I've been facilitating a forum on a topic called Visible Learning. I had not heard of visible learning before and figured I better get acquainted with what the heck we would be talking about. So it turns out a man by the name John Hattie who has over 15 years of research on what effects student achievement. This is a topic you can get lost in... and I admit I think I did! So often we hear things in the news about class sizes being the problem, or teacher pay or the actual school building and infrastructure... but really as Hattie puts it this are the distractions in politics (check out Hattie's Politics of Distraction) not the things that effect student achievement significantly. When you think to your personal education experience you don't think of how many kids were in your class, or if you had been in a different classroom would it have been better, but you think about the teachers that had the biggest impact, both positive and otherwise. One of the key things I took from this research is the importance of the teacher. The strategies they use, the feedback they gather to really make the experience about the learning it what truly makes the difference. You can be in the same school, but from one year to another you may have a totally different experience as a student. |
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Obviously both are needed but when do you use one versus the other? When do you encourage your students to try to use creative thinking skills over critical? Or do they always need to be doing both? Here's a good image to see the overlap as well as the different skills required for Creative versus critical thinking. One of the issues we seem to face is what is creative thinking, and how do we define it versus critical thinking?
Critical thinking to me is really looking at the issue that needs to be solved and breaking it down into parts and determining what needs to be done, how it needs to be done, and when it needs to be done. It it analyzing the facts of the matter and determining my thoughts around it. It is being critical of what is offered and choosing to look deeper to determine if there is something more. Creative thinking to me is allowing a bit more of the "think outside the box" side of me to come out. I think of it as pushing the boundaries in terms of what can be done, and being more open to new solutions we may not have tried before. While there definitely can be overlap of critical and creative happening in the same challenge I approach I tend to have one approach or another at a time. Either I'm thinking creatively about something, or I'm being more critical in my approach. Do we need to have students do both at the same time? Or is it good to have them just look at a problem one way or another?
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