After spending two days discussing creativity and critical thinking in education with colleagues from across the world at OECD and UNESCO Headquarters last week, I wanted to capture my reflections on current discussions and challenges in the field, not least for my own benefit and in an attempt to structure my thoughts; but I hope these reflections are also of interest to others and look forward to hearing your views.

The potential of teaching creative and critical thinking skills

It probably does not come as a surprise that everyone attending the events agreed about the potential and indeed the need to teach creative and critical thinking skills to tackle the challenges of the 21st century, focusing in particular on Climate Change and the rise of AI. These were, of course, events quite clearly aimed at an interested audience, so the views of people in the rooms certainly did not reflect those of all educational communities, especially the ones that were not represented, but there is clearly a critical mass of people internationally who are interested in this topic and many countries have already made significant progress towards adapting their assessment methods in an attempt to test a wider range of skills. I particularly enjoyed presentations from ministers of education from Tonga and the Maldives, who reflected on the need to reform their education systems to make them more culturally responsive and provide more opportunities for students to think critically and creatively. In Tonga, for example, 30% of students’ final grades are now based on internal assessments, students have the choice to answer exam questions in Tongan or English and the curriculum has been reformed to be a lot more culturally relevant. 

For anyone reading this who might be getting concerned about a lack of focus on knowledge and direct teaching approaches, rest assured, it was made clear that such approaches continue to be important to build the foundation for creative and critical thinking, but students need to be taught explicitly how to combine this knowledge in novel ways to solve novel problems. However, what can be considered as ‘novel’ is also important to consider. Do we mean completely novel and innovative, or ‘personally novel’, i.e. new to the person having the thought?

Creative and critical thinking can (and need to be) taught

This leads me to the second important point. It became clear from discussions during those two days that creative and critical thinking skills can and need to be taught. This is to say that creativity was not considered as something innate but rather as a skill that students can acquire through explicit teaching at all ages. This suggests that creative and critical thinking do not simply emerge as a result of being exposed to enough content. Whilst content knowledge is certainly the basis on which creative thinking skills can be built,content knowledge alone is not enough. It was also made clear that creative thinking is not, and should not be, reserved to the arts; it spans all subjects, including maths and sciences. 

Challenges to teaching creative and critical thinking skills

Despite the general enthusiasm for the potential of teaching creative and critical thinking skills explicitly, a number of challenges surfaced as discussions took place over the two days.

• Standardised assessments

One barrier to teaching creative and critical thinking skills continues to be the use of standardised assessments; or at least the ways in which standardised assessments are being graded. The whole aim of teaching students how to think critically is to teach them that problems can be solved in a multitude of ways, and that there is typically more than one right answer. Standardised tests often do exactly the opposite. They require students to answer questions in a specific way, usually relating to both form and content, and therefore teachers teach students how to formulate their answers for their highest chance of success. This constitutes a real challenge for teachers working in systems with high-stakes, standardised assessments. How can they prepare their students for such standardised assessments on the one hand while also providing them with opportunities to think ‘out of the box’ in their lessons? How do we expect students to cope with such mixed messages? To me, two approaches could possibly address this issue. One option would be to address how standardised exams are graded, so that a wider range of possible solutions are accepted. Alternatively, or additionally, formative assessments, which capture students’ thinking and the final product over an extended period of time could be combined with summative assessments and given additional weight to allow for a wider range of competences to be tested. 

• A crowded curriculum

Teaching students how to think critically and creatively takes time. They need the time to develop their ideas, sometimes even to go down the wrong path only to realise that an alternative answer may be more appropriate. It is also typically associated with teaching approaches such as guided inquiry-based learning, which is often more time-consuming than direct teaching. In already crowded curricula, there is little space to engage in this type of learning, so countries need to review their curricula and allow for more time to engage with fewer topics more deeply to encourage this way of teaching.

