On critical and creative thinking

Yes, they’re important, but can they be taught?

Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash

Let me start by saying that the Sir Kens and the technocracy have done lasting damage to education. I posted Professor John Sweller’s comments recently, that “When I’m faced with somebody who says I want to teach students (critical and creative thinking), my first question is, ‘What creativity skills have you learned that you wanted to pass on, which ones do you use?' I normally get complete silence on that. There’s simply nothing there.” Rather than receiving a list of teachable skills that would counter Sweller’s view, I was met with, “But…Sir Ken!” When asked about specific strategies offered by the Sir Kens … dead air. I was offered the insight that Sir Ken suggested an expanded definition of creativity, but nothing on the specifics of said definition. 

I agree with Sir Ken in one sense — that we need a new definition of creativity. Scrap that. We need many definitions of creativity. Baer critiques measure like the Torrance tests, which measure divergent thinking through things like the number of unique items generated, which resonates with the idea that if you throw enough shit at a wall, some of it is going to stick. I don’t subscribe to this generic model of creativity either and it’s often the hallmark of many inquiry or PBL approaches. While the strategies offered are also a little underbaked, I do like this paper by Daniel Willingham as a starting point for defining critical thinking.

You are thinking critically if (1) your thinking is novel—that is, you aren’t simply drawing a conclusion from a memory of a previous situation and (2) your thinking is self-directed — that is, you are not merely executing instructions given by someone else and (3) your thinking is effective — that is, you respect certain conventions that make thinking more likely to yield useful conclusions.

I would include these in a working definition of creative thinking as well, because innovation is implied, but also the usefulness of ideas generated. This article by Kylie Murphy, Steve Murphy, and Nathaniel Swain, has also provoked some, shall I say, back and forth. I agree with the article — that we need stronger definitions which reflect the domain-specific nature of critical and creative thinking (CCT). What I’m not sure about is whether CCT is a teachable skill or whether universities should be including this in their initial teacher education programs. Like teaching, ITE is also a zero-sum game and there is so much more to be done to bring evidence-based practice to undergrads.  

I do know there is a misconception that explicit instruction is teacher-led forever and ever, and I think this prevents a lot of practitioners from even considering Science of Learning. I think both trad and prog tribes are susceptible to binary thinking and this can hurt our shared cause. So in the interest of keeping an open mind, this post will explore the opportunities and limitations of the discrete teaching CCT skills in the classroom. TL;DR — CCT is observable, it can be fostered, but it is more a measure of thinking rather than teachable skills. It is also explainable within the current Science of Learning. Should it be taught as part of ITE? Probably not.

CCT in the English classroom

I’ve come up with a working definition of CCT in English and it isn’t a million miles away from Willingham’s. This was the most difficult part of writing this piece, so I would be curious to hear if you have a better one. To me, it demonstrated the inherent definitional problems we face with CCT. 

In English, critical and creative thinking is a student’s ability to incorporate, extend and question the formal and theoretical conventions of language and literature to produce original thinking, problem-solving and writing. 

I really love the idea of ‘deep structure’ that Willingham talks about and I recognise this as something I try to make visible to my students. Instead of looking at the surface characteristics of new problems, students look for deeper structural comparisons. The use of rubrics helps with this, but I have also developed my own classroom heuristics to help students recognise the foundational knowledge needed to answer challenging critical questions. An example of this is my repeated assurance that they won’t be tested on anything they haven’t learned, so if they encounter a new question, it’s not really a new question. Another is my catch-cry, “If the author’s context isn’t in the question, it’s still in the question.” These strategies, structures and reminders help students decode new questions according to their existing schema. 

An example is this challenging question on the work of T.S. Eliot: Poetry manifests an awareness that language forms the self. How does Eliot play with language to reflect the struggles of the self in his suite of poetry?

Students have the knowledge to know that Eliot’s work is often about identity, they know that his play with form shows the failure of tradition to voice his struggle, and their job is to create a thesis that connects these ideas. Oh and even though context is not in the question, it’s in the question, implied by the word ‘struggle.’ Willingham’s second point about the thinking being self-directed comes into play here. If students don’t have the requisite knowledge, and if they can’t make those connections independently, then critical thinking has not happened. Does my repetition of the schematic elements always work? No. So have I taught CCT? Possibly not. On one hand, a student reported a lightbulb moment where they said, “Oh, this is all stuff we have already learned.” On another, my thesis writing scaffolds can only support students to access the B range, because the A range is where independent thinking is demonstrated. 

Another observation that leaps out at me after considering where, when and how I see CCT emerge in the classroom is that it’s usually the more gifted, talented or knowledgeable students who demonstrate this. It’s these students, with modelling, opportunity and space, who more frequently come up with the goods we want to see from all our students. And for me, it’s usually the readers who play at the edges of the field, perhaps because of the volume of background knowledge they already hold. A few years ago, one of my extension students was writing fairly straight genre pieces — perfectly competent but not critically reflexive and not incredibly literary. After I showed them a model of innovation, John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse, they engaged in what I can only describe as a mild writerly hysteria, incorporating sketches, metatextual metaphors and rich allusions into their writing.

