Creative and Critical Thinking

¶ … concrete sequential thinking are crucial for survival in the current challenging world. The primary reason people need to nurture abstract, critical, and concrete sequential is that these abilities are beneficial for educational, personal, and economic growth. This essay examines abstract, critical, and concrete sequential thinking styles and gives examples of each thinking style because they are crucial in my daily life.

Today, critical thinking style is a vital and important topic in modern educations. Educators have tailored the curriculum to the needs of the current era because it has become a tool used to learn how to survive. Therefore, I became interested in learning to think critically. As a critical thinker, I always use my cognitive strategies and skills to increase the chances of a desirable outcome. This kind of thinking is involved in problem solving, calculating possibilities, and decision-making. As the thinker, when I am making use of this skill, I become thoughtful and effective in handling tasks. I have benefited from this skill because when I think critically, I become aware of the diversity of behaviors, values, and social structures in the world. For instance, as a critical thinker, I tend to be more involved in life and I always appreciate different elements of value. Due to such an attitude, I am an innovator and I value creativity in exploring possibilities. Most importantly, I can imagine alternatives based on rational methods of thought that prompts forward leaps in terms of creativity. Critical thinkers do not need a host of skills, but competence with whatever they are thinking. This means that critical thinkers are only required to have adequate knowledge of something. However, being a critical thinker is not an easy task. The educator plays a vital role and the enabler and facilitator of developing this skill (Lau, 2013).

Abstract thinking is a type of thinking whereby the thinker thinks about things that are removed from the current facts. These types of thinkers can reflect about ideas, events, attributes and relationships independent from owners of those attributes or relationships. For instance, while a concrete thinker tends to think about a specific dog, I find myself thinking about dogs in general (Lau, 2013).

Concrete sequential thinking style is whereby thinkers can base their thinking on reality. They tend to process information in a sequential, ordered, and linear manner. To this group, reality involves what they can detect via their physical sense of smell, taste, touch, sight, and sound. They recall and notice details easily and recall facts of specific information, rules, and formulas with ease (Lau, 2013). As one of these thinkers, the best way for me to learn is through hands-on experience. For instance, as a concrete sequential thinker, I was able to break down projects into specific steps. This enabled me to set up a quiet work environment.