Creativity, Critical Thinking, & Problem Solving
There are many types of critical thinking skills that can be incorporated in any lesson to engage students in higher order thinking. Examples of critical thinking may include 1) evaluating bias, credibility, consistency, qualifications, or recency of information 2) evaluating primary sources versus secondary sources, inferences, or validity of reasons 3) identifying assumptions, opinions, claims, ambiguities, missing parts of an argument, adequacy of definitions, or appropriateness of conclusions (Rimm, Siegle, and Davis, 2018). After learning a lot about critical thinking, I had the opportunity to revise an upcoming ELA lesson to incorporate critical thinking.
While reading Creativity: The Psychology of Discovery and Invention by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, I learned a lot about creativity, how it is used, when it is used, etc. Csikszentmihalyi described creativity as “a central source of meaning in our lives” (2013, pg.1). This presentation explains some of the most important information that I took away from Csikszentmihalyi's book. You will learn about why creativity is important, why it is important to education, information about creative problem solving, and the concept of FLOW.
One of the final topics I learned about during my journey through the gifted education courses was advocacy. The definition of advocacy is "the act or process of advocating or supporting a cause or proposal" (Lewis and Karnes, 2005). This is so important in all aspects of education, but I had the opportunity of applying it to gifted education and creating my own advocacy plan. The attached plan explains the steps I would take if my program was threatened to be shutdown/lose its funding.