Author: Mike Colagrossi / Source: Big Think
All humans have a mindful capability for creative thought. Unleashing it is dependent on how we’re taught to go about the creative process.
- Divergent thinking is a fundamental aspect of creative teaching.
- Studies have found that there are a number of valid teaching methods that inspire creativity in their students, regardless of what field they’re in.
- Ordinary modes of education are not conducive towards developing creativity if they do not employ methods like divergent thinking and also allow mistakes to be made while learning.
Creative intelligence is the ability to observe or act with any of the senses, enact mimicry to a certain fidelity and then through repetition make that thought, action or idea your own before you can then develop it to new places it’s never gone before.
The creative spirit and process is something that is highly sought after. For writers and artists, the concept has even been deified as the Muses. Nowadays it’s not just the eccentrics and poets looking to get a creative hit, but also business people and regular students seeking out that creative magic.
It’s a process that, for a while, many people didn’t think could be taught. It’s more than a set of skills or behaviors within a predefined set of parameters. It’s mysterious and novel. Creativity manifests when somebody has mastered a subject or skill and then needs to invent a new solution to a problem that couldn’t be overcome with any previous method.
While it’s difficult to teach someone a new creative solution, it is possible to instill the fundamentals so that a person may go on and become creative in their own right.
Analyzing creative teaching systems
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
A creative mindset can be taught, but not from sitting in a lecture hall or taking a standardized test.
In the early 21st century, researchers from the University of Oklahoma set out to analyze a number of different creative teaching systems. They set out to learn how different training programs helped foster and spur creativity, and published their findings in the Creativity Research Journal:
Over the course of the last half century, numerous training programs intended to develop creativity capacities have been proposed. In this study, a quantitative meta-analysis of program evaluation efforts was conducted. Based on 70 prior studies, it was found that well-designed creativity training programs typically induce gains in performance with these effects generalizing across criteria, settings, and target populations. Moreover, these effects held when internal validity considerations were taken into account.
Observations of these…
The post Can creativity be taught? appeared first on FeedBox.