Many alternatives exist for setting the delivery, content, direction, tone, and priorities for a Critical Inquiry/Thinking general education program. Review of our university's overall general education program indicated the need, and overwhelming faculty approval, for a program to improve critical thinking skills, to specifically include exploratory learning and improved cognitive abilities. As we moved ahead we formed a Critical Inquiry Committee for in depth, and participative planning. One of the preliminary, investigative steps was to survey peer institution critical inquiry programs. The results of the study are reported below, along with our steps in developing our first year, one credit, general education critical inquiry program. Our paper includes details of our faculty development program and the results of our pilot program implementation. Our full program is scheduled for implementation during fall 2012. (Contains 1 figure and 6 tables.) [For the complete proceedings, "Proceedings of the International Association for Development of the Information Society (IADIS) International Conference on Cognition and Exploratory Learning in Digital Age (CELDA) (Madrid, Spain, October 19-21, 2012)," see ED542606.]