I regret that I didn’t take the opportunity to frame the Critical Thinking ILO proposal as a draft at the beginning of our conversation. I suspect we might have had a more productive meeting on 2/20. I was hoping to get more substantive feedback on the Critical Thinking proposal. Since you have read this material and given it some thought, I’d really like to hear what you think in more detail.

A few points from our discussion deserve some follow up:

• The terminological suggestions have already been incorporated in the draft language on the BC Gen Ed blog (linked below). “Charitable” has been replaced “sympathetic”.” Are they better choices? ThinkArguments uses “systematic empathy.” “True” has been supplemented with a parenthetical clarification (accuracy, or correspondence with how things are). The critical thinking committee will be working on further revisions and would appreciate further input.

• Process and participation came up. We welcome such oversight from the CAC. We’ve sought this kind of collaboration for a while. I’m sorry I was not prepared to address process and participation in the meeting. However, here are some details. The critical thinking proposal is the result of 14 meetings over the course of more than a year, attended by diverse faculty, philosophers always being in the minority. All college faculty were invited to multiple feedback sessions this past fall. Well over 100 collaborative faculty hours in meetings have gone into this proposal so far. I can estimate the total number of participants to be in the range of 30-40 (I’d have to track repeat and occasional attendees to get a more accurate figure). Meeting attendance typically varied between a half dozen a dozen faculty. A great many more hours have gone into reading, writing, and thinking things over by working group members. I feel I owe it to those who have collaborated on the Critical Thinking ILO to clarify the record on these points. If you need receipts, I can send you screenshots of Outlook invites. 

• It was asserted that having advanced degrees should make us all qualified to teach critical thinking. We should not just assume this. Most of us have never taken a course in critical thinking. In the 25 years I’ve been here this college hasn’t hosted any critical thinking professional development save for workshops that have been organized by members of the philosophy department. Critical thinking stands out as the only significant academic subject matter I can think of where faculty are not expected to have some professional preparation. Research referenced below shows that students have better critical thinking outcomes when faculty engage in critical thinking professional development.

• The meeting minutes show concern that the proposal in its current form is “philosophy centric.” This raises a number of pertinent questions that could aid your inquiry:
  • What is a philosophy specific conception of critical thinking?
  • What are the alternative less philosophical approaches to critical thinking (in some detail)?
  • In what ways specifically does this draft proposal (or some future proposal) reflect a more rather than less philosophy-specific approach?
  • How is the approach articulated in the current draft proposal generally fruitful or applicable only to philosophy?

The SEE model in the draft proposal does organize some elements of critical thinking that are prominent in critical thinking courses like PHIL&115 which is taught in the philosophy department. However, PHIL&115 is a course in general reasoning skills, philosophy is not part of that curriculum. The notion that philosophers have their own peculiar approach to critical thinking seems to be a widely held opinion. It is also one that betrays a lack of familiarity with typical developed critical thinking curriculum where students cultivate their ability with an integrated suite of general reasoning skills.

Eventually, the CAC will be asked to approve language for a critical thinking ILO. I’d encourage CAC members review some developed critical thinking curriculum and research first (see links below). I suspect you will find that developed critical thinking curriculum as we might teach in PHIL& 115 is not narrowly specialized for philosophy, but rather a broader more inclusive approach that already includes most of what people think of as critical thinking from their disciplinary perspectives. The challenge we face in crafting a meaningful infused critical thinking ILO is finding that vital core of the broader critical thinking curriculum that speaks to a wide range of more discipline specific conceptions across campus. 

The current working draft of the critical thinking ILO is posted here: Articulating Critical Thinking: – General Education Reform at BC

Note, the post includes links to some critical thinking resources that were not included in the proposal including:

• ThinkArguments, an online competency based critical thinking curriculum designed for infusion. Faculty can create a free account and gain full access to the modules for review.
• A link to an older edition of Parker and Moore, perhaps the industry standard among the many critical thinking texts on the market.

Here is a link to a summary of critical thinking research that has been helpful to us: Critical Thinking: What the Research Says – General Education Reform at BC

This is the text of a proposal brought to the Bellevue College CAC in February of 2026

This proposal is to approve a new governance structure for the administration of Institutional Learning at Bellevue College.

