Page 158 - Keys to College Success

HOW CAN YOU IMPROVE YOUR
practical thinking skills?

You’ve analyzed a situation. You’ve come up with ideas. Now, with your practical
skill, you make things happen. Practical thinking—also called common sense or street
smarts—refers to how you adapt to your environment (both people and circumstances),
or shape or change your environment to adapt to you, to pursue important goals.
Let’s say your goal is to pass freshman composition. You learn most successfully
through visual presentations. To achieve your goal, you can use the instructor’s Power-
Points or other visual media to enhance your learning (adapt to your environment) or
enroll in a heavily visual Internet course (change your environment to adapt to you)—
or both.
Real-world problems and decisions require you to add understanding of experiences
and social interactions to your analytical abilities. Your success in a sociology class, for
example, may depend almost as much on getting along with your instructor as on your
academic work. The workplace also demands practical skills. For example, while stu-
dents majoring in elementary education may successfully quote child development facts
on an exam, their career success depends on their ability to evaluate and address real
children’s needs in the classroom.

Through Experience, You Build Emotional Intelligence
You gain much of your ability to think practically from personal experience, rather than
from formal training. What you learn from experience answers “how” questions—how
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to talk, how to behave, how to proceed. For example, after completing several papers
for a course, you may learn what your instructor expects, or, after a few arguments with
a roommate, you may learn how to manage “hot button” topics more effectively. See
Key 5.9 for ways in which this kind of knowledge can be shown in “if–then” statements.
Emotional intelligence promotes success. For example, when first recovering from
her accident, Chanda experienced a wide range of emotions. Over time, her response
involved practical and emotionally intelligent actions that made her more likely to Critical, Creative, and Practical Thinking
thrive in high school:
■ Perceiving emotions: After getting over the initial shock of what happened,
recognizing her feelings of confusion and loss
■ Thinking about emotions: Noting what perception arose from those feelings (at
first, “I’m not going to be able to live like other kids”) and how it affected her
mindset (at first, made her feel shy and unmotivated)
■ Understanding emotions: Determining that the emotions diminished her motiva-
tion, and considering how to adjust that mindset to increase self-worth and
determination
■ Managing emotions: Using what she learned, deciding she could have a fulfilling expe-
rience despite her disability, and getting involved with friends and school activities

If you know that social interactions are difficult for you, enlist someone to give you
some informal coaching. As Dr. Norman Rosenthal reports in “10 Ways to Enhance
Your Emotional Intelligence,” you may not realize how much others can tell what you
are feeling. “Ask someone who knows you (and whom you trust) how you are coming
across,” he recommends. For example, ask a friend to role-play the meeting with your
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instructor (with the friend playing the instructor) and give you feedback on words,
tone, and body language.

Practical Thinking Means Action

Action is the logical result of practical thinking. Basic student success strategies that
promote action—staying motivated, making the most of your strengths, managing

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