Redesigning the Future - Assignment Example

This would provide an opportunity to introduce the standards to teachers and allow them to infuse them into their curriculum and develop assessments based on their understanding of the critical/creative thinking standards. 4. Allow teachers the time to use these strategies and assessment principles in their classrooms in an attempt to help them develop their own individuality when designing and assessing instruction while at the same time providing them with innovative experimentation. 5. Reunite with teachers to dialogue about what they thought was effective and ineffective, their evaluation of the critical thinking standards, and what barriers they felt impeded their abilities to utilize this manner of instruction and assessment.

Having a healthy dialogue with teachers about critical/creative thinking and then affording them the time to utilize methods and strategies for teaching and assessing thinking would allow teachers to think about and identify their own practices. Building metacognitive opportunities into the process would allow teachers to think creatively and intellectually about their own teaching processes. This would motivate them to recognize what they thought was valuable and what they thought should be changed in their curriculum and instructional methods, along with recognizing where they might be able to learn more about critical and creative thinking and instruction.

All good decisions and solutions to problems require a clear understanding of what the actual problem is. Helping students separate causes from solutions, symptoms from problems, and sub-problems from real problems is essential for teaching students to think critically. For example, defining the wrong problem can send a student down the wrong path to, at a minimum, irrelevant solutions, and ensure that she will not understand the subject matter or concepts she is examining. Helping students define problems to take what they are learning and phrase inquiry in the form of questions to be answered through research and collaboration is a goal of critical instruction.

Helping students see the goals and objectives of what they are studying is essential to help them understand the subject matter. Many problems with students' understanding of, for example, biology or history come with the fact that they do not know why they are studying biology or history what biologists and historians attempt to accomplish through their scholarly endeavors. By not identifying the goals contained within various disciplines, students cannot be expected to understand the discipline as a system.

For example, without understanding what a biologist seeks to accomplish by studying cells, let's say, the student cannot possibly hope to identify biological problems in the area of cellular formation or development. It cannot be taken for granted that students understand what historians, biologists, mathematicians, artists, or journalists do; in fact, it should be assumed the opposite and engage students in discussions as to the purposes behind studying one subject or another.