Enhancing Creative and Critical Thinking Skills of Secondary Students

Sir William Bragg once said, �The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them. � Given that there are so many endless ideas, since this is a world where curiosity is planted, but still we can�t deny the fact that we just end up being ultimately curious about things. Bragg said that there is a need to discover new ways of thinking about science. But what needed the most is the facilitator, the facilitator who can be of big help in organizing facts and can be the bridge to invent new ways of understanding science. The teachers, the facilitators, the educators are the most needed to help learners understand so much of the world, to understand science. �It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge. � This is a quote from Albert Einstein, which tackles the purpose of the teacher. In line with this, Science is one of the very complex subjects that is being taught nowadays where effort is necessary to catch the interest of the learners. Teaching of science is not just a big challenge to the teachers, but also, it is a point of responsibility, since the educators� duty is to make students learn like learning to count or to read, learning this substance is also a lifelong process, basically because it is a big part of individuals� everyday life. It is the schools� concern to help their teachers sharpen students in science, especially because the reality that awaits the learners is everything about science. Besides, it is anticipated that science curriculum of a state is capable of aiding scientific manpower not undermining the truth that it echoes the essentials, ethics, welfares and goals of the society. In public secondary schools, science teaching is no joke since large number of students in the Philippines are said to be studying in Public or Government schools. Due to fast tracking time, the present quickly reached its saturation point, and there were lots of changes occurred in the realm especially in the educational system. The country, feasibly, is going along with the transformations of the world. Teaching science in public secondary schools is one of those greatly affected areas in education. Subsequently there were studies saying that science secondary education in the Philippines lags behind other countries in the world. It turns out that teachers together with the education sector of the country must strive harder to escalate the state�s science education, particularly in public schools. The focus of this study was to describe the creative and critical thinking skills of junior high school students as assessed by teachers and students themselves. The descriptive method of research was applied in the study, with the questionnaire as the main data gathering instrument responded to by 71 science teachers and 369 students along the public secondary schools in Batangas City. From the teachers� assessment in creative thinking skills, the highest weighted mean is application of distributed reasoning or brain storming in the context of cooperative groupings which obtained 3.27 weighted mean and verbally interpreted as greatly manifested. While from the students� assessment, the results revealed that they greatly manifest extension of one's idea to a concrete outcome by applying learned concepts and principles which obtained 3.39 weighted mean. From the teachers� assessment in creative thinking skills, making unusual association or connections between seemingly unrelated or remote ideas were the lowest mean scorer of 2.97, manifested. On the other hand, in students� assessment the lowest weighted mean is making unusual association or connections between seemingly unrelated or remote ideas and is manifested by students with a weighted mean of 3.04.