Development of critical and creative thinking skills Dana Hanesová Christian Primary School Narnia Faculty of Education, University of Matej Bel SLOVAKIA

Critical and creative thinking - God’s idea God’ idea of holistic development: Luke 2:52 God’s idea of an ideal relationship: Mark 12:30 Applied in ALL human activities: integration of „heart, mind and hand“

„The brain is designed for survival, not formal instruction.” (Jensen, 2005)

Holistic application in education All ages/education levels: very young (pre-primary) young (primary) secondary All phases of a school lesson motivation exposition (new stuff) practice evaluation (feedback)

Techniques developing critical/creative thinking Bloom’s Taxonomy Mind mapping Lotus blossom SCAMMPERR Six Thinking Hats (E. De Bono) Text Book: Dana Hanesova: From learning facts to learning to think

Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives (1956, revised 2001)

Create: Can the students create anything new out of the input given? Synthesize and Evaluate: Can the students synthesize the acquired information, create an opinion about it and argue for their evaluation of it? Analyze: Can the students break the acquired information into parts and see what are the connections among them? Apply: Can the students transfer what they have learned and apply it in a different situation? Understand: Can the students explain the acquired content? Remember: Can the students remember the content?

Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives Students feedback: “It was useful for developing creativity, for the evaluation process, for the real work in schools, for comparing the levels of education. lot of important information with very clear instructions, good overview about thinking skills and really helps to develop them, helps learning, to focus attention, to better understand the curriculum, to use one’s intelligence, to train one’s mind, develops professional vocabulary, skill to work with longer texts in foreign language, funny inventive idea.

Mind-maps (T. Buzan)

Lotus Blossom (Y. Matsumura)

Students: - simple for various difficult problems - helps to define problems, analyse them, find sub- problems/causes, look for a lot of varied solutions. - motivates to search for adequate information. - leads to many ideas/and maybe correct solution. -graphic expression: clear, intelligent, transparent -very interesting, entertaining (also as after-school activity). - in FLT: develops vocabulary.

SCAMMPERR (A. Osborn) Substitute: Are there any parts of our solution/idea that can be replaced? Combine: Can our solution/product be with any other ideas to produce a new idea? Adapt: Are there any ideas that can be borrowed and applied in our situation? Magnify /Minimize: Are there parts of our idea/solution/product that can be magnified or minimized? Modify: Can anything in our idea be modified? Put it to some other use: Can we use the idea in another situation/with other learners? Eliminate: Should we eliminate any parts of our solution/idea? Rearrange: Is there any better order/hierarchy for our ideas? Reverse: Should we consider reversing the order/importance of any ideas/solutions?

Six Thinking Hats (Edward de Bono)

Six Thinking Hats Students - feedback: helps to simply understand the problem, analyse it, openly discuss, see it from six different angles (even in a ‘good light’), solve it by finding lots of solutions. facilitates learning (ability to summarize ideas) - develops intelligence. leads to acquiring new skills and knowledge, new vocabulary, general communicative skills, listening to English text. focus on one type of thinking but also to change the different types funny, transparent, very interesting

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