ARTICLE ON CREATIVE AND CRITICAL THINKING

ARTICLE ON CREATIVE AND CRITICAL THINKING

What is the difference between critical and creative thinking?

         Being a thinker who can apply both critical and creative thinking is necessary for increasing the level of competence in performing certain tasks and dealing with daily life. Both types of these thinking need to be nurtured because both of the thinking abilities can guarantee the beneficial and development of one’s personal life, educational level, wider views and economic development. Creative and critical thinking skills are considered essential for students (Crane, 1983). He claimed that both critical and creative thinking play equal and important roles in completing a better andragogy across the mission of long life learning. Even though both of the thinking are often contrasted, but the combination of these two thinking definitely will create a better thinker. How critical thinking differ from creative thinking? What are the strategies can be applied in both critical and creative thinking?

Specifically, critical thinking is convergent while creative thinking is divergent. Critical thinking will activate the usage of left brain as compared to critical thinking and critical thinking to seek for relevant facts, information and argument about technical subject. Meanwhile, creative thinking, the right side of the brain will be activated more than left brain, is to create something new by inserting the senses of innovative and inventive. In the other words, critical thinking involves synthesis and evaluation of information while creative thinking includes the importance of initiative and imagination. These thinking are contrasted but intimately linked. Both teaching and learning process should include critical and creative thinking in order to enhance learning in students’ case study, self-learning and problem solving in daily life.

Critical Thinking

            The differences of critical and creative thinking can be differentiated by their components. The components for critical thinking include making inferences with inductive or deductive reasoning skills, judging and making evaluation after observation, creating sensible argument and solving obstacles or problems besides making decisions. In the other words, it is about a reasonable reflective thinking that focuses on what to believe or what to do. Researchers found out that people can develop their critical thinking competencies when they were in their early age. Critical thinking skill is correlated to create metacognition and motivation for students in achieving their learning outcomes.

Metacognition, thinking about thinking, in critical thinking supports students by implanting self-worth and self-determination in students themselves. For the example, it encourages students to evaluate and monitor their own thinking process and as a result, they are likely to perform high quality of ideas. Furthermore, when metacognition included in forming critical thinking, self regulated learning among the students will increase effectively. This is because the ability for making critical reasoning and sensible arguments in themselves will regulated often.

Most of the researchers view that motivation can facilitated the development of critical thinking. Facione (2002) defined disposition as the consistent internal motivation to engage problems and solve problems. Motivation is the presupposition for critical thinking and high order thinking skills in having encourages to create and deal with large flow of ideas. With motivation, people can encourage themselves to create ideas and think beyond the theories based on the facts and facilitate critical thinking by asking how, what and why for problem solving. Motivation supports critical thinking in students and those who are motivated to learn are more likely to persist the tasks given and call for critical thinking.

            The main characteristics of critical thinking included active and open. They are active and not passive because they ask question and do analyses to uncover some tasks and to assure their understanding. Meanwhile, critical thinking is said to be opened because they free to create and generate new ideas or perspectives. They do not view certain idea in egotistical way but they investigate for the evidence.

Creative Thinking

            Creative thinking involves imagination, initiative and one’s own way of thinking style in finding solutions to learning tasks. Clegg (2008), Feldman and Benjamin (2006) reported that creativity has becoming a topic of ever-increasing interest to educational settings. Indeed, teachers carry a big responsible in facilitating students’ creativity and their potentials in the classroom. In the other words, teachers serve as the metronome and role model in the classroom and help students to develop their thinking potentials. Teachers’ missions not only stop at the development of students’ in the classroom but teachers need to maximize students’ potentials and help them to apply in their daily life.

            Creative thinking can be said as expressive, productive, innovative and imaginative thinking. It can be facilitated by making smart guesses on certain tasks, modified and speak out their own opinions and formulating hypotheses and communicated the results. Creative thinking promotes creation or thinks out of the box when solving problems to improve the existing theories. An obvious example can be shown when the generation of mobile phone keep renovating and becoming more advance in varieties of designs and functions. Besides that, the development of hard disk, which can store 1 Terabyte in a mobile and convenient size, is created to replace floppy disk, which can only store 4 Megabyte when it invented for the first time around late 1960. Next, emergenative is a type of creative thinking skill that introduces a new creation of another way of thinking. As an example, for launching Green Revolution, chemical fertilizers and insecticides are invented in order to solve agriculture’s problems.

