I’ve been giving some thought on creativity these days. I read a simple and enlightening article on Scientific American mind on the topic,
How to Unleash your Creativity. Three professionals of different backgrounds discuss the creative process. Julia Cameron mentions that she has found
the creative process to be teachable and trackable.
The professionals talk about the techniques that can be used to awaken this creativity in each one of us. YES! Everybody is creative, but there needs to be an effort to unleash our creative potential. Creativity doesn’t come naturally to all. There are ways to enhance it. Robert Epstein mentions the four competencies to develop our creative minds:
There are four different skill sets, or competencies, that I’ve found are essential for creative expression. The first and most important competency is “capturing”—preserving new ideas as they occur to you and doing so without judging them.
… The second competency is called “challenging”—giving ourselves tough problems to solve. In tough situations, multiple behaviors compete with one another, and their interconnections create new behaviors and ideas. The third area is “broadening.” The more diverse your knowledge, the more interesting the interconnections—so you can boost your creativity simply by learning interesting new things. And the last competency is “surrounding,” which has to do with how you manage your physical and social environments. The more interesting and diverse the things and the people around you, the more interesting your own ideas become.
John Houtz argues that failure is also an important part of the process:
The creative individual thinks of failure as a new opportunity: “Okay, why did I fail? What was wrong? Let me try to do something else. Let me go forward with it.
This brings me to what happened the day before yesterday at my house. I turned off the TV when the kids were having some snacks. Afterward, they just kept the big screen off and started playing around, inventing a game, creating characters for themselves, imagining some of my decorative beads were, in fact, diamonds. They also made up a character for me. I was supposed to be the bad girl (does it mean something here?!), and they were the good guys trying to defeat evil! I asked them how the game would go and also questioned some strategies. They saw that some of the plans they had would not work, so they sorted things out. We had fun. However, what called my attention was the way the creative process happens, in the middle of total mess. You can see the room in the picture here. They had to scatter their costumes all over to find the perfect outfit, they had to negotiate the moves and strategy. The creative process was not linear. There were lots of decisions and steps happening at the same time. As a mother, my tendency would be to say, “oh, my! What a mess! Clean it up now!”. However, I felt this was a wonderful moment to boost my kids’ creative thinking and see how things would unfold.
This little anecdote should be a starting point for our own reflection as parents, educators and human beings. It was a fantastic reminder of the best of our childhood that we tend to kill at school, creativity, imagination, dream. I read
this wonderful post by Ewan McIntosh about his talk with Mitsch Resnick about the spiral of imagine, create, play, share, reflect, imagine that kids have. By 1st grade, we start to interrupt it by our test-driven grade-oriented ecosystem.
So, here comes my 8-year old son with some papers he filled in the first week of school with activities related to “getting to know you”. I couldn’t believe that he wrote:
We all have our moments of boredom, and I think we need them as a do-nothing time that will give us energy for the activities to come in our lives.
As an educator, I can understand that we have a syllabus to follow, subjects to cover, time constraints, but my question has always been:
How can we create an anti-boredom atmosphere in the classroom that leads to engagement, motivation, willingness to be in class and not doing something else?
I guess there’s no easy answer, but nowadays, with the Internet and with this exciting NetGen little ones, there’s so much that can be done to grab their little attention span and have them there with you.
Just thinking out loud, but here are some ideas:
- Though we have a lesson plan, be it written or in our minds, with a clear sequence of steps, tasks, etc, let us give every class we teach “Creative Booster” moments that we let our kids` imagination fly and we just embark on it with them.
- The surprise element: let us rethink our teaching practices. How often do we change the way we present new content? Start in a totally unusual, unexpected way. You might be surprised with the result.
- Let the students be producers and not mere spectators, recipients of knowledge.
- Enchant by telling stories and listen to the kids` stories.
- How about a treasure box of ideas for fun classes with made by your students?
- Ask open-ended questions and not obvious ones.
- Explore the topic of a dream classroom and listen to your students` ideas. You might get some wonderful tips for the creative classroom.
- Find partner classes for projects. Projects are always an effective way to boost creative outcomes.
- State a problem you have or a friend`s problem (real or totally invented) and ask students to collaborate and find solutions for it.
- Use art, visuals, words, music, body, action, mind, technology to enhance the creative classroom.
- Have your own down time in which you focus on pleasurable things in your life to give yourself some creative input. Read magazines, books, watch movies, take photos, a long shower. You`ll surely find inspiration in the little pleasures of life.
The fact that creativity is for everyone and is teachable is certainly a reminder for myself that we need to explore it in the classroom for the sake of humankind.
Of course, at the end of the game, I asked the kids to clean up the room, but though creativity can be messy, there`s also organization involved.
What other ideas could we add to nurture the creative minds around us?
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Watch this video on Creativity by Ken Robinson:
