Critical thinking, Creativity and Collaboration in Youth Work

Aims of the tool

- to convey to readers the idea that the changing world requires new educational approaches and learning new skills and competencies;
- to develop critical thinking — the ability to achieve, process, understand, rationalize, and analyze large amounts of contradictory information to the point of making an informed decision and taking action promptly;
- to develop creative thinking — the ability to see different perspectives in the world, to find hidden patterns, to make connections between unrelated concepts, to generate solutions, to come up with unexpected decisions, to invent new things, to turn imaginative ideas into reality;
- to develop collaboration — the ability to work in a team to achieve the shared purpose, learn from each other, and contribute to the others’ learning;
- to enrich the “toolkit” of youth workers and NGOs’ volunteers with new methods that could be used in different non-formal education activities.

Description of the tool

Mastery of the main skills of the 21st century allows people to figure out things in an ever-changing world, efficiently solve unfamiliar problems, to be confident and successful.

Communication, Сollaboration, Сreative and Сritical thinking are considered to be these four crucial competencies. This toolkit is focuses on three of them — Сreative and Сritical thinking + Сollaboration.

Critical thinking is usually defined as the ability to question; acknowledge and test previously held assumptions; to recognize ambiguity; to examine, interpret, evaluate, reason, and reflect; to make informed judgments and decisions; and to clarify, articulate, and justify positions. Critical thinking is analytic, focused, and objective. The phrase that could describe it appropriately is “yes but”. On the other hand, Сreative thinking is generative, diffused, and subjective — and it corresponds to the “yes and” expression. Creative thinking makes us develop new ideas within or across disciplines, bring together concepts into unexpected configurations; come up with new possibilities for something that already exists, and imagine something absolutely new.
Collaboration is the ability to work in a team to achieve the shared purpose, learn from each other, and contribute to the others’ learning.