Background:

In coordination with the Office of Academic Affairs, former members of FACT launched preliminary discussions with administrators and faculty to reform Institutional Learning (formerly General Education) in Winter Quarter2023. This effort was initiated to address standing accreditation recommendations in a way that would make Institutional Learning meaningful for students, assessable, and improvable. That spring, a team of five faculty and administrators from FACT(Rebecca Cory, Zach Morgan, Russ Payne, Alice Jenkins and Anthony Tessandori) participated in an AAC&U Institute on General Education and Assessment where they outlined a new program of Institutional Learning. In the Fall of 2023, this plan, dubbed the TILTed model of Institutional Learning, was presented to faculty. In coordination with administration, our legacy program of General Education was retired at that time and FACT was replaced by and ILO working group. In Spring Quarter 2024, faculty voted to adopt six new ILOs to replace the 18 Gen Ed outcomes of the legacy program. Working groups per ILO were established. Over the course of 2024-25, ILO working groups worked from faculty input concerning the KSA (knowledge, skills and abilities) faculty associate with the six new ILOs to formulate articulations of the new ILOs (short explanations of the each ILO’s content), ILO definitions, and rubrics for assessment. The first two of these, for Communications and Critical Thinking are currently submitted to the CAC for approval in separate proposals. Other ILOs remain in process. These first two ILOs were piloted in several courses during Fall Quarter 2026. Review and reflection on the process and data collected will happen this quarter (Winter, 2026).

Proposal

FACT has been disbanded for 2 years. In its place we propose to form ILO committees per ILO which will be responsible for a broader range of programmatic functions per ILO than merely facilitating assessment. Operating under the auspices of the CAC, ILO committees will be responsible for the following:

• Supporting programs in adopting ILOs for their courses.
• Facilitating faculty and curriculum development as needed in coordination with the Faculty Commons.
• Vetting courses for adopting ILO resulting in recommendations for certification of courses to the CAC.
• Facilitating assessment of ILOs and faculty reflection on the process, student learning, curricular and pedagogical improvements etc.

While ILOs are to be taught as infused outcomes across campus, the ILO committees are intended to fulfill a fuller range of normal programmatic functions than just assessment. In our legacy program of General Education the absence of this coordinated functionality resulted in meaningless assessment data which undermined our ability to address accreditation recommendations asking that assessment data be used to improve instruction in ILOs.

ILO committees are to be constituted by faculty members, some with area expertise, and administrative partners from the Office of Academic Affairs to be determined (since we are unsure who will ultimately fulfill Rebecca Cory’s former role). Eventually ILO committees may consist of as few as three faculty members but more, perhaps five or seven per ILO will be needed as we work on initial course adoption of ILOs. Simply grandfathering in courses that formerly claimed an ILO will not serve students or satisfaction of accreditation expectations since we have lacked any ongoing practice of faculty collaboration and coordination around ILO instruction under the legacy program. Faculty membership on ILO committees is ultimately to be elected by faculty.

The CAC will no longer be charged with deliberating over and approving the claiming of Gen Ed outcomes on a per proposal basis. This role will be taken over by ILO committees which are dedicated to administration of their specific ILOs. The CAC should be in a position to approve ILO adoption in batches or as a matter of housekeeping.

I look forward to fielding questions about this proposal. With the permission of the CAC, I will document this proposal and our discussion on our Institutional Learning Blog where all of the working documents for this effort are archived.

We have plans for how to certify courses to teach one of our new ILOs. The process involves collaborating with the ILO subcommittees to adopt the ILO, and this may include some professional development or curriculum. Some courses may already be well prepared to adopt some ILOs. In other cases making ILOs meaningful and beneficial for students may call for faculty do some preparation for integrating the ILO in meaningful ways into their courses. A good part of the point of certifying courses through the ILO subcommittees is to facilitate collaboration and support in adopting an ILO.

Over the course of developing our new program of Institution Learning, we have recommended varying approaches to criteria for adopting an ILO. In the basic version of the Tilted Model, we adopted our traditional expectation that courses teaching a campus wide outcome devote 30% of the course to teaching (not just applying) the outcome. Unlike past practice, however, we also proposed to introduce meaningful accountability for doing so.

On what we called the “Deluxe” version of the Tilted Model, we certified courses on two tiers, teaching the ILO (with 30% of the course focused on teaching the ILO), and applying the ILO. The expectation here is lower, but would, for example, provide a way for Prof Tech courses to support the ILO without displacing any of their skills curriculum. In practice it would make sense to disaggregate assessment data for these two tiers since data at the applied level would be measuring student learning in less well-defined ways (different Prof Tech programs might be applying different aspects of Critical Thinking for example, and data would not reflect broader learning of Critical Thinking). The deluxe model has a few benefits. It would include a much broader range to courses in teaching the ILO, including many that don’t have space on the syllabus to provide a comprehensive treatment of the ILO. Students would still benefit from more exposure to the ILO across more classes and programs. The deluxe model could also afford something like a developmental picture of learning since ILOs would often be taught in Gen Ed courses, then reinforced with applications in Prof Tech courses. The deluxe model also invites participation at the college prep level. Several BATs instructors, for instance, have expressed enthusiasm for introducing Critical Thinking skills to students who aren’t fully prepared for more robust college level instruction.

