Creativity

What are some ways then as educators that we foster creativity in our classrooms?

1. Embrace creativity as part of learning.  Create a classroom that recognizes creativity.  You may want to design awards or bulletin boards to showcase different ways of solving a problem, or creative solutions to a real world scenario.
2. Use the most effective strategies.  Torrance performed an extensive meta-analysis that considered the most effective ways to teach creativity.  He found that the most successful approaches used creative arts, media-oriented programs, or relied on the Osborn-Parnes training program.  Programs that incorporated cognitive and emotional functioning were the most successful.
3. Think of creativity as a skill.  Much like resourcefulness and inventiveness it is less a trait and more a proficiency that can be taught.  If we see it this way, our job as educators becomes to find ways to encourage its use and break it down into smaller skill sets.  Psychologists tend to think of creativity as Big-C and Little C.  Big C drives big societal ideas, like the Civil Rights movement or a new literary style.  Little C is more of a working model of creativity that solves everyday problems.  Both concepts can be included in our classrooms.
4. Participate in or create a program to develop creative skills.  Programs like Odyssey of the Mind and Thinkquest bring together students from around the world to design creative solutions and bring them to competition.
5. Use emotional connections. Research suggests that the best creativity instruction ties in the emotions of the learner.  In the “Odyssey angels” program students can devise a solution to help their local community, such as helping homeless youth. This topic is worthy of more discussion by itself. A blog post by fellow blogger Julie DeNeen gives some valuable information about this type of teaching.
6. Use a creativity model.  The Osborne-Parnes model is oldest, widely accepted model.  It is often used in education and business improvement. Each step involves a divergent thinking pattern to challenge ideas, and then convergent thinking to narrow down exploration. It has six steps:

• Mess-finding. Identify a goal or objective.
• Fact-finding. Gathering data.
• Problem-finding. Clarifying the problem
• Idea-finding. Generating ideas
• Solution-finding. Strengthening & evaluating ideas

Acceptance-finding. Plan of action for Implementing ideas