Critical thinking for helping professionals : a skills-based workbook PDF
Preview Critical thinking for helping professionals : a skills-based workbook
Critical Thinking for Helping Professionals This page intentionally left blank Critical Thinking for Helping Professionals A Skills-Based Workbook Third edition EILEEN GAMBRILL LEONARD GIBBS 1 2009 1 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offi ces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright © 2009 by Eileen Gambrill and Leonard Gibbs. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. ISBN: 978-0-19-533095-3 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Preface This workbook has a single purpose: those who do its exercises will reason more effectively about life-affecting practice and policy decisions. Critical thinking involves the critical appraisal of beliefs, arguments, and claims to arrive at well-reasoned judgments. Critical thinking is essential to helping people because it encourages practitioners to evaluate the sound- ness of beliefs, arguments, and claims. What helpers believe infl uences what they do. Thus, it is important to examine beliefs in relation to their accuracy. Will sending a youthful offender to boot camp be more effec- tive in decreasing future offenses than placing him on probation? Will a prescribed drug forestall the progression of confusion among Alzheimer’s patients in a nursing home? Will children with learning disorders learn better if mainstreamed into regular classrooms? Professionals make many such judgments and decisions daily. Deciding which actions will help clients is an inescapable part of being a professional. Thinking crit- ically about claims, beliefs, and arguments can help professionals arrive at beliefs and actions that are well reasoned. Thinking critically is important in all areas of the helping profes- sions, including practice, research, social policy, and administration. Critical thinking skills will help you spot policies and procedures that benefi t agencies but not their clients and those that maintain discrimina- tory patterns of service. These skills and related values and attitudes, such as being open minded and fl exible as well as self-critical, will encourage recognition of and respect for cultural differences. This workbook is designed to learn by doing. It has been revised to make it more interdisciplinary and to include exercises concerning problem-based learning and evidence-based practice. A workbook requires action as well as thinking. It involves readers actively in exercises related to making decisions at the individual, family, group, community, and societal levels and allows for immediate feedback about decisions made. Think as much as you like, you cannot assess the effects of your thinking until you act. For instance, did your thinking result in decisions that benefi t clients? Not only may a workbook foster better learning, it makes learning enjoyable. You are more likely to continue learning tasks v that are fun. Toward this aim, we have tried to create exercises that are enjoyable as well as instructive. Some of the exercises involve cooperative learning. Here, you will be involved with your peers and/or colleagues in learning adventures designed to hone your critical-thinking skills. The exercises included are designed to be useful in all helping profes- sions curricula. Some have been pretested, others are new. Each exercise includes the following sections: Purpose, Background, Instructions, and Follow-up Question(s). The workbook exercises illustrate that the knowledge and skills involved in research and practice overlap. Practitioner failure to draw on practice and policy-related research is a problem in all professions. Indeed, this troubling gap was a key reason for the invention of the process of evidence-based practice described in Part 4. Too often, professionals do not take advantage of research in making decisions that affect their clients. Because of this, clients may receive ineffective or harmful “help” (Silverman, 1993). One reason for this lack of integration lies in the structure of some professional education programs. Research courses are typically taught separately from practice and policy courses, e ncouraging the false impression that research and practice are quite d ifferent enter- prises. This arrangement hinders understanding of the shared v alues, atti- tudes, content knowledge, and performance skills of research, practice, and policy. For example critical discussion, whether with yourself or others, is integral to all. Research and practice are complementary, not competing areas. Part l, Critical Thinking, defi nes critical thinking, discusses why it especially matters in the helping professions, and describes related values, attitudes, knowledge, and performance skills. This part also contains two exercises. The fi rst provides an opportunity to review the criteria you use to make decisions. In Exercise 2, you assess your beliefs about knowledge (what it is and how to get it). The two exercises in Part 2, Recognizing Propaganda in Human Services Advertising, demonstrate the importance of questioning claims about what helps clients. Presentations of a human-services advertisement and a treatment-program promotion, portray vivid emotional appeals to convince viewers that a method works. The seven exercises in Part 3, Fallacies and Pitfalls in Professional Decision Making, are designed to help you to identify and remedy common fallacies and pitfalls in reasoning about practice. They rely on vignettes that illustrate situations that arise in everyday practice. vi Preface Exercise 5 contains twenty-fi ve vignettes that can be used to assess practice r easoning. The Reasoning-in-Practice Games (Exercises 6–8) involve working with other students to identify practice fallacies. In the Fallacies Film Festival (Exercise 9), students work together to prepare a skit to demonstrate a fallacy. Exercise 10 provides an opportunity to spot fallacies in professional contexts (including your classroom) and Exercise 11 describes group think ploys and provides an opportunity to learn how to spot and avoid them. Part 4, Evidence-Informed Decision Making, contains seven exer- cises