Critical thinking for helping professionals : a skills-based workbook

425 Pages·2009·3.707 MB·English

by  Eileen D Gambrill, Leonard E Gibbs

Critical Thinking for Helping Professionals
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Critical Thinking for Helping Professionals
A Skills-Based Workbook
Third edition
EILEEN GAMBRILL
LEONARD GIBBS
1
2009
1
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Copyright © 2009 by Eileen Gambrill and Leonard Gibbs.
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ISBN: 978-0-19-533095-3
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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