Summary about chapter 9 Facilitating Complex Thinking Moises Morel 2019-30-1-0057 Mireya Romero Facilitating Complex Thinking Knowing when to challenge, and when to support, when to pause and ask, and when to move on ahead—when to consolidate a student’s learning, and when to nudge the student forward, these are questions about instructional strategies which facilitate complex learning, either directly or indirectly. In this summary we`ll consider three somewhat complex forms of thinking that are commonly pursued in classroom learning: (1) critical thinking, (2) creative thinking, and (3) problem-solving. Critical thinking requires skill at analyzing the reliability and validity of information, as well as the attitude or disposition to do so. Educators have suggested a variety of specific cognitive skills as contributing to critical thinking. In one study, for example, the researcher found how critical thinking can be reflected in regard to a published article was stimulated by annotation—writing questions and comments in the margins of the article (Liu, 2006). Also the metacognition, this means strategies for thinking about thinking and for monitoring the success and quality of one’s own thinking. How best to teach critical thinking? Critical thinking takes on a different form in each learning context. Its details and appearance vary among courses and teachers. Creative thinking Creativity is the ability to make or do something new that is also useful or valued by others (Gardner, 1993). The “something” can be an object, a skill, or an action. The are two types of creative thinking, the first is creative thinking, the generation of ideas that are new as well as useful, productive, and appropriate. The second is that creative thinking can be stimulated by teachers’ efforts. Teachers can, for example, encourage students’ divergent thinking—ideas that are open-ended and that lead in many directions (Torrance, 1992; Kim, 2006). Divergent thinking is stimulated by open-ended questions—questions with many possible answers, such as the following: Another way of teaching critical thinking is using problem-solving. Problem-solving is the analysis and solution of tasks or situations that are complex or ambiguous and that pose difficulties or obstacles of some kind (Mayer & Wittrock, 2006). Problem solving happens in classrooms when teachers present tasks or challenges that are deliberately complex and for which finding a solution is not straightforward or obvious. Problems vary in how much information they provide for solving a problem, as well as in how many rules or procedures are needed for a solution. A well-structured problem provides much of the information needed and can in principle be solved using relatively few clearly understood rules. An ill-structured problem has the converse qualities: the information is not necessarily within the problem, solution procedures are potentially quite numerous, and a multiple solutions are likely (Voss, 2006). "The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing."—Albert Einstein References: Educational Psychology,second edition/Kelvin Seifert and Rosemary Sutton-2009
