detect nuances in language. The distinction is this: one may be able to select words that describe precisely what one is feeling or thinking, and yet those words may not form an effective communication because, for instance, the hearer does not understand them, or finds them offensive. CT is a form of thinking that requires a good grasp of language; communication is a form of interpersonal action that, done well, requires perceptive choices among words. To refer to the terms used in the title of EP 2.1.3, CT can be applied for purposes of communication, but communication is not, itself, an intrinsic part of CT.

The non-cognitive (or perhaps supra-cognitive) role that CT inevitably plays, both in the classroom and as part of the implicit curriculm, is instead suggested in a different part of EP 2.1.3 – in, specifically, its reference to “practice wisdom.” Critical thinking is thinking about things, informed by one’s understanding of things; and one cannot understand things – words that describe emotions, for example – without having experienced them. Experience with and understanding of people provide indispensable grist for the mill of critical thought – which is to say, what one thinks, critically or otherwise, depends on what there is to think about.

According to EP 3.10, “The implicit curriculum is as important as the explicit curriculum in shaping the professional character and competence of the program’s graduates.” What there is to think about, for the social work student, is not at all limited to coursework, lectures, and other formal learning experiences. To the contrary, such things assume greater or lesser importance, in the student’s thinking, according to the professional socialization provided by interactions with the perceived priorities and agendas of the educational institution. Whether the student will do the assigned reading, for example, and what s/he will make of it if s/he does it, are powerfully influenced by signals from faculty and peers. One could say, indeed, that the implicit curriculum is not merely on a par with, but is actually prior to and controlling of, the material served up for critical analysis in the explicit curriculum. The explicit curriculum is the steak; but the implicit curriculum is the temperature of the grill, the skill of the chef, and the ambiance of the restaurant.

CT as an Emotional Process

EP 2.1.3 does not directly mention emotion. This is not surprising; according to van Woerkom (2008, p. 6),

Most theories of critical reflection do not pay attention to the impact of emotions on learning or emphasize the importance of controlling emotions. However, emotions do not only obstruct learning. Learning does not take place when there is no emotional arousal [citation omitted]. Emotion drives attention, which drives learning, memory, and problem-solving behavior.

Van Woerkom goes on to cite Taylor (2001) for the view that emotion is part of learning, not a hindrance to it. Citing research into brain pathology, Taylor (pp. 223-224) describes the essential role of emotion in setting the agenda for reasoning, by determining what information is important and what can be ignored. Yet to say that emotion is important in CT is not the same as saying that emotion is part of CT. What is the relationship between the two?

Emotion is, of course, an extremely broad subject. It has been brought somewhat more down to manageable size, for purposes of CT, in the form of the emotional intelligence (EI) construct. Mayer, Roberts, and Barsade (2008) identify three kinds of theoretical approaches to EI: specific-ability approaches identify a particular ability that is considered essential to EI; integrative-model approaches combine several specific abilities; and mixed-model (or “trait­based,” Van Rooy & Viswesvaran, 2007, p. 260) approaches typically combine at least one relatively standard EI attribute (e.g., accurate emotional perception) with at least one attribute that is not normally included in the measurement of EI (e.g., happiness, adaptability). Mayer et al. (p. 520) detect increasing doubt among researchers regarding the EI-specific usefulness of the last of those three, however.

Mayer et al. (p. 525) present seven trends in studies of EI outcomes. These trends may be summarized as having to do with social relations, psychological well-being, and academic achievement. Without denying the value of all of these within social work practice generally, only the academic achievement construct seems particularly related to CT. There, they say, “EI is correlated with higher academic achievement as reported by teachers, but generally not with higher grades once IQ is taken into account.” This appears to be the case regardless of whether EI in this sense is measured from a specific-ability or an integrative-model approach.

While research continues, this progress report by Mayer et al. (2008) tentatively implies two alternate approaches for the relationship between EI and CT in social work education. One approach, consistent with a traditional understanding of higher education, might exclude EI from the measurement of CT for the reason just stated: it does not seem to have much of an effect on grades independent of IQ. The other approach, oriented toward a concept of what education should be as distinct from what it is, would insist upon including EI in CT because of the crucial effect of emotion upon reasoning, and would restructure social work education accordingly.

A sense of how that latter option might work arises from what is in some ways the primary integrative-model approach identified by Mayer et al. (p. 523), namely, the Four-Branch Model of EI – which happens to be the very first model of “emotional intelligence,”according to Goleman (1995, pp. 43-44) – developed by Salovey and Mayer (1990) and tested by the Mayer­Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT) (Mayer, Salovey, & Caruso, 2002). The four branches in this “leading ability-based explanation of emotional intelligence” (Fan, Jackson, Yang, Tang, & Zhang, 2010, p. 781) have been described, relatively recently, by Salovey and Grewal (2005). Based upon their description, there appears to be a reciprocal intuitive relationship between the second branch, “using emotions,” and the third branch, “understanding emotions.” The former has to do with the effect of emotions on thinking, and the latter captures the reciprocal relationship in which cognition detects and articulates differences among emotions.

