Critical and Creative Thinking

Description for CRCRTH601:
This course explores issues about the nature and techniques of critical thought, viewed as a way to establish a reliable basis for our claims, beliefs, and attitudes about the world. We explore multiple perspectives, placing established facts, theories, and practices in tension with alternatives to see how things could be otherwise. Views about observation and interpretation, reasoning and inference, valuing and judging, and the production of knowledge in its social context are considered. Special attention is given to translating what is learned into strategies, materials, and interventions for use in students' own educational and professional settings.

Prerequisite: Instructor permission required (arthur.millman@umb.edu).

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Academic Information:
Credits: 3

Description for CRCRTH602:
This course seeks to increase the participants’ understanding of creativity, to improve their creative problem-solving skills, and to enhance their ability to promote these skills in others, in a variety of educational settings. Students participate in activities designed to help develop their own creativity and discuss the creative process from various theoretical perspectives. Readings are on such topics as creative individuals, environments that tend to enhance creative functioning, and related educational issues. Discussions with artists, scientists, and others particularly involved in the creative process focus on their techniques and on ways in which creativity can be nurtured.

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Academic Information:
Credits: 3

Description for CRCRTH616:
Genuine dialogue provides a creative space in which may emerge entirely new ways of thinking, acting, and relating to others. At the heart of such dialogue is holding respect for oneself, for one another, and for a commonly created pool of meaning. Course participants learn and experience approaches to listening and dialogue derived from Buber, Bohm, Isaacs, Jackins, Weissglass, and others, that allow us to become more aware of the underlying beliefs, assumptions, and emotions that limit our thinking and our responses to the world. Discussions explore applications of dialogue processes in educational, organizational, social, and personal change.

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Academic Information:
Credits: 3

Description for CRCRTH618:
Through interactive, experiential sessions and structured assignments, students learn critical and creative approaches to working in organizations. Skills addressed include: communication and team-building; facilitation of participation and collaboration in groups; promotion of learning from a diversity of perspectives; problem-finding and solving; and reflective practice. Students apply these skills to situations that arise in business, schools, social change groups, and other organizations with a view to taking initiative and generating constructive change.

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Academic Information:
Credits: 3

Description for CRCRTH652L:
This course explores the ways children think about their natural and social world and how they affect their learning of science. It is particularly concerned with identifying and describing the organized conceptual frameworks children have prior to instruction (which typically are different from the scientists’ conceptualizations) and with understanding the general processes by which conceptual frameworks can be changed. One important question concerns the ways in which children are fundamentally different learners and thinkers from adults and the ways in which they are fundamentally similar.

Prerequisite: Instructor permission required.

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Academic Information:
Credits: 3

Description for CRCRTH653L:
Introduction to the concepts, methods, and problems involved in analyzing the biological and social influences on behaviors and diseases and in translation such analyses into population health policy and practice. Special attention given to social inequalities, changes over the life course, and heterogeneous pathways. Case studies and course projects are shaped to accommodate students with interests in diverse fields related to health and public policy. Students are assumed to have a statistical background, but the course emphasizes epidemiological literacy with a view to collaborating thoughtfully with specialists, not technical expertise.

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Academic Information:
Credits: 3

Description for CRCRTH655:
This course considers various aspects of metacognition and how they influence behavior in children and adults. Topics include the individual’s knowledge of his or her own cognition, self-awareness, the monitoring of conscious thought processes, inferences about unconscious thought processes, metacognition as a decision process, metacognitive strategies, the development of metacognition, and metacognition as a source of individual differences in children.

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Academic Information:
Credits: 3

Description for CRCRTH655:
This course considers various aspects of metacognition and how they influence behavior in children and adults. Topics include the individual’s knowledge of his or her own cognition, self-awareness, the monitoring of conscious thought processes, inferences about unconscious thought processes, metacognition as a decision process, metacognitive strategies, the development of metacognition, and metacognition as a source of individual differences in children.

Academic Information:
Credits: 3

Description for CRCRTH655:
This course considers various aspects of metacognition and how they influence behavior in children and adults. Topics include the individual’s knowledge of his or her own cognition, self-awareness, the monitoring of conscious thought processes, inferences about unconscious thought processes, metacognition as a decision process, metacognitive strategies, the development of metacognition, and metacognition as a source of individual differences in children.

Academic Information:
Credits: 3

Description for CRCRTH688:
Reflective practitioners in any profession pilot new practices, take stock of outcomes and reflect on possible directions, and make plans to revise their practice accordingly. They also make connections with colleagues who model new practices and support the experimenting and practice of others. Students in this course gain experiences and up-to-date tools for reflective practice through presentations, interactive and experiential sessions, and, optionally, supervised pilot activities in schools, workplaces, and communities.

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Academic Information:
Credits: 1-3

Description for CRCRTH688:
Reflective practitioners in any profession pilot new practices, take stock of outcomes and reflect on possible directions, and make plans to revise their practice accordingly. They also make connections with colleagues who model new practices and support the experimenting and practice of others. Students in this course gain experiences and up-to-date tools for reflective practice through presentations, interactive and experiential sessions, and, optionally, supervised pilot activities in schools, workplaces, and communities.

Academic Information:
Credits: 1-3

Description for CRCRTH692:
In this course student identify issues in educational or other professional settings on which to focus their critical and creative thinking skills. Each student works through the different stages of research and action from defining a manageable project to communicating findings and plans for further work. The classes run as workshops, in which student are introduced to and then practice using tools for research, writing, communicating, and supporting the work of others.

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Academic Information:
Credits: 3

Description for CRCRTH693:
This course covers techniques for and critical thinking about the evaluation of changes in educational practices and policies in schools, organizations, and informal contexts. Topics include quantitative and qualitative methods for design and analysis, participatory design of practices and policies in a framework of action research, institutional learning, the wider reception or discounting of evaluations, and selected case studies, including those arising from semester-long student projects.

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Academic Information:
Credits: 3

Description for CRCRTH694:
This seminar provides participants with an opportunity to review and reflect on their work in the program and its impact on their current and future professional and personal lives, through a final project that demonstrates knowledge and integration of critical and creative thinking skills, processes, and strategies. To facilitate the synthesis of ideas and the identification of a final project option, the seminar begins with group experiences. Students choosing the same final project option meet in small groups weekly to present their plans and progress notes for support and critique. A three-page final project description is presented early in the course, and all projects are presented during the last four weeks.

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Academic Information:
Credits: 3