            The main characteristics in creative thinking include looking for variety of answers and allowing imagination to flow through. Creative thinkers are encourage to search for variety of alternatives and problem solving methods while try to view the problem in the different perspectives. In addition, creative thinking allows imagination in searching for answers. Some of the ideas may sound silly or unacceptable but creative thinkers know the limit and the barrier of their ability in providing a proper and suitable problem solving method .

Strategies That Can Be Applied In Critical And Creative Thinking

            How can we measure the effectiveness of critical and creative thinking in the classroom as these thinking are abstract? The way of thinking and the way of the students expressing their thought can be evaluated easily whether they are critical or creative thinkers. Moreover, high qualities thinkers can create innovative but sensible ideas as compared to normal thinkers because they can see further and can think out of the box. Students’ attitude towards the effort to apply critical and creative thinking in the classroom is very important and when the students are willing to receive the teacher’s way of teaching, they can adapt much more knowledge than they expected. Critical and creative thinking can act as teaching medium in the classroom by expanding students’ horizon and the way of thinking, exploring variety possibilities for solving the problems, generating and exchanging ideas, making evaluations on the assumptions and enacting the solution. Thus, critical and creative thinking can be applied in the classroom in many effective strategies.

            Approaches or strategies that involved in critical thinking including nurture rational thinking, be open minded in adapting ideas, have disciplinary in gathering information and give out judgments. Rationality in critical thinking is a compulsory element because this sense enables one to analyze apparent confusion and ask questions in sensible way. A rational thinking person will rely on reasons and evidences rather than emotion. Rationality will lead one to be more concern about finding the best explanation and evidence to search for solution. In critical thinking, the element of open mindedness is encouraged for the thinkers to evaluate all the reasonable inferences in order to make conclusion, consider variety of possible views to the subject matter and able to accept new ideas to evidence’s reevaluation. For an example, the varieties theories in education such as Behaviorism, Innatism and Interactionism are being accepted in explaining students’ behaviors during learning process. Students’ behaviors not only restrict to one theory but those critical thinkers enable to accept new opinions and conclude them into their thinking to form their own conclusion.

            What do disciplinary means in critical thinking? Thinkers need to be precise and meticulous when searching for comprehensive and exhaustive ideas. After the thinkers gathered all the information needed, they need to conclude and give explanation based on their own thinking and not just copying others’ ideas. For the element of judgment, when searching for information and others’ views toward certain tasks, critical thinkers enable to recognize the extent and the weight of the evidence. They can know how far the relevance of the perspectives and the assumptions go and they are able to detect the weaknesses of the views.

            There are many techniques can be used in approaching creative thinking. The open mindedness element also occurs in creative thinking but the way is a bit different from critical thinking. Creative thinkers will open to ideas, look for ways to make something works and pushing the idea to its limits by including the sense of imagination. In the classroom, teacher can encourages students to brainstorm on a topic and just write down all the ideas that flow through their mind. Moreover, by asking students the same questions for at least twenty times, students are able to give out different answer and different opinions each times. The compulsory method to create more creative thinkers is to keep asking question to question: Why do you think you know the answer and do you have any evidence to support your opinions? Next, teacher need to encourage students to keep an ideas book and  jot down their ideas straight away when they figure out something new as the ideas can slip away easily. Furthermore, the design of the curriculum or outdoor activities in school also needs to include the elements of play, teamwork, problem solving and imagination to boost the students’ creativity.

Conclusion

            An idea of balance training in creative thinking and critical thinking is the superior thinking. There is no saying stated about which thinking is higher than another thinking but both critical and creative thinking need to be sharpen to create superior idea. The combination of both of the thinking can develop a higher thinking ability. The role of imagination and creativity, with the sense of rationality from critical thinking, in explaining certain concept will create high level of thinking level. In Malaysia, government facilitates high order thinking skills by adapting many questions that require students’ opinion based on their own view and facts in the examination. Thus, in order to create and facilitate critical and creative thinking, thinkers need to take their chances to think outside the box based on rational and explainable facts.

