Critical And Creative Thinking Henderson

Creative and Critical Thinking Across the Curriculum
Wednesday Nov. 25, 2005
Henderson Annex
9:00-11:30

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Triarchic Theory of Intelligence
Intelligent behaviour arises from a balance between analytical, creative and practical abilities and that these abilities function collectively to allow individuals to achieve success within particular socio-cultural contexts
Sternberg 1988, 1997, 1999

Framework for thinking about Thinking
According to Sternberg intelligent behaviour consists of the application and melding of three types of thinking, all of which can be learned or enhanced. Creativity is a balance between these three forms of thinking.

Triarchic Theory of Intelligence: 1. Creative Ability
This includes divergent thinking as it is the ability to think of or generate new, novel, and interesting ideas. But it is also the ability to spontaneously make connections between ideas, or groups of things -- ones that often go unnoticed, or undiscovered by others.

Triarchic Theory of Intelligence:2. Analytical Ability
This includes the ability to think convergently in that it requires critical thinking and appraisal as one analyzes and evaluates thoughts, ideas, and possible solutions. This type of thinking is key because not all ideas are good ones, some need to be culled. People use this type of thinking to consider implications and project possible responses, problems, and outcomes. Commonly we think of this ability as "critical thinking" at its best.

Triarchic Theory of Intelligence:3. Practical Ability
The world is full of people who have good ideas, as well as ones who can pick ideas apart. However, the basic key to creative work must include the ability to use practical thinking. This is the ability to translate abstractions and theories into realistic applications. It is the skill to sell or communicate one's ideas to others, to make others believe that ideas, works, or products are valuable, different, useful, innovative, unusual, or worthy of consideration. It is finding a potential audience for one's creative work.

Overview of Sternberg’s Triarchic Theory of Intelligence:
Creative Abilities: generate invention, discovery, and other creative endeavours
Analytical Abilities: evaluate, analyze, compare and contrast information
Practical Abilities: tie everything together by allowing individuals to apply what they have learned in the appropriate setting.

CREATIVITY
If you had to provide a working definition of creativity, how would you define it?

What is Creativity?
Creativity is a mental and social process involving the discovery of new ideas or concepts

Creative and Critical Thinking Compared
Critical Thinking
Creative Thinking
Analytic
Convergent
vertical
probability
Judgment
Focused
Objective
Answer
Left brain
Verbal
Linear
Reasoning
Yes but…..
Generative
Divergent
Lateral
Possibility
Suspend judgment
Diffuse
Subjective
An answer
Right brain
Visual
Associative
Richness, novelty
Yes and…….

Creativity
Has been attributed to divine intervention, cognitive processes, the social environment, personality traits, and chance. It has been associated with genius, mental illness, humour and REM sleep. Some say it is a trait we are born with; others say it can be taught with the application of simple techniques.

Scientific Approach…
Formal starting point for the scientific study of creativity from the standpoint of orthodox psychological literature, is considered to have been J.P. Guilford’s 1950 focus on a scientific approach to conceptualizing creativity and measuring it psychometrically
Parallel time: we get approaches to teaching creativity techniques: brainstorming (Alex Osborn), lateral thinking (de Bono)

Current ideas about creativity…
Current ideas in creativity view it in terms of how we view learning: fixed trait or malleable? If you think it is malleable, you will grow more readily as a learner, than if you think it is a fixed trait.
Educators need to promote creativity in class so that students see this possibility.

Our Context: What are some strategies to get at creativity?
Cognitive and Affective Strategies:
Cognitive: Fluency, Flexibility, Originality, Elaboration
Affective: Curiosity, Complexity, Risk Taking, Imagination

Creative Processes to get at Creativity
These 8 creative processes lay a foundation upon which creative learning develops. Teachers’ use of them in the classroom means that creative potential and creative skills can be detected and developed at the same time.

Cognitive Strategy #1: Fluency
Fluency: involves generating as many ideas as possible
Quantity breeds quality: the more ideas that children can think of, the more likely are original ideas to emerge
Example: list all the things that are green; list all the creatures we may see on our field excursion; how many experiments can you create using these two magnets?

