Australian teachers’ adoption of critical and creative thinking as curriculum

Abstract

Critical and creative thinking (CCT) was introduced as a General Capability in the Australian Curriculum in 2010, heralded as a call for more explicit teaching of CCT. This study was an online survey of 259 Australian teachers, exploring how they have adopted CCT as curriculum, including how confident they feel about this area of their teaching and what aspects of Australia’s CCT curriculum they teach and how. Most respondents believed it was important to teach CCT, but only a minority could recall professional learning in this area, and their confidence levels tended to be only moderate. The teachers were asked to provide examples of what they ‘say’ and ‘do’ in their teaching that best reflect their ‘typical’ approaches to teaching CCT. The examples indicated that they typically incorporated CCT into their teaching of other learning areas. However, the examples were mostly focused on only a few of the CCT General Capability sub-elements and were mostly of teachers providing students opportunities to engage in CCT skills, rather than explaining, modelling, scaffolding, or reinforcing the skills. For teachers to teach CCT more confidently and impactfully, improved professional learning and a more conducive CCT curriculum would assist.