All this is fine, but since most of our communication takes place in narrative, and not division of the house or collaging, I might encourage getting them to operationalize this knowledge in the form of writing an essay.
Sometimes I think the reason why people love intoning names of fallacies, especially on internet message boards, is because they think (erroneously) that it obviates the need to present a tailored argument.
While I’m never against having a kid write an essay, I’m not sure I understand how this helps in detecting fallacies and cognitive errors beyond what any teacher pointing out badly constructed arguments in any essay. Pointing out fallacies is about deconstructing arguments, not constructing them. Understanding fallacies help naive students find flaws in superficially convincing arguments in either their own work or in the work of others. And of course one fallacy is that your argument being wrong does not mean that mine is right - we should teach that also.
Yes, around half way through I tend to reinforce the importance of doubt by teaching the Fallacy Fallacy and reminding them that they still need to stick to the null hypothesis.
Of course, one of the rubrics during persuasive writing bits is that they need to anticipate and explicitly refute three arguments a possible opponent might use…
OK, this is a good point. Some of the essays should specifically be rebuttals to persuasive texts offered as prompts. This would also serve the purpose of driving home the point that texts are not simply to be consumed or memorized or regurgitated back on a test, but are meant to be engaged, challenged, and refuted or supported as warrants.
But I’m not sure just knowing the name and general idea of the concept is really teaching critical thinking skills. In other words, I posit that “crafting a (written) argument” and “thinking critically” are substantially the same thing. A demonstration:
Another thread asked whether misbehaving children really were so ubiquitous in restaurants or whether the reports were exaggerated. Two posts assert “confirmation bias” (here and here), but who has used it more persuasively? Which poster seems to have a better handle on the concept? Does it not appear to be the same poster in each case?
How many years have you been teaching, Kimmy?
No time to look at those threads now. I think understanding critical thinking is necessary but not sufficient to construct a well crafted argument. There are plenty of things, such as logical flow, which are required in addition to critical thinking skills.
I don’t think the proposal is to just have kids memorize the names of fallacies. That would probably happen if you tried to cram this subject into an already existing class.
If I were teaching this class I’d have the kids construct fallacious arguments, for something they oppose, just to make it interesting. If they learn it well enough, they could make an excellent living as writers for FoxNews. 
OK, not to pick on you, but unless you are running an experiment, you do not have a “null hypothesis.” I’m not even sure what you actually mean by “they need to stick to the null hypothesis.” The alternative hypothesis wasn’t proven to a point of statistical significance? Well, what’s the alternative hypothesis here in the first place? It’s very confusing. The opacity of this kind of jargon is one of the things I am hoping to convince people to avoid.
Instead of saying “null hypothesis,” you can use the still-kinda-jargony but more widely understood “Occam’s Razor” (which likely more closely adheres to what you mean anyhow). Even better, “Where two differing explanations account for the observed phenomena and both have equal evidentiary support, the simpler, more elegant explanation should be preferred.”
Of course you can, hypotheses aren’t confined to "experiments’.
It’s basic epistemology.
How many years have you been teaching, Kimmy?
Fallacies were taught in my English class (AP English 3) this year BTW and I picked up most of the fallacies before that.
Kimmy Gibbler no one has suggested teaching students a list of fallacies and biases. The wiki links are simply to provide a convenient source for the thread. The actual educational process should be just that, an educational process. Your response is kinda funny in a way. I mean we are talking about teaching critical thinking, bias, and logical fallacy, and you are suggesting we want to teach it like its a list of vocabulary words.
Things need labels. Understanding the concept is far more important that learning the name of the concept without a doubt (unless you are in the business of testing people) I don’t see anyone arguing for the position you are posing.
How about the Bias list? have you learned anything from that list at all in school?
Ok, I avoided this the first time, because the irony of such a naked argumentum ad verecundium (appeal from authority) in a thread given to impassioned pleas for teaching critical thinking is just too much of a sitting duck. I also knew you’d not be able to resist renewing the question, thus giving me an opening for this preamble.
Since we acknowledge the shortcomings of such a naked appeal from authority, I shall therefore pass over it in silence.
If your position is that your teacher training or experience leads you to doubt my position, you should set forth those principles or experiences that you believe cast doubt on my arguments.
Incorrect. I am asking if you have any evidence, at all, for your claims on what we should or should not do.
One form of evidence is, certainly, having actually seen the results of a certain pedagogical strategy over time in different population groups and/or cohorts.
