Activity: Everyday Critical & Creative Thinking

Activity: Everyday Critical & Creative Thinking

Although important in college academics, critical and creative thinking aren’t tools that are only applied in a classroom. On the contrary, these are intertwined skills that can be effectively used in all realms of a person’s life to make good decisions, ethically engage with the people and events around them, and build a more just global society. For example, a student who thinks critically will seek out resources and ways to change their behaviors when they realize their study habits are not working. Even more vitally, racism, heterosexism, and other forms of prejudice cannot stand in the face of active critical thinking. For all of these reasons, it is valuable to encourage a practice of everyday critical thinking as early as possible.

Opening: Ask your students to collaboratively work to develop a definition of critical thinking. You may also include creative thinking as a second definition. It may be helpful to create two lists like the example below, or to begin with the question of how you know when you’re using critical and/or creative thinking. You and your mentor will may need to redirect students if and when they make mistakes in this definition, but it’s likely that their peers may also do this work.

Sample Definitions:

Critical thinkingis the active, persistent, and careful consideration of a belief or form of knowledge, the grounds that support it, and the conclusions that follow. It involves analyzing and evaluating one’s own thinking and that of others. In the context of college teaching and learning, critical thinking deliberately and actively engages students in:

• Raising vital questions and problems and formulating these clearly and precisely;
• Gathering and assessing relevant information, and using abstract ideas to interpret it effectively;
• Reaching well-reasoned conclusions and solutions and testing them against relevant criteria and standards;
• Openly considering alternative systems of thought; and
• Effectively communicating to others the analysis of and proposed solutions to complex challenges.

Creative thinkingis the generation of new ideas within or across domains of knowledge, drawing upon or intentionally breaking with established symbolic rules and procedures.It usually involves the behaviors of preparation, incubation, insight, evaluation, elaboration, and communication.In the context of college teaching and learning, creative thinking deliberately and actively engages students in:

• Bringing together existing ideas into new configurations;
• Developing new properties or possibilities for something that already exists; and
• Discovering or imagining something entirely new.”[1]

Real Life or Pop Culture Example: After your students have made their first attempt at defining, share with them a real world example. Work with your mentor prior to class to choose an example that illustrates how these concepts are applied in everyday life, not just in formal research papers. Possible examples are infinite, but include the Men in Black written exam scene near the beginning of the film or the State Farm® French Model Commercial “State of Disbelief.” These are examples of critical and creative thinking in action and failure to think critically, respectively.

Ask your students to analyze the example you’ve chosen, explaining how they saw critical and creative thinking present in or absent from the example you provided. Based on this work ask your students how they now want to refine their earlier definition(s).

Group Work and Mini Presentation: In groups, students should find one example of critical thinking (or failure of critical thinking) in pop culture. This can be a video clip, advertisement, excerpt from a popular book, a post in social media, or anything else you can defend. Be prepared to share your example and your group’s analysis of it in front of the class.

[1]Definitions adapted from John Dewey; Richard Paul and Lind Elder; MihalyCsikszentmihalyi, and M.A. Rosenman and J. S. Gero. Retrieved from North Carolina State University