As most of my classes are very large, this strategy has the potential to expand the effectiveness of my feedback and encourage students to work together.

Creating meaningful timelines or even graphs that indicate causality could be useful.

This has potential for my courses - having student groups create their own weekly quizzes would be great. They would share the information with each other and help each other study.

Guilty. I'm also sympathetic to the criticism that self-regulatory learning is for kids with a lot stability. But as a skill set to be exported out of the classroom, perhaps self-evaluation is one of the more valuable things we can teach students to do. I keep returning to the Gloria Ladson-Billings interview. She claimed that students who quit, end up quitting a lot. They get overwhelmed and quit. It's not necessarily a lack of grit, but an inability to set goals and follow through with them. Even for students who struggle with poverty and abuse at home, this self-evaluation could be useful, practical even - and not just a higher order critical thinking skill outside of their awareness capabilities. But the rub is still how to teach these kids who struggle so profoundly.

These categories of "motivation" are helpful to me. Helping students identify why they should learn things isn't always easy, but building self-efficacy (regardless of the varying degrees of student awareness of their "beliefs") is a something worth discussing explicitly. I do keep coming back to something from previous readings though - students who are undereducated and/or lack confidence in their abilities because their schools were in a socioeconomic void AND the persistence of this idea of grit. Student awareness can sometimes read as confidence, and confidence needs stability or some patterns of success, I would think. How does that process begin in the classroom? But the notion of grit is appealing even if its hard to define or even encourage. Just something I'm chewing on . . .

I appreciate most the focus on transferable skills and structure in teaching critical thinking and the emphasis on faculty continuing to self-evaluate how they are reaching students. I don't know that the model of how do we get these superstitious, sitcom-watchers to just think is the most modern framework by which look at this process though.

I would add the confidence to apply it too.

I wonder about defining critical thinking in terms of career paths, financial investments, and "desirable outcomes," in general, particularly when you think about social justice movements and ethics. Also, and maybe I'm jumping the gun here, but it seems shortsighted to always be looking toward the "right outcome" when you don't know what you'll learn.