Cognitive Strategy #2: Flexibility
Flexibility: involves approaching things in alternative ways, from different viewpoints or perspectives, and responding in a variety of categories
Example: change the rules of one of these games – chess, scrabble or snakes and ladders so that you play to lose (the one who loses is the winner).
Computers should replace teachers: Look at this statement from different viewpoints- those of children, parents, teachers, and the Ministry of Education and decide whether you agree.

Cognitive Strategy #3: Originality
Originality: involves producing unusual, unique or clever ideas and combining known ideals into some new form. Ideas may be original to society, or original to a child or group at a particular time and place.
Example: Find a way for Jack and Jill to get water from a well on the hill so that they do not have to walk down carrying a heavy bucket full of water
Create your own alien; based on a planet in our solar system

Alien Adventure
Create your own alien, taking into account: Where does your alien live? What type of planet does it live on and where on this planet? Water? Swamp? Dessert? Tundra?
What does your alien eat?
How does your alien catch its food?
How does your alien see? Why does it see in this way? How does your alien move? Why does it move in this way?

Cognitive Strategy #4: Elaboration
Elaboration involves stretching or expanding upon things and adding to an idea to make it more interesting or complete (teacher stealing)
Example: improve both the ladder and the fire extinguisher so that they are more effective in times of emergency.
Create an alternative ending to the story
Add a new element to a board game to make it more challenging

Affective Strategy #1: Curiosity
Curiosity involves encouraging children to wonder, to be inquisitive, to follow intuition, to question and to seek problems and information
Example: what if all the trees in the world were destroyed by human carelessness. What would the world be like?
What if the wolf in Red Riding Hood was telling the story, what would he say?

Affective Strategy #2: Complexity
Complexity involves feeling challenged to seek many different, difficult or complex alternatives, bringing structure out of chaos and seeing gaps in information or situations.
Example: what are the things to consider in choosing a new pet?
Design a piece of playground equipment that is imaginative and fun to play on, is safe, and requires children to cooperate as they use it.

Affective Strategy #3: Risk Taking
Risk taking is having the courage to share ideas, take a guess; exposing oneself to criticism or failure and being prepared to justify or defend ideas.
Example: Survival on the moon activity

Survival on the Moon activity
Your mission is to rank 12 items. Put them in numerical order from the most important to the least important.
Work with your group to decide what is needed. Here is the list: tanks of oxygen, five gallons of water, stellar constellation map, food concentrate, nylon rope, first aid kit, parachute, signal flares, magnetic compass, box of matches

Affective Strategy #4: Imagination
Imagination involves putting oneself in another place or time, building mental images and feeling intuitively
Example: an Easter egg lands on your doorstep six months late. Imagine why it may be so late, and make up a story about it.

Creativity strategies……
Fluency Curiosity
Flexibility Complexity
Originality Risk Taking
Elaboration Imagination
How do you start with these strategies? Begin by picking a theme of study, and try to incorporate these ideas into the learning…..say Fairytales…..

Using Specific Creativity Techniques
In conjunction with the eight creative thinking skills, there is a variety of important methods and techniques that may be considered basic to developing creative thinking:
Brainstorming
Scamper
Forced Relationships
Attribute Listing
Bloom’s Taxonomy

Brainstorming
Useful technique to help us be open minded and to generate many ideas and it is an integral part of the problem-solving process.
Principle of deferred judgment is important since too often good ideas can be lost by evaluating too quickly or too much.

Rules for Brainstorming
Criticism and praise are ruled out
Free-wheeling is welcomed. The wilder the ideas, the better. Offbeat and silly ideas may trigger practical breakthroughs that might not otherwise occur.
Combination and improvement are sought. Group members are encouraged to combine and “hitchhike” ideas.
Quantity is wanted. The larger the number of ideas, the greater the chance of reaching the best solutions.