            

PEDAGOGY IN TEACHING

PEDAGOGY IN TEACHING

Daily Lesson Plan    

Subject                       : English                                             

Form                           : 2 Excellent 2                         Place               : Classroom

Date                            : 03 Februari 2012                   Time               : 8.50 a.m to 10.10 a.m

Theme                                    : Jobs People Do

Learning area            : Occupation

Learning objective    : Define each occupation and their jobs

Learning outcomes:  Students are:-

1.      Able to know the collective nouns for people.

2.      Able to recognize the past tense forms, plural forms and contractions.

3.      Able to conduct positive and negative statement sentences.

4.      Able to take part in discussion and gain confidence to
interact.

5.      Able to identify the main idea of the conversation.

6.      Able to conduct interview through variety of occupations.

7.      Able to read the dialogue in the right intonation.

8.      Able to memorize what they have learned.

Duration                     : 80 minutes

Teaching aids            : 1. Power point slides
2.  Hands out (worksheet)
3.  Paper strips
4.  Mah-jong paper and marker (for presentation)

Prerequisite                : Students have previous knowledge about:

1.      How to interact with others when a situation is given (introduce occupation).

2.      The common occupation around them and their responsibility.

3.      The proper intonation for give out question and statement sentence.

4.      The basic rules in forming positive and negative statement.

Method/Pedagogy     : Discussion, presentation, role play.

Scientific skill            : Introduce new words, conducting presentation, carry out group   discussion.

Thinking skill            : Idea generating, describing, characterizing, sentence forming, comparing and contrasting.

Phase	Learning outcomes	Teaching and learning activities	Vocabulary/Notes
Induction Set (5 minutes)		1.       Teacher asks students to name the common occupations. 2.      Teacher will show some pictures of different uniforms through slides. 3.      Teacher asks the students about their understanding of the pictures.      Q :  Is that the uniform of the navy or sailor ?      A : It is a navy uniform.     Q : Can you introduce yourself as a navy?  Then, teacher gives examples in introducing an occupation and their responsibility.	Uniform- the proper attire that symbolic the occupation. Navy- nation armed service that conducts military operation at sea.
Generating ideas (20 minutes)	Able to know the collective noun for people. Able to recognize the past tense forms, plural forms and contractions. Able to conduct positive and negative statement sentences.	1.   Teacher introduces more occupations and their collective nouns through slides. 2.   Teacher elaborates more on their responsibility and how to recognize them based on their uniforms. 3.   Teacher emphasizes on English rules, Subject- Verb agreement when forming sentences. 4.   Teacher needs to introduce the way to use past tense and contractions (comma). - The person worked as a nurse before but now, she is retired. 5.   Teacher reminds the students about negative and positive sentences in order to clarify statement.	An army of soldiers A crew of sailors A troupe of artists I am a soldier. My responsibility is to protect my country. I worked as a nurse in Johor. Now, I am a house wife. Negative statement: I am not a doctor. Positive statement: I am a nurse.
Restructuring Ideas (Students’ centered-activities) (40 minutes)	Able to take part in discussion and gain confidence to interact. Able to identify the main idea of the conversation. Able to read the dialogue in the right intonation.	1.   Students are divided into 4 groups. Teacher guides and monitors group by group to encourage the participants involve in the group talk. 2.   Each group is asked to choose an occupation and elaborate all the ideas by writing down on mah-jong paper. 3.   A representative from each group will present their ideas in front of the class (using mah-jong paper and marker pen). 4.   With teacher’s guide, students read the dialogues with intonation and body gesture. Student A : I am a police officer. Can I help you? Student B : I want to be the witness of the car accident.	Give suggestion on occupations : -       Astronomer -       Mechanic -       Geneticist -       Project builder Read dialogues based on the handout given with intonation.  Role play.
Application (10 minutes)	Able to conduct interview through variety of occupations.	1.   Students write down an occupation that they want to be in the paper strips and introduce themselves in groups. 2.   Students try to discover the responsibility of the occupation.	Try to conduct own dialogues/ conversation. Role play.
Conclusion (5 minutes)	Able to memorize what they have learned.	Teacher summarized the topic with simple explanation and give out some homework.	All the students.

Homework:

• Assign the students to do complete the exercise given and the exercise will be discussed in the next class.
• Students need to do a simple mind map about the things they have learned in the class.

Reflection:
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________

Reference

Rohini Shanta, Uma Kurup and Shalani Lorenz. Form 2 English Textbook: Chapter 2 : Jobs People Do. Petaling Jaya, Malaysia. Perniagaan Mega Setia Emas Sdn. Bhd.
 ( Kod buku: F022168)

Language Learning Theories

Language Learning Theories

JOURNAL 1 : BEHAVIOURISM

How to learn English better?

            Educators often apply variety of theories and rules to ensure the regulations in the classroom will be well organized. One of the popular theories among the educators is behaviorism theory. Behaviourism emphasizes in influencing certain behavior to more preferable and modifies changes in behavior or the way of thinking. This theory can be applied to shape the classroom or to have a better classroom management especially in language teaching. Reinforcement and punishment or rewards are normally used to help in shaping the change of behavior in students.

