Critical
Thinking
(versus Creative
Thinking)
“The need to be right all the time is
the biggest bar to new ideas. It is better to have enough ideas for some of
them to be wrong than to be always right by having no ideas” - Edward de Bono
Critical thinking involves logical
thinking and reasoning, including skills such as comparison, classification,
sequencing, cause/effect, patterning, analogies, deductive and inductive
reasoning, forecasting, planning, hypothesizing, and critiquing. Critical
thinking enables us to recognise a wide range of subjective analyses of
otherwise objective data, and to evaluate how well each analysis might meet our
needs.
Creative Thinking:
Creative thinking involves creating something new or
original. It involves the skills of
flexibility, originality, fluency, elaboration,
brainstorming, modification, imagery, associative
thinking, attribute listing,
metaphorical thinking and forced relationships.
The aim of creative thinking
is to stimulate curiosity and promote divergence.
Togetherness:
The critical and creative functions of the mind are so
interwoven, that neither can be separated from the other without an essential
loss to both.
Critical Thinking implies an effort to
see a thing clearly and truly so that not only the good in it may be
distinguished from the bad and the perfect from the imperfect, but also it as a
whole, may be fairly judged and valued.
While critical thinking can be thought of
as more left brain and creative thinking more right brain, they both involve "thinking."
Critical thinking includes a complex combination of skills. According to Paul
and Elder of the Foundation for Critical Thinking, the standards are:accuracy,
precision, relevance, depth, breadth, logic, significance and fairness.
Critical Thinkers:
Critical thinkers display the following characteristics: They
are by nature skeptical. They are active, not passive. They ask questions and analyse.
They consciously apply tactics and strategies to uncover meaning or assure
their understanding. They do not take an egotistical view of the world. They are
open to new ideas and perspectives.
They are willing to challenge their
beliefs and investigate competing evidence.
Critical thinking enables us to recognise
a wide range of subjective analyses of otherwise objective data, and to
evaluate how well each analysis might meet our needs.
Process:
Creativity masters a process of making or producing, while criticality
masters a process of assessing or judging Thus critical thinking has a creative
component: to produce a better product of thought.
And creative thinking has a critical component:
to reshape thinking in
keeping with criteria of excellence. Interrelation: To achieve any challenging end, we must have criteria,
gauges, measures, models, principles, standards, or tests to use in judging
whether we are approaching that end. Our creative thinking must be tested
against critical standards. Generative ability must be married to judiciousness
to achieve excellence. The great creative thinkers were great critical thinkers,
and vice versa. The interrelation and interdependence holds for all learners and
thinkers at all levels.
While critical thinking focuses on step-by-step,
linear processes aimed at arriving at a correct answer, creative thinking begins
with possibility, multiple ideas, and suspended judgement. It might be said that creative thinking
supports the ideas with which critical thinking works. Thus, even though these
two kinds of thinking work in different ways, they actually support one another
and aim at the same ultimate goal, which is to solve a
problem. At the beginning of the process,
creative methods are used to
examine the problem environment, generate
ideas, and make associations.
Then the analysis and judgment faculties
are brought into play, and the possibilities are analysed for a possible
solution.
Critical thinking without a creative output
is merely negative thinking
while Creative thinking without a
critical component is merely novel thinking.
CSAUG 2017
No comments:
Post a Comment