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The 13rd of December of 2019 the SPOON projectpartners and several science teachers had a great opportunity to attend to aworkshop about Critical Thinking, presented by our croatian SPOON project’spartner, Bojan Markicevic, from the TvornicaZnanosti organisation, hosted by SPOON dutch partner Boswell-Bèta at UtrechtUniversity.Theparticipants worked in three activities suitable for secondary and higheducation, and that can be applied independently if needed.Firstactivity: the building teamFor thefirst activity, we were divided in teams, with different roles: architect,building chief and building worker. The first’s task was to create a buildingmodel with the provided materials. During the construction, second’s task wasto try to note down the construction process. Once finished (under pressure oftime), the models where hidden, and the building worker had to build the model,using the same materials, based on the notes.The mostinteresting point of this activity starts when the discussion starts betweenthe participants, so the role of the teacher is for the utmost importance.Several facets of critical thinking skills can be discussed, based on theparticipants input: communication procedures, empathic skills, team-buildingspirit, information management etc.Second activity: The critical thinkingskills, and how to develop themThe secondactivity consisted in a deeper dialogue that started setting the definition for“critical thinking skills”, and defining which are those skills. As next step,the participants were encouraged to think about how to develop those skillsamong students. The discussionwas deeper that the first activity, so we could suggest to use it in teachertraining programmes and with students interested in education.Thirdactivity: the horses and ridersThe thirdactivity consisted in an optical illusion activity. The most interesting aspectof the activity&#160; was that theparticipants were not allowed to manipulate the papers before thinking how tosolve it, and they had to sketch the solution before trying it. Once one had solvedit, they had to define how to help blocked students without giving a recipe.The second part was especially difficult and interesting at the same time.Therefore, we discussed about teachers’ quality of feedback.Inconclusion, the participants found the activities very suitable for criticalthinking teaching.References: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famous_Trick_Donkeys 