Chapter 8 - Teaching Creativity

Summary

One method for teaching creativity is to encourage students to adopt broader perspectives. Taking different perspectives provides access to a wide range of knowledge, including social categories, stereotypes, interactions, roles, and events. Prospective thinking has also proven effective by asking students to judge how probable it would be for various future events to happen to them. Examples of creative methods (cartoon captions, gestures, incongruent contexts, novel uses of parts) and types of thinking (prospective, perspective) can serve as guidelines for instructional interventions when developing curricula for improving creativity. For example, an undergraduate creative thinking course at a large Midwestern university focused on strategies to help students develop different perspectives, identify unique opportunities, generate multiple ideas to solve problems, and evaluate those ideas. One of the themes that emerged from six international studies was the role of the teacher in managing discomfort from the uncertainty of open-ended tasks.