Something nagged at me while reading this: this whole framework is built like a debate. You're comparing alternatives, weighing evidence against something, picking a winner. It feels very Western-academic way of thinking about thinking. Not every culture treats reasoning like a competition, though. Some traditions are way more dialogic or communal the goal isn't to "win" by evaluating a claim against a rival, it's to build shared understanding or work out how ideas relate to each other and to the people holding them. So when we hand students this framework and call it "critical thinking," we might be quietly telling them there's only one legitimate way to reason well and it happens to be the one that already matches how Western universities grade essays. I still think the framework is genuinely useful. I just don't think it should get to be the only definition available.

Maliszewski's assignment is a good example of studying AI. The group builds a book display with generative AI tools and analyzes the output. This approach differs from viewing AI as a forbidden shortcut or a neutral tool. This changes the question from whether students should use AI to what they notice in AI's output. Critical thinking about AI is a skill to practice, and it's more sustainable than bans. Since it treats critical thinking about AI itself as a skill to be practiced, this isn't just a policy to be enforced.

Diana Maliszewski makes a key point: critical thinking should encourage "healthy skepticism," not distrust that dismisses any other viewpoint as "fake news." This corrects some misguided pop-culture ideas about critical thinking. But it also raises a tough question that the article doesn't fully answer: how to teach students to distinguish between skepticism and denialism, since both can sound similar ("I'm just asking questions")? That difference between the two isn't always clear to students still learning to evaluate evidence.

Newman describes critical thinking becoming "part of your intellectual hardware" that persists even as specific facts fade. This metaphor is worth interrogating: hardware implies something fixed and durable, almost mechanical, whereas critical thinking is arguably more like a habit that atrophies without practice. If we take the metaphor too literally, we might assume the skill is "installed" once and doesn't need reinforcement, but the article's own argument (that it must be practiced repeatedly, K–12 through post-secondary) contradicts that implication.

Newman's suggestion that professors explain why a question is good, rather than just saying "great question," is a small but powerful idea. It reframes feedback as a teaching moment rather than a reward. It's a low-cost intervention that could be tested in almost any classroom.

Newman's claim that we assume students pick up critical thinking "by osmosis" is worth sitting with, because it exposes a hidden shortcut: many instructors design assignments that require critical thinking without ever teaching it as a discrete skill. This is similar to expecting students to learn grammar just by reading novels some absorb it, but the students who most need explicit scaffolding (often first-generation students, ESL learners, or those from under-resourced schools) are the ones left behind by an implicit approach. It raises a question about equity: whose students benefit from "osmosis," and whose don't?