Critical Thinking

Since I started teaching I wondered how to effectively teach critical thinking, and even today when I searched for the latest info on the topic I came up with the usual bland recommendations about encouraging questioning and inquiry, so here's my own first crack at a series of steps:

1) Observation->What are all of the facts at hand?
2) Assessment->What's the nature of the problem?
3) Relationships->What facts are related to others and how?
4) Categorization->What facts appear relevant to the problem?
5) Hypothesis->What is your belief about the solution to the problem?
6) Testing->Were you correct? If not, what new information did you learn that sheds new light on the facts and their relationships?
7) Recurse->As you learn more and your understand of the facts and their relationships change, go back and repeat the steps above (your new understanding of the facts may change your understanding of the problem, or even reveal new facts that you hadn't noticed before).