1. Learning Objective: Creative and Critical Thinking
I have taken a variety of classes that helped me to think in a way that I am not
used too. I was able to gain critical and creative thinking skills. Thinking creatively is a
way to produce something amazing, by having an idea and slowly developing that idea
by doing research (Davis 2013). Critical and creative thinking skills helped me produced
products that were rewarding and being able to assess what I have developed in my
learning from various assignments. (IAS website, n.d).
I was able to gain creative thinking skills that helped me produced a product that
was rewarding from one of my class assignments for my Art and Climate Change course.
The project that I did was a group project that is a combination of using both photographs
and writing a story. This story is about time travelers going back to the year 2016 and
experiencing snow and ice for the very first time after so many years. This project helped
me think for creatively when producing this story. The group and I had to snowshoe in
Snoqualmie Falls, Washington, in order, to take the photos that are in the story. It was a
challenge because we had to figure out what photos to take and how we should take the
images. Afterwards, we had to figure out how to use the photos to flow with the story
line. All of this took a lot of time and effort. This project helped me develop my skills in
creative thinking because I had to use my creatively on how to produce a story from the
resources that I had with my group and it was overall a rewarding experience.
I was able to gain critical thinking skills that helped me learn how to assess my
own learning throughout my class work. I was able to gain these skills in my
Communication studies course. The one assignment that helped me to think critically was
the scholarly response papers that I had to write. Scholarly response papers were an
assignment for this course. In this paper, I had to analyze a scholarly article and pinpoint
the key words and write about the article in my own words. This assignment was difficult
because this peer reviewed article was very hard to understand, as indicated with, this
quote: “Dewey’s sentence, by any reasonable interpretation, is either false to everyday
experience or simply mundane if he means only that on some occasions communication
is satisfying, and rewarding” (Carey 1988). The way the author is phrasing this sentence
just didn’t make sense to me until I had to read the sentence multiple times. Eventually, I

2. understood it to mean that communication is not just transferring information, but a
whole variety of things such as body language. I was able to overcome this by critically
thinking and analyzing the article by asking myself questions and dig deeper into the
article to understand it.
All in all, I have learned and gained the skills to think creatively and critically.
These assignments were the most difficult but also most rewarding because I was able to
gain so much from it.