We live in a world where the things that are easy to teach and test have also become easy to digitize and automate. In this respect, creativity and critical thinking become increasingly important, both to ensure that we harness technology and continue to work together towards a more sustainable and humane world. It is neither surprising that most curricula give them more emphasis, nor that teachers find them difficult to teach and test.

Critical thinking and creativity are becoming increasingly important in the labour market, and contribute to a better personal and civic life. People will increasingly have to contribute to and absorb innovation. Moreover, with artificial intelligence and robotics possibly leading to automation prospects for a sizeable share of the economy, skills that are less easy to automate such as creativity and critical thinking become more valued. Even if there was no economic argument, creativity and critical thinking contribute to human well-being and to the good functioning of democratic societies.

The OECD Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) ran an international action research in 11 countries on “Fostering and Assessing Creativity and Critical Thinking Skills in Education”. The objective of the project was to build a shared language and understanding of what fostering creativity and critical thinking entails in primary and secondary education. After highlighting why creativity and critical thinking skills matter, the chapter presents the project’s goals, its main outputs (rubrics on creativity and critical thinking, examples of lesson plans and professional development plans) as well as insights from the fieldwork that were captured through mixed qualitative and quantitative methods.

This chapter argues that creativity and critical thinking are essential skills in innovationdriven societies and economies and key skills for employment in the digital age. Creativity and critical thinking also contribute to personal and social well-being. Most countries recognise them as key learning outcomes for their education systems. After presenting a state of the art of the research consensus on what creativity and critical thinking entail, the chapter presents the portfolio of OECD rubrics on creativity and critical thinking that were developed by working with teachers and schools networks in 11 countries, and reflects on how teachers used them to give students more opportunities to develop their creativity and critical thinking skills while teaching their usual curriculum.

This chapter presents eleven signature pedagogies that are aligned with the OECD rubrics on creativity and critical thinking and could inspire schools and teachers on how to nurture their students’ creativity and critical thinking in mathematics, science, visual arts, music and interdisciplinary projects. Signature pedagogies refer to structured pedagogical models that can be applied to pedagogical activities, projects or education as such. They go beyond pedagogical techniques that all teachers should master in addition to conventional teaching based on lecturing. Some of those pedagogies have been used by the country teams participating in the OECD project.

This chapter presents a framework to support teachers in the design of classroom activities that nurture students’ creativity and critical thinking skills as part of the curriculum. Developed collaboratively by participants in the OECD-CERI project, the framework is composed of a portfolio of domain-general and domain-specific rubrics and a set of design criteria to guide teachers in the development of lesson plans that create opportunities for students to demonstrate their creativity and critical thinking while delivering subject content. Teachers across teams in 11 countries worked to adapt their usual teaching practice to this framework and to develop lesson plans in multiple subject areas. The chapter presents a selection of exemplar lesson plans across subject areas and concludes with some key insights.

This chapter discusses the undertakings and experiences of the different teams taking part in the OECD-CERI project with regard to the development of teachers’ ability to foster and assess creativity and critical thinking. Local team co-ordinators relied on three types of measures to design their professional development strategies: teacher training, individual follow-up, peer dialogue and collaboration. Seeking support from school and system leaders was also key to provide teachers with good conditions for professional learning. The extent to which teams relied on these measures varied as their relevance and effectiveness depended on the specificities of local contexts.

By drawing on questionnaire data and qualitative feedback from teams in 11 countries, this chapter explores beliefs and behaviours around creativity and critical thinking among teachers participating in the OECD-CERI project. Do these teachers feel prepared for nurturing creativity and critical thinking in their students? Do they share an understanding of how these skills materialise in school settings, and of how they translate into the language of specific subject areas? Do they have practical ways of assessing student creativity and critical thinking? To what extent do curricula and teaching workloads allow them to innovate towards these goals?

This chapter presents the most relevant effects of the OECD-CERI pilot project on students’ outcomes and discusses the validation of the survey instruments. Furthermore, it introduces the initial findings of a class-level analysis, with a special focus on the most successful classes and the characteristics of their teachers, students and adopted pedagogical activities. Finally, it discusses the lessons learnt from the pilot phase. These are laid out by main topic and provide suggestions on how the survey operations and instruments can be improved in sight of the validation phase.

The OECD Secretariat developed five different instruments: three pre- and post-questionnaires (for students, teachers and school principals) and two achievement tests for students in maths and science, and in visual arts and music. A sixth tool was also used in order to assess students’ creativity, the domain-specific EPoC (Evaluation of Potential Creativity) test developed by Lubart, Besançon and Barbot (University of Paris-Descartes, France).