Critical and Constructive Thinking Skills for the 21st Century

The Art and Science of Improving the Effectiveness of your Thinking with DBM®

The single thing that clearly distinguishes us human beings from other animals is our ability to think and apply our thinking to change the world. This ability to think is not a single ability.
Being able to understand accurately what is happening in the world gives us a huge advantage in constructing effective action plans. Being able to construct possibilities means that we are freed from the constraints of what has been and can create new possibilities. Being able to organise our thinking and communicate it to others means that we can get them involved in our plans and extend our influence in the world.
Thinking involves making sense of the world, identifying what’s happening in how things are progressing recognizing what we know. Identify we don’t know, formulating problems and solutions, constructing simple through to complex strategies of action, planning.
Constructing descriptions, explanations, arguments, and recommendations for others to inform others and to influence their understanding and thinking, often as a basis for decision making.
At its most basic thinking is sensory thinking, selecting and sequencing sensory experiences to extend our understanding of the world. This is further developed into remembering, imagining, fantasising, creating, and forgetting. We also use thinking to go beyond our knowledge is a process of turning the construct new information, facts, ideas.
Our thinking also develops into value and evaluative thinking. At its most basic form this is emotional thinking; identifying what is safe or dangerous, what we like and do not like. In a more elaborate form it includes calculating, extrapolating, imagining, creating possibilities and working out probabilities.
This can be further developed into more elaborate constructive and creative thinking.
To help other people understand what we are thinking we need to form our ideas effectively. This is another range of different thinking skills. We need to understand our own ideas, organise them in a form that makes sense and communicate them clearly, and recognise if they are being understood. Related to this is how we understand what other people are thinking. We need to understand the form of their presented ideas as well as the content.
Thinking is so important that any improvements in thinking can be very valuable.
Developmental Behavioural Modelling (DBM®) is a very effective methodology that is used to identify in detail of how and why things work. DBM® is not a theory or method. DBM® is a universal modelling methodology that describes with great precision how and why things work. DBM® uniquely describes the mechanics and the artistry of the rich variety of thinking processes

Syllabus:
In this training you will explore a wide range of different types of thinking, learn how they work, what they are useful for and practice them to develop your ability to use them.

You will learn how the different ways of thinking connect usefully.

You will develop a range of thinking skills for constructive critical thinking.

You will learn a range of skills for constructing ideas and arguments.

You will also explore some of the difficulties and problems arise and thinking and how to resolve them.

You will learn and develop a range of different types of thinking skills including:

Sensory Thinking, Practical Thinking, Logical Thinking, Emotional Thinking, Constructive Thinking, Productive Thinking.

You will learn a wide range of structural thinking tools, understand the differences in how they work, what they are useful for, and develop skills in using them.
They include:
Specifying, Defining, Exampling, Grouping, Generalising, Abstracting, Conceptualising, Classifying.

You will learn updated and new models of Logic and Reasoning. Many popular models of logic and reasoning derive from the formal Logic of the 19th century and the critical thinking of the 20th century. While these have proved to be useful, they do not include a lot of our natural thinking processes.

You will learn many distinctions for our natural thinking processes as well as new modelling and re-modelling of logical processes for Productive Thinking through Logical Reasoning including:

Productive Thinking: Creating more examples of the same thing.

Reproductive Thinking: Creating new example of the same.

Deductive Thinking: Creating new specific conclusion.

Inductive Thinking: Creating new general or universal conclusion.

Abductive Thinking: Creating totally new ideas.

You will learn how to form these new ideas and present them as opinions, arguments, and cases.

You will also learn to identify a wide range of negative forms of structuring this kind of thinking including:
Faults, Fallacies, Fictions, and False Facts.