Cultivating Creativity

Cre8

WHAT IS CREATIVITY?

  Creativity is the ability to think and act in ways that are new and novel. There are two basic kinds of creativity, innovation and invention. Innovation is thinking creatively about something that already exists (e.g., the tape recorder, Walkman, and CD player are all innovations on the phonograph). Invention is creating something that did not exist before (e.g. the phonograph). 

WHY WOULD I WANT TO BE CREATIVE?

• Creativity is an important 21^st century skill.  Studies show that students of the arts in all disciplines outperformed their non-arts peers on the SAT by 91 points in 2009 (Caperton, 2010).  
• "A recent IBM poll of 1,500 CEOs identified creativity as the number one “leadership competency” of the future" (Bronson & Merryman, 2010).  
• Many employers want employees who are creative and can see connections, have bright ideas, are innovative, communicate and work well with others and are able to solve problems ("National curriculum," 2009). 

HOW CAN I BECOME MORE CREATIVE?

To be innovative and inventive (creative) requires divergent thinking (i.e. generating many unique ideas) and then convergent thinking (i.e. combining those ideas into the best result).  There are four categories of divergent thinking when brainstorming and problem solving: 

• fluency (i.e. generating a quantity of ideas or solutions)
• originality (i.e. generating ideas that are statistically unusual-less than 5% of the population), 
• flexibility (i.e. abandoning old ways of thinking and using a variety of categories to create a new schema or use for an object)
• elaboration (i.e. adding details in order to expand upon an idea) (Sanchez, 2011; Woolfolk, 1998).

Challenge yourself regularly to brainstorm solutions for problems or new ideas.  Examine your brainstorm for the four above categories of divergent thinking.  Identify your strong and weak areas and practice, practice, practice!

Here are some exercises you can do to practice:

• Fluency- List all the things you can think of that are blue or have the word “blue” in them. (for ex: blueberry, sky)
• Originality- Design the ultimate school desk.
• Flexibility- What are other uses for a paperclip?
• Elaboration- Add details on to the letter “B” so that it is part of a larger picture.

One way students practiced this in class is by selecting 2 artworks of their choice and then creating an original image inspired by the artworks they selected.  They also wrote a reflection of their work to describe their thought process: