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The purpose of this thesis is to propose an organized framework of critical and creative thinking skills and strategies within a problem-solving format to facilitate the infusion of instruction of such skills and strategies within the regular academic curriculum. This curriculum development proposal is the product if my deeply held conviction that there had to be “a better way to teach social studies” than the traditional method of presenting a broad but shallow overview of a topic from a single point of view and then testing for recall. During this quest, I was formally introduced to critical and creative thinking through coursework, and here found the key to making social studies instruction interesting and relevant to students. I therefore redefined the problem to encompass the issues related to organizing critical and creative thinking skills, strategies, and processes into a manageable curriculum. In this thesis, I will establish a need for such an organizing framework, and I will demonstrate that the approach proposed here has merit to accomplish the task at hand. While such a framework has generic applications, the discussion here will focus on its use in a unique social studies curriculum which was developed around this framework and which has been successfully implemented at the [...] |
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