Barth’s piece as a model exposed the deep structures of texts that readers usually take for granted. By giving permission to extend the boundaries of literature, the work of this student was transformed. I suppose I enabled divergent thinking by providing a model. Two questions remain: if I did not have this content knowledge and know exactly where to direct this student, would creative thinking have happened? And secondly, if this student was not already a reader, would my effort and instructional time have been wasted? I am lucky to work in a small school with small classes. Many examples from my practice involve almost-adult learners who have elected to study double the English periods of their peers. So the question remains — what elements of CCT can we teach, and is it worth it?

Is CCT a measure of knowledge and mastery?

The more I think about this, the more I wonder if CCT is evidence of learning, rather than evidence of teaching. Is this kind of thinking purely evidence of mastery, validating all of the good practices that teachers have implemented up to that point? In ruminating about this post, I wondered if I had laid sufficient groundwork in Year 7 English for this thinking to later occur. They’ve learned domain knowledge about Blake as an innovative early eco-warrior, but have they learned enough about the Industrial Revolution itself? They've learned how to write free indirect discourse, but could I have exposed them to Woolf and Freud, and the power of literature to mediate the objective and the subjective? Did I give enough background knowledge for them to know why these composers are innovative?

It’s when I provide opportunities for students to think critically and creatively that I see evidence that learning has occurred, and if it hasn’t, then I know there is more learning to be done. There is a vast difference between the way students integrate self-selected critical material compared to material provided by the teacher. I can provide tools but I can’t genuinely integrate this material into the thoughts of another. I can model my thinking through think-alouds or with scaffolds, but importantly, this is me doing the thinking. Likewise, when I use Pam Hook’s hexagons to synthesise concepts, it’s very interesting how schemas emerge — the sophistication of the groupings almost perfectly correlates with student ranks! Again, is CCT simply an assessment measure?

In response to popular demand, here are 10 strategies for use in the English classroom to help teachers foster not teach critical and creative thinking. Note their similarity to the foundations of Science of Learning and what we know about the centrality of knowledge to thinking.

1. Develop their own domain knowledge. Non-negotiable. Read the classics. Read postmodern texts. Read critical material.

2. Define critical and creative capabilities when you design assessment, and plan units of work accordingly. What do you want to see as evidence?

3. Map fundamental knowledge about the conventions of literature and the historical influences on innovation. This can be within a unit of work but also scoped and sequenced from 7-12. Map opportunities to retrieve and reinforce. 

4. Define and give examples of convergent thinking (an example would be genre), and provide samples of divergent thinking (appropriation, experimentation and critical material).  

5. As part of (4), scope and sequence conventions and experimentation through text choices. Doug Lemov’s ‘plagues’ are a great place to start.

6. Teach fast using EDI so that you can achieve mastery more quickly and have time and space for critical and creative thinking. Formative assessment should be short, sharp and frequent. 

7. Using EDI will also help you recognise when the expertise reversal effect should kick in for the majority. Move on to let students demonstrate these mastery skills but know when to pull back, support or even reteach. 

8. Think aloud and be ready to develop and model an infinite variety of bespoke thinking scaffolds for an infinite variety of problems. I’m not convinced generic scaffolds have much value, as I’ve said here. 

9. Develop self-regulated writing strategies to make recognition of convergent (or typical) text features automatic over time, allowing space for more advanced thinking.

10. Preserve the top assessment band for only those who have demonstrated critical and/or creative thinking.

You’ll notice that my list of strategies has nothing to do with lessons in critical and creative thinking; there are no generic mindmaps, no sketching skills, no KWL charts. Sweller points out, “Normally (strategies) consist of nothing more than giving people problems they can't solve – how that is going to make somebody a critical and creative thinker I've no idea.” The foundational paradox of teaching CCT is that the thinking needs to happen independently of the teacher for it to qualify. The thinking is the sum total of every other teaching practice up to that point, not the teaching of thinking itself. 

Should we frame CCT as a teachable skill?

If critical and creative thinking is an end, rather than a means, then it would seem that we can achieve this outcome through what we already know about effectively mapped and delivered curriculum. I know from my own practice that it’s hard to take off the training wheels and watch students wobble, so perhaps it is worth providing a road map for how to get there. But are our universities better off aiming to produce master teachers with rich content knowledge and understanding of evidence-based pedagogy? Is it within the realm of possibility that teacher education courses could deliver the knowledge and skills needed to foster CCT to undergrads in every subject domain?

Some things I know: we do need to develop independence and mastery in our students. Critical and creative thinking exists. We do have the tools to make this happen. But concerns remain about what Dylan Wiliam has called the single most important concept in educational improvement: opportunity cost. The biggest caveat I can see here is student readiness: too much, too soon, with too little knowledge will see our most vulnerable learners fall further behind. If critical and creative thinking is a measure of learning, then perhaps we are better off prioritising teaching students what to think with.