Thoughts on Developing Creativity

I’ve gotta be honest -- I am feeling a little overwhelmed by the thought of the digital storytelling project.  Not by the technology involved, but by the storytelling itself.  I feel a little creatively challenged.  Now that we have watched Sir Ken Robinson’s video on changing the paradigms of education, I at least feel like I have an excuse.  After all, I went through school when it was even more factory-like than it is today, so it is likely that I too had about 96% of divergent thinking sucked out of me along the way!

Robinson defines creativity as the process of having original ideas that have value.  He goes on to say that divergent thinking isn’t a synonym for creativity, but is an essential capacity for creativity.  Divergent thinking is the ability to see lots of possible answers to a question, lots of possible ways of interpreting a question, to see multiple answers instead of just one (to think laterally instead of just in linear or convergent ways).

I have been impressed with the extraordinary creativity of many of the authors we have been reading -- most recently, Ayers’ descriptions of developing a complex and dynamic curriculum and Bigelow’s descriptions of his untracked classroom and role playing activities, etc.  I even saw a news story yesterday about a local 5th grade teacher named Mr. Keith who has transformed his 5th grade classroom into a pirate’s cave and devleoped all sorts of fun activities related to that theme in order to engage his students in math (and with great success -- standardized math test scores have doubled). http://www.king5.com/video/featured-videos/Life-of-a-pirate-improves-Kent-students-math-scores-150179455.html

Clearly other people either haven’t lost their ability to think divergently or else they have figured out how to re-learn the skill -- the latter is my aim!  So I did a little googling to come up with ideas and here are a few:

(1)  Prepare for divergent thinking by brainstorming, concept mapping and keeping a journal. Teach yourself to freely associate ideas rather than keeping all of your ideas focused in a single vein or method.

(2) When confronted with a brain teaser or real-world problem, look for the most common solution first. Then, instead of stopping with this solution, begin again from the beginning and approach the problem with a completely different perspective, looking for a solution from a different angle.

(3) Learn to view the world as consisting of a countless number of different perspectives. The more you can get used to seeing simple, everyday issues as a matter of perspective (by looking up news issues from a number of angles, or reading literature written from a perspective different from your own), the easier it is to think divergently in any situation.
[1-3 are from ehow.com/how to think divergently]

(4) A great exercise in fluent thinking is the “List of 100.” Take a problem or an everyday object and write down 100 things about it. You might struggle at first, but the idea is to look at it from all angles and to not censor yourself. In the end, some of your ideas might not be very useful or practical, but others will be, and you will start to notice elements or combinations you never noticed before. Once you have a great list of ideas, you can begin to elaborate and develop the ideas that have a seed of promise.
[from growingcreativekids.com]

Well beyond this course and this digital storytelling project, we will be called on to come up with creative solutions to the myriad of challenges and opportunites facing us as teachers and, more generally, facing public education today. This is a small step, but it’s a start -- I’ll keep you posted!