Scamper
S ubstitute: replace parts or materials
C ombine: mix, join with other things
A dapt: alter to suit new conditions
M odify, Magnify, Minify: make smaller or larger, change the shape
P ut to another use: give a new purpose
E liminate, Elaborate: remove or add parts
R everse, Rearrange: turn inside out or upside down, move parts

Scamper the Story of Cinderella: usingscamper to provide guidelines for creative questions.
Substitute: What do you think would have happened if Cinderella had lost her necklace instead of her glass slipper?
Combine: How do you think the story might have changed if the prince had had the same character as the stepmother?
Adapt: how would the story change if it took place in the present time?
Modify: Retell the story with the prince being a giant.
Magnify: how would the story have changed if Cinderella had been identical twins instead of one person?
Put to use: How would Cinderella have used her broom to help her if the Fairy Godmother had not appeared?
Eliminate: Retell the story without the Fairy Godmother.
Rearrange: What would have happened if the ugly sister had found the slipper instead of the prince?
Reverse: retell the story, with Cinderella having the personality of the wicked stepmother, and the stepmother having Cinderella’s personality (loving and kind)

Activity: Scamper a…..
A pencil
A bird
Your shoe
A telephone
A flower
A banana
A car

Forced Relationships
To think of many new and unusual possibilities it is necessary to force our thinking beyond the obvious and the ordinary. Forced relationships help to look at new possibilities by putting unrelated ideas together to create ideas or to help solve a problem

Forced Relationships Example
Ask students to think of four unrelated objects for example: chocolate, computer, scissors, and socks.
Then present a problem statement: “how can we overcome the trash problem in the playground?”
Students must take each object in turn and associate it in some way with solving the problem:
Computer: email parents to come to a meeting about the issue
Chocolate: use chocolate as a reward for picking up trash
Scissors: cut the paper garbage into tiny bits so that it can be recycled for the art room.
Socks: if there is no garbage can nearby; and you see garbage while playing, stick it in your sock.

Attribute Listing
A technique used to generate many new ideas by examining closely the main attributes or characteristics of a topic, problem or object and thinking of ways to improve each attribute. This helps us to consider possibilities we may otherwise overlook if we view the object or problem only in a more general way

Attribute Listing Examples
What are the attributes of an outstanding product?
How can we improve our classroom?
Change your teddy bear so that it is more unusual and fun to play with.

Bloom’s Taxonomy
Creating
Generating new ideas, products, or ways of viewing things: designing, constructing, planning, producing, inventing
Evaluating
Justifying a decision or course of action: checking, hypothesizing, critiquing, experimenting, judging
Analyzing
Breaking information into parts to explore understandings and relationships: comparing, organizing, deconstructing, interrogating, finding
Applying
Using information in another familiar situation: implementing, carrying out, using, executing
Understanding
Explaining ideas or concepts: interpreting, summarizing, paraphrasing, classifying, explaining
Remembering
Recall information: recognizing, listing, describing, retrieving, naming, finding

Instant Activities
Junkology Box
Quickliners
Creative Connections
Personal Logo
Story Chain
Creative and Fluent Thinking Challenges

Critical Thinking
What is Critical Thinking?
Refers to the quality of thinking
Involves thinking through problematic situations about what to believe or how to act where the thinker makes reasoned judgments that embody the qualities of a competent thinker.

Skills related to an overall ability to Critical Thinking:
Finding analogies and other kinds of relationships between pieces of information
Determining the relevance and validity of information that could be used for structuring and solving problems
Finding and evaluating solutions or alternative ways of treating problems

1. Analogies: Reason through the use of analogies
Two things compared; there needs to be a decision about whether the likeness is enough to make a conclusion reasonable
Example: just as an elephant is huge when compared to a fly, it is small when compared to a skyscraper; just as our galaxy is huge compared to our solar system it is small compared to the universe.

Analogies
Emu: Australia :: penguin ___________
Continent
Cold
Antarctica
Feathers

Self Talk through analogies
Ask: What is the relationship between an emu and Australia?
An emu comes from Australia and an penguin comes from where? Where does a penguin live?
Then survey the choices: Continent is a place but not a specific place; cold describes a place; Antarctica is a place and penguins live here, feathers are part of a penguin but not a place

More Analogies: find the most accurate relationship
Teeter is to tooter as jungle is to (elephant, gym, Africa) _________
Uncle is to niece as aunt is to (nephew, cousin, brother)____________
Rattle is to snake as chirp is to (bird, cricket, chipmunk) _____________
Peas are to carrots as meat is to (cow, beef, potatoes) _______
Salt is to sugar as sour is to (sweet, bland, tart)_______
Airplane is to pilot as train is to (conductor, caboose, engineer) ___________
Sound is to ear as scent is to (smell, nose, hear) __________
Talking is to yelling as giggling is to (snickering, laughing, chuckling) _____________
Race is to track as swim is to (meet, stroke, pool) ________
Surfing is to waves as skiing is to (hills, snow, slopes) __________

2. Develop Deductive Reasoning
Deductive reasoning is general to specific: theory, hypothesis, observation, confirmation
Is evidence based
Looks at invalid/valid arguments
For an argument to be sound it must be valid and the premises true as well
This is a valid argument but not true: Everyone who eats steak is a quarterback. John eats steak. Therefore John is a quarterback.

