The comments and suggestions made in the survey of student satisfaction conducted as part of the 7-year “AQUAD” review of the Program in 2017-18 reflect how students experience the kinds of tradeoffs present in the program given the resources available and possibilities for effectively meeting the needs of a diverse community of students:

• Having a small program composed of faculty with diverse specialties allows for close interactions among faculty and students and gives students an exposure to others from a variety of fields and ways of thinking. Even so, faculty specialties  can’t cover the diversity of student interests and professional fields, making it necessary for students to pull more general course content in the direction of their specific interests and reach out to experts outside of the program.
• The interdisciplinary nature of the program means that courses may draw upon multiple disciplines in supporting theory and practical applications of course content. Courses that promote a primary emphasis on creative arts may integrate concepts from science and technology studies, and vice versa, for example. Students should generally expect to need to stretch themselves into unfamiliar areas occasionally, not necessarily to master new disciplines but rather to appreciate relationships between the approaches and perspectives of different disciplines.
• The range of formats mean that students may be able to take some (but not all) courses in their preferred format, but both face-to-face and online students have to get used to new ways of engaging with learning as they encounter processes that serve both formats.
• Course meetings are typically highly participatory, where discussions, individual and small group activities, sharing feedback, and direct practice with tools may be involved in the sessions. Long lectures are rare in the class meetings, and active learning is enhanced through contributions made by everyone in class. Students who are not used to this style of interaction, especially in the virtual environment, are invited to talk with your instructors about how to best serve your needs.
• Teaching models that emphasize reflective practice and problem-based learning allow students to define critical and creative thinking in more personal terms and be able to work toward applications and practices directed toward their own fields, but students seeking the theoretical underpinnings of critical thinking and creative thinking in support of direct scholarship in these fields may need to reach beyond the coursework at times to explore the related content. The program does not extensively train students on formal logic/fallacies as part of critical thinking, for example, so coursework alone does not lead to mastery of such topics. The program does not necessarily treat any particular model of critical or creative thinking as a universal or dogmatic best practice, so “textbook” perspectives on critical or creative thinking may be referenced but not held as the only relevant models of thinking.
• The program’s support of student personal and professional development provides opportunities for students to pursue their work and life projects and attempts to influence change in highly flexible and customized ways. There is no built-in path to a specific career change or job promotion nor single common reference point shared by a cohort of students in moving toward a certain professional outcome.
• Following the points above, students in the program come from a range of professional fields, and participants in courses may also include students in other programs who take CCT courses as electives. We see this diversity as both enriching the interactive experience  in class while also sometimes involving additional effort to reach common ground and mutual understanding about issues and processes as we each share our unique knowledge and perspectives.
• In the early days of the CCT program (the 1980’s), the program focused mainly on how to apply critical and creative thinking to teaching and curriculum in K-12 schools. While the program takes a much broader view of its audience in recent times, some materials/readings that continue to be used in courses might still appear to be written to an audience of teachers. We hope that in such cases, students from other professions are not turned off but rather see this as an opportunity to attend to more general principles, see them in relationship to their own needs, and further develop their capacity for educating/facilitating/coaching critical and creative thinking in their respective environments. We see the fostering of thinking as a role that one takes on rather than a formal vocation and therefore relevant to professionals in all areas.
• The program and its courses explore cross-disciplinary tools and processes of critical and creative thinking through coursework, problem-based learning, and extensive workshop activities. These involve some need to experiment with new approaches and models and to be responsive to the interests and needs of the current students. This also means that course content can evolve slightly from year to year and may be designed to connect general concepts to timely professional and social issues relevant during the period of their study. Particularly with respect to the virtual environment, some processes may be regarded as “best practices”, and others are decidedly more exploratory.
• Teaching that relies largely on part-time faculty with interesting field experience outside of academia offers the students access to perspectives on practice and experiential learning, but participation by adjunct faculty beyond the direct teaching of a course is limited; course redesign and rethinking curriculum can get addressed deliberately but at times more slowly than what is ideal, given the shifting formats, evolution of technologies, and the varied and changing needs of students.