You could also certain cite educational research to support your claims, if you cannot personally speak to the effectiveness of anything you’ve seen in practice.
My position is not that yours is wrong, per se, just that without more weight behind it than This is What Kimmy Thinks Should Be Done In Classrooms, it hasn’t risen to the level of an argument, just noise.
Which is to say, give proof or retract.
I learned some of them as part of the fallacies (such as the Gambler’s fallacy) and I learned others in AP Psychology class but many of them are unfamiliar to me.
I actually don’t think that there is need for specialist training on this point. Much as I don’t think, for example, one needs to be a lawyer to deduce that lawyers should meet with their clients and obtain information about their legal questions and objectives. I would not say that telling a layperson who said this “Well, what do you know about being a lawyer?” counts as an intellectually honest argument. Now, if that person could say, “Well, that overlooks considerations X, Y, and Z”, then it would be a different story.
In other words, while there is such a thing as expertise, I reject the contention that expertise necessarily displaces, without further elaboration, non-professional notions that do not reach a technical discussion of pedagogy.
Or most baldly, while there is a talent for the art of teaching, and not everybody’s got it, I’m not sure the “Theory of Pedagogy” is much more than high-toned malarkey. Human beings have been instructing the young for millennia before John Dewey and Ed.D.'s ever came on the scene.
In a recent thread I started I went looking for non biased evidence that could be presented without fallacy to support the concept of god. I realize that the dope is hardly representative of the entire world, but the efforts of the believers are very telling. The idea for that thread came from my studies of fallacy and watching debates/talks with people like Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens.
This state of being is embarrassing, if aliens ever do come to earth they won’t have to take over with weapons and warfare. They can just use our own messed up heads against us. Why are humans incapable of thinking ahead more than one step? Why do we fight tooth and nail to preserve our precious beliefs when we can clearly see the harm those beliefs are causing both us and others? How to we get people to understand that our great great grandchildren will either suffer for our ignorance or bask in the glow of our understanding?
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I think I am one of the “believers” on that thread who have so embarrassed you.
But my first comment on that thread was to the effect that I agreed with you, there is no sssscientific evidence or evidence that anyone accept who has not had a personal experience they find convincing.
And no matter how many times I restated that, you insisted that I was trying to convince others to believe a I do or to mirepreent unscientific evidence as the kind of proof you had specified.
I write this not to beat a dead horse, but to point out that not everyone you perceive as hopelesly muddled is quite as stupid as you fear.
I am 100% in favor of teaching critical thinking and doing so early and often.
[aside]The course is AP English Language and Composition. Your school calls it AP English III because they teach it junior year, and AP English Literature and Composition senior year, as do many schools. But the two courses are not sequenced in any way. Some schools reverse the order. Some schools offer one but not the other, or alternate each year.[/aside]
I teach informal fallacies as a dedicated unit in my AP English Language class. It’s one of those things where you over-teach in hope they manage to retain the lesser task: I don’t expect them to remember all the specific names and devices much past the end of the unit, but I want them to retain the skill of taking apart an argument and thinking critically about the relationship between the premises and the conclusion. Then, and this is where it matters, we constantly talk about the logical frameworks of arguments they read in the wild. We talk about it in their own writing. We talk about it when we analyze rhetoric. Far and away, the most common logical problem kids have is begging the question: for whatever reason, it’s very difficult for your average 16-year old to see that he’s just endlessly paraphrasing himself. Until you can get him past that, you don’t even see the other fallacies, because there’s nothing there, really.
That said, I also teach AP Macro and Micro economics, and there’s no personal finance at all there. There simply isn’t time: I wouldn’t have a single kid pass the exam if I took a couple weeks to teach something that isn’t tested, and frankly, the kids aren’t putting the time and effort and energy into the class to not pass the exam. But I would argue that the basic thinking skills taught there: marginal analysis, comparative advantage/opportunity cost, sunk cost, simple game theory, diminishing returns, etc., are also really fundamental building blocks to effective critical thinking, and something not covered, or even hinted at, in any other course. Add to that the way economics uses graphs and models to convey changing relationships and I really think I might expand their thinking toolbox more in Economics than I do in English.
Politicians lie and manipulate. Why would they want it to be harder?
So you neither have personal experience nor research.
So noted.
'Grats. You have successfully proven that I am not a schoolteacher. Since you are, care to share where you believe my argument goes awry?