Develop Inductive Reasoning
Inductive reasoning is observation, pattern, tentative hypothesis, theory
Bottom up approach
Discovery process
But, it can be misleading: all people you have met from Vancouver wear fleece jackets, then all people in Vancouver wear fleece.

3. Finding and evaluating solutions or alternative ways to look at Problems
Use the Creative Problem Solving or Future Problem Solving process
This process helps to solve in effective and imaginative ways.
Good to use with moral philosophy and issues
Good to use with real life problems
However, there are 6 steps and it does take time and students need to be able to commit to it; teacher needs to be able to model it

CPS Process
Fact Finding: students ask questions about the problem to determine available facts and consider resources that may help them find answers
Problem Finding: clarify and define major problem
Idea finding: students generate as may ways and ideas and strategies to solve the problem
Solution finding: students decide on criteria for judging ideas and apply them to find a solution. Some criteria might include: which ideas have the greatest potential?
Apply criteria: grid it
Acceptance finding: develop a plan of action

Five Steps to Critical Thinking: how to approach it all….by the Critical Thinking Consortium
1. Background Knowledge: Information about a topic required for thoughtful reflection.
Students can’t think deeply about a topic if they do not know anything about it.
Questions to ask: What Background information do students need to make a well – informed judgment.
2. Criteria for Judgment: Consideration or grounds for deciding which alternative's) is the most appropriate.
Students need help in thinking carefully about the criteria to used when judging various alternatives.
Is my estimate accurate?
Is the interpretation Plausible?
Is the conclusion fair to all?
Is my proposal feasible?

Five Steps to Critical Thinking
3. Crucial Thinking Vocabulary: Students require the vocabulary or concepts that let them make important distinctions among the different issues and thinking tasks. This include:
Inference and direct observation
Generalization and over generalization
Premise and conclusion
Bias and point of view.
4. Thinking Strategies: There are strategies that are useful for guiding one’s performance when thinking critically.
Making Decisions: Making a framework of the issues, steps to problem solving.)
Organizing Information: Graphic organizers, Pros and cons, Venn Diagrams.
Role Taking: Have students put themselves in the other person’s shoes.

Five Steps to Critical Thinking
5. Habit of Mind: Being able to apply criteria and use strategies is only useful if students have the habits of mind of a thoughtful person. This include:
Open-Minded: Consider evidence opposing their view and to revise their view should the evidence warrant it.
Fair-Minded: Are students willing to give impartial consideration to alternative points of view and not simply impose their preferences?
Independent-Minded: Are students willing to stand up for their firmly help believes?
Inquiry or ‘Critical Attitude’: Are student inclined to question the clarity of and support of claims and to seek justified beliefs and values.
From: Critical Challenges. By the Critical Thinking Consortium.

Bloom’s Taxonomy
Use Bloom’s taxonomy: highest level to create projects: Generating new ideas, products, or ways of viewing things
Designing, constructing, planning, producing inventing

Destination Imagination Instant Challenges
A creative problem solving program that has students solve instant challenges as well as larger team solutions.
Example: Your Challenge is to build a Far…Out Shelter. You must give a short presentation that explains who lives in the shelter and any special features you have included.
Time: you have 5 minutes to build your Far…Out Shelter and prepare your presentation and one minute to present it.
Materials: Newspaper and Tape

Other Critical Thinking Activities
Philosophical questions
Critical Challenges Across the Curriculum
www.qisforquestion.com

Questions
Contact Marielle Wiesinger
Brock Elementary Challenge Centre
604-713-5766
mwiesinger@vsb.bc.ca

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Critical And Creative Thinking Henderson

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