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Book Review: Teaching for Critical Thinking: Tools and Techniques to Help Students Question Their Assumptions by Brookfield, S.

Brookfield, S. (2012). Teaching for Critical Thinking: Tools and Techniques to Help Students Question Their Assumptions. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. 280 pp. ISBN 978-0-470-88934-3 (hardback) In Teaching for Critical Thinking: Tools and Techniques to Help Students, Brookfield (2012) argues the "key to teaching critical thinking is to understand how students experience the process" (p. 75). He anchors his methodological approach in American pragmatism, which centralizes the student-identified strategies that helped them learn to think critically. Brookfield aims to provide tools and techniques educators can include in their "pedagogical tool kit or knapsack" (p. x) to help them facilitate teaching and the understanding of critical thinking. The first three chapters of the book lay the theoretical foundation for the strategies outlined in the remainder of the book. These chapters establish the importance of critical thinking, provide a framework for an interdisciplinary approach, and review the classroom strategies students identified as effective in helping them learn how to think critically. Brookfield approaches critical thinking from the perspective that it is not just an academic skill but a "way of living" (p. 2). In the first chapter, "What Is Critical Thinking?" Brookfield identifies four common intellectual operations of critical thinking and a tripartite typology of assumptions that critical thinking analyzes. In Chapter 2, "Critical Thinking Across Disciplines," he discusses the five traditions that inform critical thinking, in particular noting the common objective of helping students analyze the canon of their discipline and how it came to be valued as legitimate knowledge. The main point of Chapter 3, "How Critical Thinking Is Learned," is that critical theory is best understood as a social learning process that happens best in groups" (p. 231). Brookfield draws upon student testimonials collected over 30 years from Critical Incidence Questionnaires (CIQs) to provide an overview of classroom strategies students identified as enhancing their ability to think critically. Chapters 4 through 8 offer an in-depth discussion of these classroom strategies and how they can be employed to promote the various stages of critical thinking outlined in Chapter 1. These chapters provide a wealth of exercises, scenarios, personal experiences, and protocols that can be applied to different disciplinary settings and are organized into introductory, intermediate, and advanced levels. For example, Chapter 6, "Reading and Writing Critically," draws attention to the different processes associated with each medium. …