Finally, we have also discussed a “Premium” version of the Tilted Model, which builds on the deluxe model by adding assessment of ILOs in capstone assignments for graduating students.

We have never conclusively settled on which of these three approaches (or some other) we should adopt. A natural way to go with something like the deluxe approach would be to make it easy to adopt an ILO at some level, where ILO subcommittees use an adoption rubric to determine that level. We might then subsequently encourage programs to adopt claimed ILOs at higher levels through appropriate professional and curriculum development coordinated and facilitated by ILO subcommittees and the Faculty Commons.

We are currently piloting Critical Thinking and Communications. I invite Communications ILO leads to comment on their own approach at this stage. With Critical Thinking, I have simply sought volunteers from the CT ILO working group which includes around 60 faculty that have contributed to developing the CT ILO at some stage over the past two years. Critical Thinking is being piloted across 5 programs including 2 Prof Tech programs. We will work with participating faculty during Winter Quarter to reflect on the results of assessment, the process, and the rubric. We will also be in a good position at that point to discuss where piloted courses should be placed on an adoption rubric. The only qualification we have asked of piloting faculty so far is that they have participated in development of the ILO and through this have some shared understanding of the ILO.

There is a broader conversation to have, first among ILO leads and then perhaps with faculty more broadly, about how to rate courses for adopting an ILO and how to support them in adopting an ILO more robustly.

There is research on Critical Thinking, notably on how it can be taught effectively. Several key findings are reported in Jonathan Haber’s Critical Thinking (published by the MIT Press, several copies are available to check out in our Faculty Commons). In 1989 Robert Ennis outlined 4 possible approaches to teaching critical thinking as follows:

• The general approach, where Critical Thinking is taught as a set of general reasoning skills and dispositions in a dedicated course.
• Infusion, where Critical Thinking is taught across disciplines and Critical Thinking principles, skills and dispositions are made explicit.
• Immersion, where students are immersed in Critical Thinking through subject matter across disciplines but where Critical Thinking Principles, skills and dispositions are not made explicit.
• A mixed approach which includes dedicated instruction as in the general approach plus infusion or immersion across disciplines.

Two and a half decades later, a team of researchers led by Philip Abrami conducted a meta-analysis of subsequent research utilizing Ennis 4 approaches. This analysis produced some clear findings concerning how to most effectively teach critical thinking. Not surprisingly, the mixed approach, combining dedicated instruction in Critical Thinking as a set of general skills and dispositions is the most effective of improving student’s critical thinking. And the immersion approach is least effective.

While we have always thought of our approach to critical thinking in our legacy General Education program as the infusion approach, the lack of collaboration and professional development around critical thinking strongly suggests that what we have in fact been doing is closer to the immersion approach. No doubt this varies from instructor to instructor. But while the concept of infusion appears to presuppose that there is something that gets infused, we have never paid much attention to Ennis’ distinction between infusion and immersion. Given this lack of coordination, I suspect we have by and large defaulted to the later.

Our current effort at building a new program of Institutional Learning has aimed to bring us more in alignment with what Ennis calls an infusion approach. This is still not the most effective way to teach critical thinking skills, but it seems to be the best we are capable of given the remoteness of the prospect of adopting a Critical Thinking course requirement at the institutional level. While well short of ideal in terms of critical thinking education, adopting a well-developed infusion model would be a big step for us in terms of making critical thinking a meaningful part of a BC education.

A further unsurprising finding of the meta-analysis led by Abrami is that student mastery of critical thinking skills is substantially enhanced when faculty engage in significant professional and curriculum development focused on Critical Thinking. From the report,

When instructors receive special advanced training in preparation for teaching CT skill, or when extensive observations on course administration and instructor’s CT teaching practices were reported, the impacts of the interventions were greatest. By contrast, the impacts of CT were smallest when the intention to improve students’ CT was only listed among course objectives and there were no efforts at professional development or elaboration of course design and implementation.

Abrami et al. quoted in Haber

As we reimagine our approach to teaching Critical Thinking across the college, I hope we will develop more deliberate and collaborative efforts at professional and curriculum development in Critical Thinking. It would be great to see the occasional Professional Development Day feature some outside expertise on Critical Thinking in a keynote role (Professional development efforts like this, by the way, would help to address our accreditation recommendation concerning resource allocation based on the results of assessment).

