Stephen Brookfield: Creative and Critical Thinking

Stephen Brookfield: Creative and Critical Thinking

The video by Dr Stephen Brookfield talks about what critical and creative thinking is and how to challenge students to develop this. He defines critical thinking as the focus on understanding and checking out assumptions and creative thinking as the ability to look at things from multiple points of view and have multiple responses to familiar ideas. In addition to that, he also explains that the way that we act, our decisions our actions our judgments choices in life are based on sets of assumptions and there exist three kinds of assumptions, the first one is casual assumption that consist on expalin a sequence of events. The second one is preescriptive it consist on assumptions about how things should happen and how should we baheve. The last one is paradigamtic it consist on framing and structuring assumptions that are viewed obvious common sense and taken for granteed.

According to Brookflied, there are four key intellectual traditions. The first one is analytic philosophy, when you develop this intellectual tradition you are more inductive, deductive, analogical, inferential and reasoning.  The second one is natural science is when people are more hypothetical, deductive can be disproved. The third one is critical theory it consit on  uncovering power, dynamics and ideological manipulation. The last one is pragmatism is when you are more experimental and creative pursuit of beautiful consequences.

At the end of the video Brookflied gives some aspects for making this process of learning to think critically and creatively easier, two of them are to end discussions and exercises with questions and provide the students real world illustrations and examples.

Finally, Brookfield explains some crucial aspects in order for teachers encourage their students to develop this way of thinking and why it is important, because as he claims “who we are as teachers is significantly framed by who we have been as learners”