From the activities this week, my understanding is that critical thinking is a collection
of skills that allows you to make informed decisions and be a problem solver. Some
characteristics of a critical thinker include flexibility, which can help you overcome
challenges instead of becoming frustrated. Another characteristic of critical thinking
is open mindedness,being open minded can help you learn from others perspectives
and using that to create your own. It also allows you to grow and learn from yourself
and others. Resistance,avoidance, anger, denial/ignorance are a few of the common
barriers in critical thinking that limit us from learning from our past experiences and
prevent us from viewing the perspective of others. It is important to understand the
different barriers we may come across so we can learn to overcome them and
prevent it from holding us back. These barriers can affect the way you view things
and affect your decision making process if you do not make an attempt to change
and overcome them. Many of us have faced many of these barriers at some point in
our lives, speaking from personal experience in the past I have struggled with
resistance and being narrow minded. Over time I was able to step back and analyze
myself and make a change to better myself and become a better critical thinker. The
activity I enjoyed the most and feel was most informative were the videos on critical
thinking. The examples used in the videos were easy to follow and helped me get a
better understanding of how barriers can affect someone.