• Teachers’ content knowledge and own levels of criticality

Teaching creative and critical thinking skills requires a high level of subject knowledge and confidence from teachers. This is because the final answer is not necessarily set in stone. We discussed a case study focusing on a Year 8 Science lesson with the topic ‘Should we replace our power station’. In this example, students were asked to brainstorm different approaches to energy generation and come up with a replacement for their local power station through a process of research and debate, including calculations of energy production of the different sources. Such an approach requires the teacher to have strong subject knowledge to guide students through both possible and interesting-yet-impossible solutions to a given problem. Sometimes, this can even include unexpected discussions such as ‘can we reduce our energy consumption enough so as not to need to replace our current power station?’ – ‘Interesting thought, let us calculate that.’ This would be a clear deviation from a given lesson plan, but a lesson that builds on students’ interest whilst developing their knowledge. 

• Teacher agency

As mentioned above, Teacher agency is, as ever, crucial to consider (if you know me and my writing, you will surely have noticed a pattern), but in particular in the context of teaching creative and critical thinking skills. It clearly emerged that teachers need the necessary freedom to explore different options and scenarios with their students and to build on their prior knowledge and thinking. This is difficult to achieve with top-down approaches and centralised lesson plans. 

So, before countries can rush into changing their assessments and curricula to include creative and critical thinking skills, they need to consider how teachers’ initial and continuous training prepares them for this type of thinking.

• Defining what’s acceptable

In my own teaching, I once asked my 14 year-old English as a Foreign Language students in Austria to write a letter of complaint from elves to Father Christmas about their working conditions as a pre-Christmas lesson, in an attempt to have them engage creatively with the text type of ‘letter of complaint’ that is part of Austria’s A-Levels (Oh, the things I have done to keep students engaged in the run-up to Christmas). One student handed in a miniscule piece of paper with tiny writing, arguing that an authentic letter written by elves couldn’t possibly be written on A4 paper, let alone be type-written. A stroke of genius, I thought, although it made my job of marking their work significantly harder. Luckily, as a teacher in Austria at the time, I had significant levels of agency and it was up to me whether I wanted to accept this piece of writing as meeting the necessary requirements (it did!) or whether I wanted to reject it based on form. It is important that we define and set the parameters of what is acceptable and agree on how much deviation from these parameters we are willing to accept, both as part of everyday lessons and as part of exams. 

• Humanities, where art thou?

As somebody with a background in the humanities (foreign languages, linguistics, literary studies, cultural studies), it struck me just how often I thought ‘well, that’s just good teaching, isn’t it?’, because in the humanities, it is. Teaching students how to take multiple perspectives, interpret a given piece of art, literature or music from a range of viewpoints, cope with nuance, play around with ideas and debate different potential solutions are part and parcel of teaching in the humanities. Or at least they should be. Yet, the humanities have been gradually but consistently standardised or pushed out of curricula in many countries over the past decades as they were not deemed ‘scientific’ or important enough in preparing young people for work or life. I would suggest that we need to revisit and reverse this development and accord the humanities their righteous place in education, right at the heart of it, developing students’ creative and critical thinking skills as they have always intended to do.

• Neurodiversity

For some, thinking through multiple solutions can be exciting. For others, it can be anxiety-inducing and stressful. This can be true whether they have a diagnosed SEND or not. We need to recognise that not all students will naturally thrive with this type of teaching approach and some students may need much higher levels of support to accept this novel way of thinking and teaching. It is important that teachers are trained in supporting (neurodivergent) students in this new type of learning before it can be rolled out more widely.

As a team, we look forward to exploring these challenges and different approaches to teaching creative thinking skills in primary schools as part of our pilot programme adapting the OECD’s Professional Learning Framework to the English context. 

To find out more and/or to sign up to our welcome webinar on 29th September, please click here. 

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Background on the events we attended

My colleague Jen Crittenden, our Teacher Advocacy Lead, and myself first attended a meeting at OECD Headquarters on Tuesday, 16th of September, to share with colleagues from Canada, China, France, Hungary, India, Slovenia and Portugal our respective progress of adapting the OECD’s professional learning framework on creative and critical thinking to our local contexts. It was fascinating to hear the different approaches teams took to adapt and implement the framework, ranging from working with students during their initial teacher training to in-service teachers and ranging from relatively small-scale implementations like our own to region-, or even country-wide trials. It became evident that policymakers’ support of such initiatives is key if we want to achieve sustainable and wide-reaching change. 

On Wednesday, 17th of September, Jen and I attended the 7th Creativity in Education Summit at UNESCO Headquarters, which brought together policymakers, practitioners and researchers who are interested in fostering creative and critical thinking skills in education.