Critical thinking is an intellectually disciplined process of evaluating and analyzing information to guide beliefs and actions. It involves skills like clarity, accuracy, reasoning, and sound evidence. The document discusses how critical thinking is important in education by moving away from simple memorization and towards asking questions, collaborating ideas, and engaging students in problem solving. It provides examples of how to apply critical thinking in the classroom through activities like classroom blogs, discussion boards, and group projects where students explore and discuss topics together, rather than through traditional testing. Specifically, one example given is having student groups create a blog post about important accomplishments of Benjamin Franklin and having other students comment on the posts to agree or disagree.