George Couros's List: Critical Thinking

• The easiest lessons to teach are the hardest to learn. One of the most difficult tasks for a student is memorization of facts–Level-One in the hierarchy of thinking levels.  Unfortunately, one of the easiest lessons to teachers to present, organize, sequence, and evaluate is the hardest for kids to learn and remember. 
• The easiest l
• Teachers, who better understand the way kids’ brains utilize their classroom experiences, can be even more effective in improving student achievement, can reach and teach all students, and can find more satisfaction in involving the kids in student-centered teaching and learning.

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• A recent IBM poll of 1,500 CEOs identified creativity as the No. 1 “leadership competency” of the future.
• Around the world, though, other countries are making creativity development a national priority.
• Researchers say creativity should be taken out of the art room and put into homeroom.
• Creativity isn’t about freedom from concrete facts. Rather, fact-finding and deep research are vital stages in the creative process. Scholars argue that current curriculum standards can still be met, if taught in a different way.
• Preschool children, on average, ask their parents about 100 questions a day. Why, why, why—sometimes parents just wish it’d stop. Tragically, it does stop. By middle school they’ve pretty much stopped asking. It’s no coincidence that this same time is when student motivation and engagement plummet. They didn’t stop asking questions because they lost interest: it’s the other way around. They lost interest because they stopped asking questions.
• While our creativity scores decline unchecked, the current national strategy for creativity consists of little more than praying for a Greek muse to drop by our houses. The problems we face now, and in the future, simply demand that we do more than just hope for inspiration to strike. Fortunately, the science can help: we know the steps to lead that elusive muse right to our doors.

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