Critical and Creative Thinking Skills

We can seek to directly improve the critical and creative thinking skills of our learners by providing challenge supplements that focus on these.

A challenge supplement is something you append to your main lesson, like an extension task or question, to stretch the thinking of your learners.

An obvious approach is to use tailored questions based on the top three levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy (analysis, synthesis and evaluation).

Here are four more strategies you might also like to try.

Critical and Creative Thinking: Strategy 1 – Make a Connection

Challenge learners to make and explain connections between the lesson content and other areas of learning, including areas that might, at first glance, have little to connect them to the current topic.

Making connections involves lateral thinking, which is inherently creative.

You can scaffold this type of thinking by giving learners a model of how to make connections.

You might demonstrate, for example, how we can look for similarities of type or category, such as when we note a connection between a historical interpretation and a design solution.

Both fall into the category of creative thinking whereby we take what is known and use our skills to turn it into something new that solves the problem we face.

Critical and Creative Thinking: Strategy 2 – Applying Critical Questions

Provide learners with a set of critical questions they can apply in various situations, no matter the information and ideas with which they are presented.

The nature of these questions will differ depending on your subject or age-group, but the emphasis is on coming up with a set of 3-5 that you can challenge learners to consistently apply.

So doing will help them to develop their critical thinking as they come to internalise the questions along with the ways of thinking they promote.

Critical and Creative Thinking: Strategy 3 – What if …? Speculation

Challenge learners to speculate using the question stem ‘What if…’

This is an example of synthesis-led questioning.

Here the focus is on developing plausible responses to the conditional hypothesis indicated by the question stem.

You can control the extent to which you structure learner thinking by altering the degree of emphasis you place on providing explanation for any speculations.

The higher you set the bar for justification, the more control you will be exerting over the creative thinking learners do.

Bear this in mind.

Creative thinking can benefit from having justification removed from the situation, as this lets learners speculate more freely.

Consider, for example, how we might approach creative thinking differently if we are given total freedom, compared to if we are given a tight brief (i.e. something against which we must judge and justify the creative thinking that we do).

Critical and Creative Thinking: Strategy 4 – Target-Focussed Self-Assessment

While learners are engaged in a task, circulate through the room and give more-able learners a target through which to assess the work they have done so far.

This target could be in the form of a question (What could you do to make your work more accurate?) or a statement (Look at your use of rhetorical techniques and assess the impact it is going to have on the reader).

Either way, the aim is to help learners to view their own work critically by giving them a clear focus for a real-time self-assessment.

Increase the efficacy of the approach by returning to learners a few minutes later to discuss with them what they have uncovered.

Clearly this is a technique you could use with any learner.

The emphasis on more-able learners comes in the context of finding different ways to get them thinking more critically and creatively.

And self-assessment, by its very nature, involves evaluation, the top level of Bloom’s Taxonomy.

Creative Trial and Error

Here we are dealing with both synthesis and evaluation, the top two levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy, with a little bit of analysis (level 4) thrown in for good measure.

Creative trial and error involves trying things out, making mistakes, and then reviewing the information elicited by those mistakes.

This information covers what happened, what went wrong, how this relates to what was attempted, and what the impact is for trying again.

When we talk about information, we are talking about:

• That which we immediately elicit (and which is visible or knowable through observation or experience of the failure).
• That which we elicit subsequently through reflection.

Both types are important.

One without the other leads to less successful creative development.

Here are three ways you can challenge learners to engage in creative trial and error in your classroom.

Creative Trial and Error: Strategy 1 – Harder Problems

Challenge more-able learners to take on harder problems.

These could be more complex, could require a higher degree of knowledge and understanding, or could be set just beyond the boundary of what learners are currently capable of.

In each case, creative trial and error will be necessary to try to solve the problems.

Or, at least, to get closer to solving them.

You should encourage learners to see the process – that of trialling ideas and assessing the results – as more important than the end to which they are aiming (solving the problem).

This is because the process can be developed and applied in other settings, and because it is the process that reveals information about the nature of the problem and the current extent of learners’ knowledge and understanding.

It is the process that leads to learning, rather than the end result of effectively solving the problem.

That helps us to learn, of course.

But if we attend directly to the process of creative trial and error, if we analyse it, reflect on it and really think about, we stand to learn much more.

Creative Trial and Error: Strategy 2 – Change the Starting Point

Give learners a different starting point compared to what they are used to and challenge them to pursue a task or question from there.

For example, a more-able learner may have honed a fairly sound technique for answering essay questions.

Let us imagine they come up with a paragraph plan, make a note of this and then implement it.

At the start of an essay-writing activity you would go up to them and present a different starting point which they must trial.

For example, you might tell them they need to write their conclusion first, then their last paragraph, then their penultimate paragraph and so on, until they reach the introduction.

This will be hard for them!

They will have to think more deeply than they are used to.

(Because we have removed a successful habit they have come to rely on. Not permanently, of course, just for the purposes of this activity.)

Creative trial and error will be heavily involved.

As a result, they will gain a better understanding of the process of essay writing and how to apply knowledge to the construction of a final piece of work.

They may well return to their original technique in subsequent tasks, but their use of this will be enhanced by the information elicited during the process of creative trial and error.

Creative Trial and Error: Strategy 3 – Alternative Decisions

When learners have completed a piece of work, ask them to go back through it and identify three alternative decisions they could have made.

This works better with larger pieces of work.

In smaller pieces, it is unlikely there will be enough content for learners to pick out sufficient alternative decision points.

When learners have their points, challenge them to choose one and to redo that section of their work based on a different choice they could have made.

This involves them trialling a previously rejected option and judging the results of this.

A great benefit of such an approach is that it gives learners an analytical insight into the process of creation.

Going back and examining the decisions taken to produce a piece of work involves looking closely at the process of creation – much more closely than you might normally do.

This yields information that would otherwise be inaccessible.

As does the subsequent task of redoing a section of your work based on an alternative decision.

Overall, this technique helps learners to better understand how to successfully create products and gives them an idea of how making different choices can lead to radically different results.