The MSCEIT is not yet mature. For example, in a meta-analytic structural equation modeling analysis, Fan et al. (2010, p. 784) detected very high correlation between that second branch and the first branch, “perceiving emotions,” and proposed that a three-branch model would have the best overall fit. Others (e.g., Murphy, 2008) have identified additional concerns with the MSCEIT. Nonetheless, in principle, one could revise the social work curriculum (and the EPAS) to accommodate EI within a broader yet still potentially defensible concept of CT – treating EI as, perhaps, “[T]he ability to engage in sophisticated information processing about one’s own and others’ emotions and the ability to use this information as a guide to thinking and behavior” (Mayer, Salovey, & Caruso, 2008, p. 503) in several significant areas of practice (Morrison, 2007).

CT as Multiple Intelligences

If CT can include emotional intelligence, perhaps it can also include other kinds of intelligence. Gardner (1983) posited the existence of seven distinct forms of intelligence: linguistic, musical, logical-mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, intrapersonal, and interpersonal (p. xi). By “intrapersonal,” Gardner intended an orientation toward emotions; and by “interpersonal,” he intended the ability to understand other people (Goleman, 1995, pp. 39, 41). The latter has led, in recent years, to broad interest in what Goleman (2006) calls “social intelligence.” These multiple intelligences are not very directly addressed in EP 2.1.3; the question here is whether they should be.

The short answer, for some, is more or less obviously No. While any form of intelligence can be useful in life and in the various things we do in life, and may even be crucial within social work niches, musical, spatial, and bodily-kinesthetic intelligences have relatively little to do with social work education and practice generally. By contrast, as just seen, there may be a case for including EI within a concept of CT, which does traditionally tend to include linguistic and logical-mathematical intelligences. The remaining question, it seems, is whether social intelligence (SI) should also be included in CT.

Or perhaps that is not the sole remaining question. Almeida et al. (2010) cite research indicating, contra Gardner, that there is, in fact, a general or common dimension of intelligence – that, in other words, “cognitive skill measures are positively correlated with each other depending on the cognitive processes involved and on the tasks’ content.” This view, should it continue to gather research support, may suggest that multiple intelligences are, to some extent, manifestations of a single core intellectual capability. Even so, there are obviously different degrees of musical giftedness, for example, among people of otherwise comparable intelligence, so it seems likely that there may be different degrees of emotional and social giftedness as well.

For purposes of CT, there may be an important distinction between EI and SI. It was indicated, above, that emotion plays an essential role in cognition, in the sense of serving as an agenda-setter within the brain. Tentatively, it does not appear that SI has a comparably central role in thinking, though of course social contact can serve as one among many influences upon thinking in a given situation. For example, Goleman’s (2006) summary of SI, involving social awareness and social facility, seems more oriented toward social performance than toward any essential aspect of thinking. That said, it may be advisable to explore this particular question further, along the lines of van Woerkom’s (2008, p. 7) suggestion that feedback is, in fact, an essential aspect of learning.

CT for Social Work

The preceding pages began by characterizing CT as a set of steps in which one identifies a datum, thinks about it, and then reflects upon his/her thinking. It was suggested that, at least to some extent, such a process might be revisited in persistent, iterative, and self-aware fashion, in a bid to get a better handle upon the phenomenon and also upon one’s potentially inextricable involvements with and effects upon it, and of it reciprocally upon oneself. These individually oriented approaches to CT seemed to prioritize the use of basic skills of logic and reason upon the datum, and also, perhaps, upon one’s use of a reflective or reflexive frame of perspective.

So far, the discussion amounted to an interpretation of EP 2.1.3, as part of the explicit curriculum within the EPAS. Upon recognizing this, it appeared that the EPAS might better be restructured to allow CT (as well as ethics and other core competencies) to play a role within the implicit curriculum as well. Among other things, doing so would clarify that practice wisdom, as a source or guide for CT, would itself be deliberately informed by the student’s professional socialization within the school of social work.

The concept of CT, in the classic sense of logic and reason, seemed to call for some updating in light of recent learning about the apparently essential role that emotion plays within thought. One possible approach, along these lines, would focus upon the reciprocal relationship between emotions and cognition as guides for one another. While it seemed possible that other forms of intelligence – notably SI – would also have some such reciprocal relationship with CT, it did not presently seem that those relationships would serve indisipensable functions within CT.

The explorations leading to this summary yield several recommendations for the teaching and evaluation of CT in social work:

• The discussion of iterative approaches to thinking, if developed, could have profound implications for the teaching of social work subjects across the board, especially if such iterations helped to generate patience and self-awareness – to generate, that is, a clearer distinction between what one wants to say or believe and what a situation actually supports.
• While there certainly could be a distinction between subjects of overt study (e.g., human rights) and the way in which those subjects are studied (e.g., critically, with respect, empirically based), the existing distinction in the EPAS between explicit and implicit criteria seems contrived and dysfunctional.
• A serious effort to inject even the classic form of CT into the social work curriculum would likely be tumultuous. In some ways, the addition of an emotion-aware component to that classic form would probably mitigate the tumult, at least within a profession like social work; in other ways, doing so would probably aggravate it. Be that as it may, it seems undeniable that any graduate education should place some priority upon developing critical thinking in students.

It has not appeared, in this analysis, that there presently exists one, or even a combination, of measures that will capture the salient features of CT for purposes of social work education. Several have been identified; further inquiry could provide a tentative list of at least one or two that probably should be put into service promptly. What ultimately emerges from this analysis, however, is that the effort to sharpen the meaning and measurement of just one core competency presents reasons to revisit a substantial portion of the EPAS and of their concept of social work education. And that is interesting.

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