Creativity & Critical Thinking
Kimberly Fields
Creativity
- Experiment – Allows the student to become an active learner which helps students retain information.
- Relate – If students are able to relate to the information they become more interested.
- Environment - provide a physical classroom space that is appealing to the students, to promote creativity. Pictures, maps, charts, etc. (Williams, 2015)
- Challenge – require students to think through problems without giving answers.
- Model – be creative in your lessons and students will mimic what they see.
Critical Thinking
Increase Wait Time – requires students to think before answering a question.
Group Collaboration – allows students to work together and teach each other information. Several students becomes the expert.
- Open Ended Questions – allows students to brainstorm and think through a solution with guidance from the facilitator when needed.
- Instructional Strategies (Williams, 20105) - Use a variety of instructional methods to insure all learning styles are included. Student’s will also have to use different levels when responding to the teacher.
- Higher Order Thinking (Williams, 2015) - Start with low-level questioning first, allowing student’s to move up Bloom’s Taxonomy then have student’s prove their answer is correct.