Fostering Students' Creativity and Critical Thinking
What it Means in School

Creativity and critical thinking are key skills for complex, globalised and increasingly digitalised economies and societies. While teachers and education policy makers consider creativity and critical thinking as important learning goals, it is still unclear to many what it means to develop these skills in a school setting. To make it more visible and tangible to practitioners, the OECD worked with networks of schools and teachers in 11 countries to develop and trial a set of pedagogical resources that exemplify what it means to teach, learn and make progress in creativity and critical thinking in primary and secondary education. Through a portfolio of rubrics and examples of lesson plans, teachers in the field gave feedback, implemented the proposed teaching strategies and documented their work. Instruments to monitor the effectiveness of the intervention in a validation study were also developed and tested, supplementing the insights on the effects of the intervention in the field provided by the team co-ordinators.
What are the key elements of creativity and critical thinking? What pedagogical strategies and approaches can teachers adopt to foster them? How can school leaders support teachers' professional learning? To what extent did teachers participating in the project change their teaching methods? How can we know whether it works and for whom? These are some of the questions addressed in this book, which reports on the outputs and lessons of this international project.
Also available in: French
- Click to access:
-
Click to download PDF - 4.82MBPDF
-
Click to Read online and shareREAD
Creativity and critical thinking: From concepts to teacher-friendly rubrics
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.
Also available in: French
- Click to access:
-
Click to download PDF - 571.16KBPDF
-
Click to Read online and shareREAD