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| Creative Thinking | Critical Thinking |
| Definition | Creativity is a process to search and explore various alternatives; hence, creative thinking involves the effort to explore something new and valuable that others have never thought of yet. | Critical thinking is the mental ability and capacity to assess the truth and the untruth of an idea as well as the strengths and weaknesses of an argument. This includes making logical judgements. |
| Characteristics | The ability to expand and develop one’s imagination, creativity and innovation with the aim of getting a new idea or an original creation. Creative thinking produces and generates innovative ideas or inventions, such as creating metaphors, analogies, or definitions. | The ability to interpret and evaluate data, ideas and information in order to find meaning or to solve problems. It covers skills such as comparing and contrasting, summarising, making decisions, analysing, making inferences and solving problems. |
| Roles in Learning | a. have an ability to synthesize and present problems and solutions in new ways b. seems to have future-oriented ideas that use past and present ideas to generate new solutions or ideas c. can quickly see the link between ideas and enjoy giving unique and innovative ideas. | a. can help prevent students from becoming too influenced by the ideas or opinions of others and help students take actions against biases and prejudices b. enables students to accept change and also be willing to change opinions c. assists students to identify and distinguish between facts with opinions, ask critical questions, makes observations in detail, avoids assumptions, and adopts a rule-based logical thinking |
| Strategies for Teaching | a. Brainstorming—This strategy is often used to identify new ideas or alternatives. It is a strategy to create and produce many ideas in a short period of time. It can work well if group members know each other and have trust among each other. b. Mind Mapping—A mind map is a way to represent ideas graphically. It is a visual thinking tool in order to help students to structure information. c. Use Questions—Some question cues can help students think creatively. Examples of question cues: 1) What might happen if/(if not)? 2) Can you imagine? | a. Building Categories—This strategy helps students categorize information by discovery rather than memorizing facts. Such active learning results in better understanding of the concepts and related materials b. Finding Problems—Some of the problems presented in the classroom (especially in Mathematics and Science) are different from the way problems exist in real life. This strategy is a way of putting problems in such a way that students use skills to solve the problems they may face in real life. c. Enhancing Environment—The layout of the classroom can encourage students’ use of critical thinking. In this way, the signs emphasize the idea of transfer by showing that many of the same thinking strategies and skills apply to different topics and problems. |