Prospective founding contributors: Conan Chi and Paul Consalvi
Open invitation to: SIG and chapter leaders, teachers, program coordinators, faculty-development practitioners, administrators, union or professional-association representatives, researchers, and students
Educators are often encouraged to teach critical thinking while working within institutions where important decisions are opaque, disagreement feels unsafe, responsibilities are unclear, and those affected have limited influence. Critical thinking is not sustained by individual skill alone. It depends on whether organizational systems make evidence visible, permit questions, respond to concerns, explain decisions, and hold authority accountable.
We invite collaborators to examine and improve the institutional conditions required for critical-thinking practice in educational organizations and professional collaborations.
To develop practical governance and stewardship approaches that make critical inquiry, protected disagreement, fair participation, transparent decision-making, and shared learning possible within educational collaborations.
Identify institutional conditions that enable or inhibit educators’ and learners’ critical agency.
Examine how information asymmetry, disciplinary processes, hierarchy, workload, and role ambiguity affect participation and judgment.
Develop fair-process protocols for consultation, decisions, explanations, appeals, and review.
Clarify stewardship roles, decision rights, accountability, recognition, and limits.
Create safe and useful mechanisms for raising concerns without converting every disagreement into conflict or complaint.
Test small governance interventions in SIG, chapter, program, committee, or project settings.
A Critical-Thinking Governance Charter for educational collaborations.
Practical stewardship and decision protocols that JALT groups and partner institutions can adapt.
A Collaboration Health and Integrity Review addressing transparency, voice, evidence, authority, workload, and learning.
Better institutional capacity to surface problems early, explain contested decisions, and learn without blame-shifting.
A model of professional collaboration in which critical thinking is not merely taught to students but practiced in organizational life.
Fair process: People should understand how decisions are made and how they can contribute.
Protected disagreement: Respectful challenge should not depend on rank or personal security.
Authority with accountability: Decision rights must be explicit and answerable to purpose and evidence.
Transparency with appropriate privacy: Relevant reasoning should be visible while personal and sensitive information is protected.
No responsibility without capacity: Roles require adequate authority, information, time, and support.
Recognition of invisible work: Coordination, care, documentation, and continuity should be acknowledged.
Learning rather than blame: Repeated problems should prompt examination of processes, assumptions, and governing values.
What organizational conditions make critical thinking unsafe or futile?
What information do educators need in order to understand and respond to consequential decisions?
How can institutions protect legitimate confidentiality without using opacity as a default?
Who may question a decision, through what channel, and what response is owed?
How should stewardship differ from ownership, management, or informal emotional labor?
What does accountability require when people act with good intentions under genuine uncertainty?
A Critical-Thinking Governance and Fair-Process Charter.
A Stewardship Role Canvas defining purpose, scope, decision rights, obligations, recognition, and review.
A protected-concern and constructive-disagreement protocol.
A transparent decision-record template documenting evidence, assumptions, stakeholders, trade-offs, decision authority, and review date.
A FASA-based Collaboration Health Review for SIGs, chapters, programs, and project teams.
Weeks 1–3: Gather anonymized cases of opacity, role ambiguity, suppressed disagreement, or invisible stewardship work.
Weeks 4–6: Identify recurring system conditions and select one small governance intervention.
Weeks 7–10: Pilot the intervention in a willing educational collaboration.
Weeks 11–13: Review feasibility, acceptability, suitability, effects, unintended consequences, and the next responsible experiment.
Organizational cases, governance experience, facilitation, institutional policy knowledge, conflict and communication expertise, ethical review, stakeholder representation, documentation systems, and evaluation methods.
This collaboration should model what it studies. Begin with a written agreement covering decision rights, confidentiality, attribution, conflict of interest, workload, access to records, and the ability to challenge or replace the stewardship arrangement. Use periodic anonymous process feedback and publish both positive and difficult lessons.
Join if you believe critical thinking should be more than a student learning outcome—and want to help create educational organizations capable of receiving, protecting, and acting upon critical judgment.
Participants may join as:
Classroom contributors: pilot an activity, protocol, scaffold, or review tool.
Research contributors: support research design, analysis, interpretation, or publication.
Learner or stakeholder contributors: examine relevance, fairness, accessibility, and lived experience.
Design contributors: create or improve tasks, games, visuals, frameworks, rubrics, and templates.
Evidence stewards: help distinguish observations, assumptions, interpretations, claims, and emerging findings.
Collaboration stewards: maintain purpose, participation, documentation, decisions, follow-through, and review.
Critical friends: provide focused challenge without undertaking continuing project responsibilities.
What important outcome could make this collaboration worth the effort?
What do participants already have that can be shared, tested, or connected?
What is the smallest useful joint output or experiment?
Whose perspective or participation is missing?
What ethical, institutional, or practical limits must be explicit?
How will decisions, contribution, authorship, and recognition be handled?
What evidence would justify continuing, revising, expanding, pausing, or stopping?
Each collaboration should seek an aspirational outcome while beginning with a feasible contribution. It should invite participation while protecting people from extractive demands. It should value expertise without producing dependence, support stewardship without creating invisible obligation, and use critical thinking not merely to identify weaknesses but to make worthwhile collaboration more possible.