Tag: literature

Fostering Creativity #2

Promoting intrinsic motivation and problem solving are two areas where educators can foster creativity in students. Students are more creative when they see a task as intrinsically motivating, valued for its own sake.

Creativity... #problemsolving #creativity

To promote creative thinking, educators need to identify what motivates their students and structure teaching around it. Providing students with a choice of activities to complete allows them to become more intrinsically motivated and therefore creative in completing activities or tasks.

Teaching students to solve problems that do not have well defined answers is another way to foster their creativity. This is accomplished by allowing students to explore problems and redefine them, possibly drawing on knowledge that at first may seem unrelated to the problem in order to solve it.

Fostering Creativity #1

The conventional system of schooling is sometimes seen as “stifling” of creativity. The pre-school, kindergarten and early school years are often the only ages where there is an attempt to provide a creativity-friendly, rich, imagination-fostering environment for young children.

Researchers see the importance of fostering creativity because technology is advancing our society at an unprecedented rate. Creative problem solving will be needed to cope with challenges as they arise. Creativity also helps students identify problems where others have failed to do so, in order to discover a solution.

Challenge Creativity

Everyone has creative abilities that operate all the time. You can enhance your creativity by surrounding yourself with diverse stimuli that is changed regularly. Diverse and changing stimuli promote creativity because they get multiple behaviors competing with each other.

To boost your creative output, capture your new ideas as they occur, challenge yourself in order to get ideas competing, broaden your training so that many new repertoires of behavior will be available to compete, and surround yourself as much as possible with diverse and ever-changing stimuli. Anyone can master creative strategies. They are the only things that stand between you and the most creative people in history.

Creativity Myth #2

Our creative potential is nearly shut down by early schooling. Teachers are the first to admit this. In kindergarten, all the kids are artists and inventors. Starting in the first grade, the kids have to work all the time. There’s no more time for fun, because there’s so much they’ve got to learn. They’re rarely allowed to daydream any more. It’s a wonder that any of them ever grow up to be artists or inventors.

When it comes to creativity, myths keep most people firmly rooted. Only artists have creativity, and creativity is rare, we’re told. Creativity is mysterious and magical and divine, people say. Creativity, in short, is not something mystical; it’s an extension of what you already know. To be more specific, new behaviors (or “ideas”) emerge as old behaviors interact, and the process by which behaviors interact is orderly.

Creativity Myth #1

If creativity is so accessible, what’s holding us back? When a group of people are asked, “Please raise your hand if you consider yourself to be creative,” – why do only a few hands go up? Why are corporate leaders, government officials, politicians, crime fighters, teachers, and parents all starving for new ideas? Why are art, music, and literature in the hands of a tiny fraction of the population–while the rest are mere spectators?

There’s another reason why creativity seems to be in short supply: Myths about creativity are deeply entrenched in our culture. Myths have enormous power to shape everyday behavior, often to people’s detriment. When people believe the world is flat, for example, they are not likely to venture out to sea, and far away lands, remain undiscovered.