            In order to help the learners to learn English better and easier, educators need to know the way to attract the learners in teaching and learning process. Since language is really hard to learn and some of learners even take English as a foreign language and not second language, educators need to draw their interest in learning this language. For example, educators can apply behaviorism in the form of reinforcement in the classroom by giving out vocabulary flash cards to the learners who answer the questions correctly. Next, educators also can apply punishment such as do extra exercises on certain topics or re-take the test if the learners failed their test.

            Speaking session is one of the important elements in language learning. Learners are encouraged to learn a language by speaking in order to communicate orally. Educators need to teach the learners about the pronunciation of certain words and how to apply the words into sentences. Thus, educators need to aware of the suitability of the environment surrounding to hold a discussion and encourage their learners to speak or read aloud. To encourage them to speak more and become active participators in the speaking session, educators can provide some CDs as a reward for those who can express their thinking well. Furthermore, educators also can organize some games such as tongue twister, hang man or creating words by the front alphabet to have a fully participation from the learners.

`           In conclusion, every language is hard to learn since those languages are not our mother tongue. However, it is not possible to be an expert in English or foreign language if the learners are learning by practicing frequently and get used to it. As a saying goes by, practice make perfect.

JOURNAL 2 (KRASHEN’S LEARNING THEORIES)
THE ACQUISITION LEARNING HYPOTHESIS

                Krashen discovered that the competence of second language can be developed by language acquisition. Acquisition learning hypothesis consists of two independent systems, the acquired system and the learned system, that highly influence second language learning abilities. Acquired system can be seen when the children learn or acquire their native language naturally in subconscious situation. Acquisition learning theories focus in communication approach to obtain high competency in language learning. Natural communication in daily life and informal situation is a meaningful interaction between the children and the environment surrounding. Thus, children will learn their utterances about words and vocabulary of their knowledge from their surroundings.

            After acquisition process, children will undergo the learned system whereby the children need to involve in formal learning and comprise a conscious process. In this stage, the children begin to use grammatical rules and apply the learned language in formal situation. The children will have instructors to guide them to apply the knowledge in the correct way. In the other words, the children gained their knowledge about language and its grammatical rules are considered as the product of formal learning about that certain language. In learned system, the children begin to identify the grammatical errors and build the correct form of words.

            Through this learning method introduced by Krashen, the ability of learning and developing second language can be more effective. According to this theory, communication or oral speaking is the most optimum way to learn language. Thus, educators are encourage to apply this learning theory into their teaching by giving some oral practices, motivation ,communicate with their students in English and encourage their students to express their thought in English. By this method, children can learn more words and be able to speak fluently as the time goes by. Through this theory, children are acquired the language instead of just learning the language.

            In conclusion, acquisition is a learning process whereby interesting and meaningful interaction in targeted language is required. Every child will undergo this process and slowly integrate to learning process. Then, they will learn about the language more deeper by understanding the grammatical rules in their language.

JOURNAL 3 (Interactionism)

Interactionists claim the importance of interaction role in second language acquisition. Long in 1997 mentioned about the importance of conversational interaction in facilitating language acquisition by connecting the learners’ internal capacities, attention in a productive way. Vygotsky and Krashen can be categorized as the main Interactionist based on their views towards the approaches such as work in group or collaboration and interact with others during second language learning process. ‘Every function in the children’s culture development appears twice: first, on social level and later, on the individual level…inside the child’ (Vygotsky, 1978).

            Vygotsky views the social interaction as the main role in language learning process and propose the Zone of Proximal Development. His view supported by Krashen’s stance by saying that ‘Acquisition requires meaningful interaction in the target language’ (Krashen, 1981). I fully agree that the social interaction can facilitate language learning because conversational learning provided learners with daily and necessary comprehensive linguistic input. In addition, through interaction, the learners can give output through speaking to immerse themselves well in using second language. Therefore, besides reading and writing, the learners of second language need to use their sensory of hearing while give feedback or response to others by stating out their opinion in order to fulfill two ways interaction in second language.

            The theory of the Zone of Proximal Development that elaborates more on interactionism can be applied in language teaching in the class. In my opinion, students need to take part in group work and interact with each other to generate more ideas while communicate in targeted language. Next, the students also facilitate language acquisition by sharing some information or solving crossword puzzles in the form of group. Moreover, I think texting or communicate with native speaker of the second language can boost my understanding to use certain phrases or words correctly. As I asked about certain phrases in Japanese language to a Japanese, he is able to explain well and I can understand the usage of the words easily.

