Workshop - Thinking skill

    

      The department of English MKBU had a Two days thinking skills workshop by the professor Milan Pandya.

Milan Pandya is a teacher trainer and educator in the field of thinking skills, critical creative and design thinking, English language teaching and communication skills. With more than 12 years of teaching experience, Mr Pandya has authored two books and presented and published a number of research papers in National and international conferences and journals. Mr Pandya has BA and MA in English literature, M.PHIL in English language teaching &his PH.D involves study into online teaching and critical thinking. He currently holds a position of vice president of advancement at a critical thinking solutions company in Ontario, Canada and teaches at multiple college Conestoga and Sheridan college in Ontario, Canada.

  First day workshop started with the introduction of Milan Pandya sir which was given by Barad sir. We warmathly welcomed Milan Pandya sir in our department. During the welcome speech Barad sir told us that you are free to ask any question. 'The stupidest Questions can bring the smartest Answers.' Firstly, sir, ask a question: what is critical thinking? After the discussion sir gave a definition 

   'Thinking about thinking in order to improve thinking' 

    Critical thinking is related to three points: 

1.logical 

2.Rational 

3.Scientific.

 Humans are rational animals. Our life depends on thinking that's why we are better than animals. In our session we see examples of critical thinking. 

 A Twitter post of well known actor Satish Santosh 

In this post he says "The very same TIRANGA DHWAJ my mother had got during the Quit India movement 1942" If we look at the picture we find that the TIRANGA DHAWJ was made after independence. In 1942 The Indian flag was different. It is shown that we are not aware of history. We discussed facts, context and during discussion sir introduced a new word plausible.

 

 By all these examples and discussions, sir explains that always be a critic. For that, think in a different way, search for the truth and always think about it from various perspectives. He presented a quote by Lao Tzu,

 "your teacher might be wrong, learn to think for yourself"

14 August 2022 is the second and last day of our workshop. It's a cheerful and amazing day. Milan Pandya Sir also talked about how to develop thinking skills with the help of mind exercise games. I especially like this task the most. 

In this picture, there are so many objects of different fields. In this activity we all tried to differentiate things and categorise in different fields like, 

food items, vehicles, Birthday parties, space related things, Tragedy of Shakespeare Macbeth and Hamlet, religion V's science, natural things and artificial things, gravity, proverbs like pen is mightier than sword, movie names extra…

  

 For this activity it is important to treat our mind to see each thing from different angles. After this, sir presented the photos of toothbrush, paper pin, goggle and asked what are the other uses of these things apart from daily uses.

   

 Thought experiment: it was a mind blowing task. Sir gave us a different situation in which we had to say what we should do in this situation and sir took our opinions and also asked us why we chose this. What's the logic behind this? In this activity there is a logical argument that is more important than answers.

 During these two days we learned lots of things. We see so many things around us and it's our habit to accept things as they are. After this session I learned to first analyze the thing whether it's true or not. See each thing differently and look at its plausibility.we ended our session with the feedback of students. Thanks to Dr. Dilip Barad sir and Milan Pandya sir.