Empowering Students: Nurturing Creativity and Critical Thinking in Education

As educators, we always aim to prepare our students for the competitive world that awaits them. However, it is also our duty to remember that beyond curriculum materials, the individual thinking and creativity of a student is just as important for success, and therefore should be nourished and encouraged. 

​The new edition of the course “Creativity for the future: promoting Critical Thinking and Problem-Solving in the classroom​” took place in Bologna from 04/02/2024 to 10/02/2024. The participants came from all across Europe, with Nikol Hristoskova from Private Secondary School "Educational Technologies" in Bulgaria; Charlotte Labaere, Eva Soetemans, Sofie Geys from H.Hartinstituut Heverlee in Belgium; Telio Gklavidou, Viktoria Psomadopoulou from TRITO LYKEIO XANTHIS in Greece; Małgorzata Okoń-Plinta, Justyna Karolina Małczak, Anna Karolina Apostoluk, Alicja Ewa Dąbrowska from Liceum Ogólnokształcące im. K. K. Baczyńskiego w Nowej Soli in Poland; Clément Lafon Placette from Charles University in Czech Republic; Urška Krečič from Srednja sola Veno Pilon Ajdovscina in Slovenia.

Living in the 21st century brings about specific competencies students should acquire. Discussing in class, the participants touched on the main topics, such as learning and innovation skills, digital skills and also career and life skills, from which we drew out the 4C’s: critical thinking, creativity, communication and collaboration. Through hands -on practice, we learned how differently our brain and thinking skills function when there’s a problem to solve.
 
Applying a series of challenges, the participants reflected on how using specific strategies could help bring students to overcome barriers and think outside the box. For example, using the 6 Thinking Hats method, participants were able to put into practice “lateral thinking” and devise its concrete application to some existing content they are teaching. By individual work and peer review, we noticed that this tool could be applied throughout different teaching subject, but also simply as an assessment tool to encourage students to think outside the box.
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During the week we also explored visual strategies and offered new activities that could be used to stimulate the student’s creative expression and could be a basis for brainstorming or discussing their ideas. We challenged an “only-art” perception  of what “visual thinking” encompasses, by proposing an innovative and digital perspective.

Nowadays, our students are exposed to immense (dis)information, and consume it passively. The importance of critical thinking skills came to discussion, and through reasoning, questioning and debating activities we tried to understand how these could be adapted to different classroom situations to help students become active and aware agents of their own learning.

We later touched on how we can take traditional tools, and reframe them to fit our objectives of fostering creativity and critical thinking in the classroom. Our participants enjoyed playing traditional games, like Taboo and Battleship, and had an opportunity to adapt them to their own subjects while building a stronger learning perspective on them.
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Finishing the course, the contribution of every participant through interesting discussions and high engagement, allowed everyone the chance to create a personalized display of their training and cultural journey in Bologna, and we said goodbye to a week full of laughter, creativity and new experiences!

Discover more about this course here.