                In conclusion, Interactionists’ views can facilitate language learning effectively as they interact with people around them by using targeted second language. For me, social interaction that consists of giving and receiving information not only generate more ideas but also enrich the vocabulary and fluency of second language. In the other words, language proficiency can be more effective by interaction and communication with the surrounding.

JOURNAL 4 (Motivation)

            Motivation can be identified as source of force or desire to complete certain tasks. From my opinion, motivation is the early stage for learners to do or learning something new. Based on Dornyei model, he claimed motivation to 3 stages which is preactional stage, actional stage and postactional stage. Those three stages involve different types of motivation. From my point of view, the classification of each type of motivation is logical and important before start work on a task.

            Basically, there are two types of motivation which are intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. I think both of the motivations are equally important to create motivated language learners. Extrinsic motivation occurs when the language learners wish to perform a behavior to earn reward and avoid punishment by taking part in competition or study hard to get good grades. Meanwhile, intrinsic motivation can occur when the language learners are interested in learning targeted second language and want to know more for own sake. For the example, language learners will play language games such as puzzle and scrabble to know more vocabularies.

            Moreover, there are many the theories that can illustrate the importance and the function of motivation towards language learners. The level of self-efficacy in second language learners is very important. They need prior experience and social support to increase the level of self-efficacy. When the learners have self-efficacy in learning second language, they can adapt the targeted language better. Self-efficacy is one’s belief or self confidence in accomplishing tasks. However, I think students should have positive outcome expectations and logical idea in performing the tasks because the tasks cannot be accomplish if the learners only have high self-efficacy.

            Furthermore, goal theory is another type of motivation that can lead the second language learners to learn language effectively. Goal theory acts as the outcome expectation so learners need to motivate themselves to reach the goal by variety of efforts and approaches. For the example, when students plan to discover the concept of English rules, subject and verb agreement, they need to pay their effort in reading Grammar book, participate in discussion and doing the exercises given by their teachers.

            In my opinion, self determination theory is a very interesting theory because it can be said as partially intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Self determination can be classified in intrinsic when the students learn to know and or to accomplish tasks. Meanwhile, self determination also can be said as extrinsic motivation when the students learn for competence. The importance of self determination in language learning can be seen when learners know what and why they need to learn. Learners themselves control their learning progress and I think this kind of motivation can guide language learning process become more meaningful even though sometimes the learners need to learn second language under pressure to achieve the goal or the objective targeted.

 JOURNAL 5 (Opinion on poster presentation)

            For Language Learning Theories course, we have been assigned for a poster presentation on motivation as our last assignment. First of all, we discovered certain method to complete the poster presentation which is by improving our skills in searching for the right information while reading and understanding all the articles. We were grouping into 3 person each group. Each of us agreed that we need to read at least three articles from the right sources.

            When my group members and I sit together and discuss about our assignment, we will write the date and the topic that we discussed as an evidence and note that we can refer back later on. For our first meeting, we assigned position for each of us in the group for making the tasks distribution easier. Poster presentation is a form of group work so we all know the important of cooperation between the members to complete our task. Thus, after we found some important point and a bit hard to figure out by ourselves, we will discuss together either by using social media or discuss face to face. Moreover, we also had a great time in completing the poster together after gathering the important points that we want to explain.

Poster presentation learning style enables the cooperation between team members to work on something together. Then, each of us needs to understand the concept that we need to present to the crowd and not just understand our own part. Understanding and information adapting can grow better when we explained about it to others. Through this presentation style, we gained a lot of skills such as skimming and information searching skills. We need to identify the main points for our topics and put them into the poster. Thus, we learned organize skills to organize our information neatly to fit them in the poster. Next, we gained communication skills when we make discussion among our group members and explain our views to others.

For me, when I searched articles that related to motivation, I will easily confuse and mess up with the information because there are too many ways of thinking for the same topic by the critical thinkers. I face difficulty when I need to differentiate the right definition of the theory based on the majority thinkers and draw a conclusion for that certain theory. Next, I will be a bit frustrated when I unable to have discussion with my team members because they have other activities to do. However, I like the way we had our discussion because we were able to give ideas while accepting other’s opinion. In completing the poster, we applied critical and creative thinking well. For critical thinking, we analyze and categorize the information in the simplest way to explain in the poster and we present our poster with creative design and information organization structure.

In conclusion, I found poster presentation learning style is quite interesting and it is a student-centered learning. Students need to find information on their own and deliver it to the crowd. However I think poster presentation has a weakness. Others students which is the audience are hard to focus on the presenters because they unable to see the information well as the size of the poster are small.