Today, I decided to try stretching Josh's critical thinking comfort level with a 20 minute free-writing lesson. To do this, I gave Josh a list of 6 random topics and gave him about 3 minutes to write anything that came to his mind for each one. Topics ranged from "The Medieval Period," to "My Family," "College," and even "Video Games." My goal was to get Josh to focus/hone these topics, centering his ideas on particular facets of each. Afterwards, I had Josh read all of his answers and found that he made some pretty interesting connections in topics. I then created a case scenario for Josh: college professor says write an argument paper about anything that you want. Using the previous topics, I asked Josh to move from topic to focus to argument, deciding on a claim that was defendable. We had a really good time of doing this, and Josh was able to articulate some really interesting claims based on this free-writing assignment.