Critical thinking is thinking that assesses itself. To the extent that our students need us to tell them how well they are doing, they are not thinking critically.
Didactic instruction makes students overly dependent on the teacher.
In such instruction, students rarely develop any perceptible intellectual independence and typically have no intellectual standards to assess their thinking with. Instruction that fosters a disciplined, thinking mind, on the other hand, is 180 degrees in the opposite direction. Because of the importance of self-assessment to critical thinking, it is important to bring it into the structural design of the course and not just leave it to episodic tactics. They should be regularly using intellectual standards in an explicit way. This should be designed into instruction as a regular feature of it.