I should say something about how Abrami et al. understand critical thinking. While critical thinking experts and educators do employ a variety of definitions of critical thinking, these typically don’t so much embody points of dispute as differences in detail and emphasis. The definition employed in the meta-analysis led by Abrami is the widely cited definition produced by the Delphi panel (organized by the American Philosophical Association):

We Understand critical thinking to be purposeful, self-regulatory judgement which results in interpretation, analysis, evaluation, and inference, as well as explanation of the evidential, conceptual, methodological, criteriological or contextual considerations upon which that judgment is based. . . . The ideal critical thinker is habitually inquisitive, well-informed, trustful of reason, open-minded, flexible, fair-minded in evaluation, honest in facing personal biases, prudent in making judgements, willing to reconsider, clear about issues, orderly in complex matters, diligent in seeking relevant information, reasonable in selection of criteria, focused in inquiry, and persistent in seeing results which are as precise as thee subject and the circumstances of inquiry permit.

Delphi Report

This very involved definition lists a robust range of Critical Thinking skills and dispositions involved in inquiry. Of course, there is little hope of expecting students to recall all of this or for faculty to address all of this in the context of our program of Institutional Learning.

The Critical thinking Working group here at BC has offered something a bit more manageable and memorable:

Critical Thinking is the careful assessment of any position by clarifying and evaluating reasons for and against the position.

A careful reading of the articulation and rubric we have offered for our Critical Thinking ILO will reveal that much of the Delphi Report’s definition is invoked in the critical clarification, analysis, and evaluation of reasoning. More here:

Articulating Critical Thinking: – General Education Reform at BC

Email from Liz Hollerman to All Faculty: 1/23/2025

Dear Bellevue College Faculty,

Thank you for the thoughtful engagement and feedback following our recent communication about Institutional Learning Outcomes (ILOs). As we continue this important work, I want to take a moment to recognize the many individuals who have contributed to the evolution of ILOs and invite others to join us in shaping this foundational effort.

Recognizing Our Current Leads
The ongoing success of the ILO initiative is made possible by the incredible work of our current leads, who are guiding this effort with dedication and expertise. Their leadership is instrumental in shaping the Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities (KSAs) for each ILO and ensuring progress continues:

Honoring Past Leads
This initiative is built on the strong foundation laid by those who have contributed over the past two years. Their efforts have been essential in getting us to where we are today, and we deeply appreciate their time, energy, and insights:

Why This Work Matters
The ILO initiative is about more than meeting accreditation standards—it’s about defining the core skills, knowledge, and abilities that every Bellevue College student should gain through their education. This work helps us ensure a consistent, high-quality learning experience that prepares our students for success in their academic, professional, and personal lives. More information will be coming soon where you can also join us in shaping this work. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out. 

Thank you for your continued support and engagement. Together, we are building a stronger, more connected Bellevue College.

Best Regards,

Liz Hollerman, EdD (she/her, they/them)

Interim Associate Vice President| Academic Affairs

Phone: (425) 564-2169 | Office: A202

Email from Liz Hollerman to All Faculty: 1/29/25

Hello again Bellevue College Faculty!

Thank you for your engagement and interest in the Institutional Learning Outcomes (ILO) initiative. As we continue this important work, we are looking for faculty members to join us in shaping the future of Bellevue College’s educational framework.

The ILO initiative focuses on defining the foundational skills and abilities every Bellevue College student should gain, ensuring a consistent and meaningful learning experience. This work is progressing well, but your input and expertise are essential to ensure these outcomes reflect the diverse perspectives of our campus community.

How You Can Contribute
We are currently seeking volunteers to:

• Contribute to specific ILO working groups.
• Help refine Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities (KSAs) for each outcome.
• Collaborate on developing tools and strategies for implementation.

Participation is flexible and designed to accommodate your existing commitments. This is a unique opportunity to make an impact on the academic experience of our students while connecting with colleagues across disciplines.

If you’re interested in joining this effort or would like more information, please reply to this email or reach out directly to Russ Payne or Rebecca Cory.

Your voice can make a difference, and we hope you’ll consider lending your expertise to this critical initiative.

Thank you for your time and your ongoing commitment to Bellevue College’s mission.

Warm Regards,

Liz Hollerman, EdD (she/her, they/them)

Interim Associate Vice President| Academic Affairs

Phone: (425) 564-2169 | Office: A202