One strategy to elicit critical thinking is to omit important facts when presenting scenarios to students for classroom discussion.  Often instructors take considerable care in class to articulate each important fact within a particular scenario that students will need to evaluate that scenario in their group discussions. Those instructors will often also take considerable care to frame specific ethical or legal questions that arise from that factual scenario.  Although these instructors are modeling thoroughness and attention to detail, they are at the same time often limiting the scope of critical thinking that they are asking of their students.

What if an instructor were to deliberately omit some important facts when presenting a scenario? What if that instructor were to not point out this omission at the time that he or she presents that factual scenario? Lastly, what if that instructor were to present this factual scenario with only a short open-ended instruction, such as asking students in their groups to discuss the scenario and to themselves formulate some important questions that should emerge from the scenario? These deliberate omissions call upon the students to realize and identify that which they do not know, and that which they need to know in order to pose—and to make progress toward resolving—important questions that are quietly hiding within the scenarios. Under this approach, students would not only decide what is problematic within a factual scenario, but also what is problematic about what they do not know about that scenario.

Although this teaching strategy of positing an incomplete scenario is arguably “messier” than a complete framing of the scenario and of the resulting questions by the instructor, the former is likely to often provide more realistic practice for the scenarios that students might encounter outside of the classroom and provide better opportunities for them to engage in deeper levels of critical thinking.  After using this omitted fact strategy, it would be good for the instructor to clarify for students that his or her motivation was not to “trick” them, but to instead provide them with an opportunity to practice critical thinking in the everyday context of incomplete information.