designed to help you to acquire knowledge and skills in the process of evidence-informed practice including working in teams. Exercise 12, Applying The Steps of EBP, guides you in this process. Exercises 13 and 14, Working in Interdisciplinary Evidence-Based Teams, offer oppor- tunities to apply the steps in a team. Exercise 15, Preparing Critically Appraised Topics (CATs), guides you in applying the process of EBP to specifi c questions and preparing user-friendly summaries of what you found. Exercise 16 describes how you can involve clients as informed participants. Exercise 17 offers tips and practice opportunities for raising “hard questions” that must be asked if our decisions are informed by the evidentiary status of services. Exercise 18 offers an opportunity to review gaps between an agency’s services and what research suggests is most effective. Part 5, Critically Appraising Different Kinds of Research Reports and Measures, contains seven exercises. Exercise 19 provides guidelines for reviewing the quality of effectiveness studies and describes how to determine a numerical index that quantifi es the magnitude of a treat- ment’s effect. Exercise 20 offers guidelines for reviewing the quality of research reviews. Exercise 21, Critically Appraising Self-Report Measures, describes concerns regarding reliability and validity and offers a practice opportunity to appraise a measure. Exercise 22 provides guidelines for estimating risk and making predictions and accurately communicating risk to clients. Exercise 23 provides guidelines for reviewing diagnostic measures. Exercise 24 provides an opportunity to review the clarity of a popular classifi cation model. Lastly, Exercise 25 suggests important concerns regarding research exploring causation. Part 6, Reviewing Decisions, contains seven exercises applying criti- cal thinking skills to key components of the helping process. Exercise 26 engages students in reviewing the quality of intervention plans used in a case example. Exercise 27 provides an opportunity to think critically Preface vii about practice-related ethical issues. Exercise 28 provides guidelines for reviewing the quality of arguments. Exercise 29 presents a case e xample of how practice reasoning can go wrong and some of the reasons why. Exercise 30 applies critical thinking skills to case records and Exercise 31 offers an opportunity to critically appraise service agreements. Exercise 32, Claim Buster involves you in detecting and evaluating claims that may affect clients’ lives. Part 7, Improving Educational and Practice Environments, includes fi ve exercises. Exercise 33 provides a checklist for reviewing the extent to which an educational or work environment demonstrates a culture of thoughtfulness. Exercise 34 includes a rating form for evaluating how much instructors encourage critical thinking in their classrooms. Exercise 35 describes how to set up a journal club and Exercises 36 and 37 offer guidelines for life-long learning. If working through the exercises contained in the workbook results in better services for clients, all our efforts, both yours and ours, will be worthwhile. We welcome your feedback about each exercise. In the spirit of critical thinking, we welcome negative as well as positive comments, especially those that offer concrete suggestions for improving exercises. We hope that you enjoy and learn from participating in the exercises in this book. With adoption of this book, instructors will have access to a website including an Instructor’s Manual and accompanying audio-visual mate- rial. The Instructor’s Manual contains descriptions of each exercise in the Workbook including a brief overview, purpose or learning objectives of the exercise, materials and time required, suggestions for using the exercise, and possible answers to Follow-up Questions. Eileen Gambrill Leonard Gibbs viii Preface Acknowledgments We owe a great deal to kindred spirits both past and present who cared enough to raise concerns regarding the quality of practice and policy decisions and who have worked to create tools and processes to help practitioners and clients evaluate the quality of decision from both an ethical and evidentiary perspective. All value (or did value) critical eval- uation of claims of effectiveness in order to protect clients from inef- fective or harmful services. We thank Kathy Finder, Nancy Erickson, Kathryn Colbert (computer consultants), Monica Bares (typing and edi- torial help), Aaron Harder (video editing), Cyndee Kaiser (cartoons), Connie Kees (videotaping), Donald Naftulin (Dr. Fox lecture), Michael Hakeem (suggestions for some of the counterarguments in Exercise 2), Jim Ziegert, Mary Ann King (vignette for Reasoning-in-Practice Game C), Carol Williams, Brenda Peterson DeSousa, Lisa Roepke, Lisa Furst, Amy Simpson, Jennifer Neyes, Melissa Brown, Jennifer Mortt, Marcia Cigler, Beth Rusch, Carol Weis, Vicki Millard, Kristen Jensen, Mindy Olson, Laurie Buckler, Michelle LeCloux, Jennifer Owen, Tiffany Winrich, Pam McKee, Kelly Meyer, Reggie Bicha, Tara Lehman, Julie Garvey, Richard Lockwood, Kate Kremer, Cory Heckel, Mike Werner, Jill Eslinger (Fallacies Film Festival vignettes), Margie Anderson (permission to use Rogers Hospital material), Macmillan Publishers (permission to use the Professional Thinking Form and Quality of Study Rating Form), Grafton Hull (content areas in suggested uses for our exercises in Five Social Work Curriculum Areas, Exhibit P.I), and Patricia Carey and Cheri Audrain for examples from nursing and medicine, respectively. Eileen Gambrill extends a special note of thanks to the Hutto- Patterson Chair funders, to the computerized databases provided by the University of California at Berkeley and to Sharon Ikami for her patience, good will, and word processing skills. Leonard Gibbs acknowledges the infl uence of a great teacher, Professor Emeritus Michael Hakeem of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and the encouragement and fi nancial support of the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire Foundation and the College of Professional Studies, whose support contributed to this work. We both thank Maura Roessner, Senior ix
The list of books you might like
