Fostering Critical Thinking Through Creative Teaching: A Comparative Case Study of Stand-Alone and Infused Approaches in Two Malaysian Classrooms

Abstract

The decline of critical thinking in the modern world is a growing concern for educators, who increasingly ask how such thinking can be deliberately cultivated within existing school structures rather than left to chance. This study examines how two teachers in Malaysia use creative teaching to foster critical thinking, and how their students respond, through two contrasting approaches: a stand-alone method, in which critical thinking is taught as its own subject, and an infused method, in which it is embedded within an existing subject. Using a qualitative multiple case study design, the research followed two classrooms in the Kuala Lumpur area: an international school in Gombak that teaches critical thinking directly through Hikmah Pedagogy, a stand-alone Philosophy-for-Children-based approach, and a school in Ampang that follows a Saudi national curriculum and infuses critical thinking into its mathematics lessons using the Six Thinking Hats technique. Data were gathered through classroom observation, interviews with teachers and students, and content analysis, and were evaluated against Duron et al.’s (2006) five-step framework for teaching critical thinking and Paul and Elder's (2002) model of critical thinking. Both teachers were found to align with all five steps of Duron et al.'s framework despite using different methods. Three factors emerged as central to how well critical thinking was fostered in either setting: the teacher's skill in questioning, the consistency with which critical thinking was practised over time, and the choice of stimulus material or anchor problems used to prompt it. Benefits reported by teachers and students included stronger academic reasoning and improved social skills such as respectful disagreement, while the most significant constraint in both classrooms was insufficient lesson time to fully develop and assess every student's thinking.