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CHAPTER 1
Jumpstart creative thinking
It is important to realise from the start that creativity is not the gift of the few and it is not the province of the Arts rather than the Sciences. Nor do children need to be academically very able to think creatively in many effective ways. All children are potentially creative: creativity arises from the natural human curiosity that we all possess. It develops from the way that the brain makes basic sense of the world, namely by linking ideas together and by looking at things in many ways. These are the cornerstones of creative thinking.
Creativity is a process. It is a way of actively understanding how the world works. Creativity plays with ideas, generates new ideas and organises and refines them. It uses ‘content’ – knowledge and facts – as fuel to fire the imagination. Because the world is changing so rapidly in so many ways, it is imperative that we empower our children to inherit the future successfully.
THE PYRAMID OF CREATIVITY
Several decades of research in the neurosciences and other fields, while not even beginning to solve the ‘hard problem’ of the nature of consciousness, has given us many valuable insights into how different modes of thinking correlate with activity in the brain. While the technical details of how networks of neurons allow us to express our thoughts are fearsomely complex, the general principles underpinning creative (and critical) thinking are relatively straightforward.
In the 1970s and into the ’80s – when I began teaching – creativity was high on the educational agenda. Another and more cynical way of looking at it is that it was fashionable. It was also very unstructured in my experience; loosely defined and lacking the methodologies and rigour (irritating word) that guides the development of thinking skills in children today. In my own field of English, when some free writing was called for, pupils were asked to ‘go away and be creative’, with the tacit understanding that anything they produced, while being marked for spelling and punctuation etc, would be read with a very lightly critical eye. It was after all, a piece of ‘creative’ writing and there were no boundaries where that was concerned.
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For me this changed when, having instructed a class to write a story, one boy came up to my table after a few minutes and said, ‘Sir I don’t know what to do,’ to which I replied, ‘Well just go and think about it.’ He considered this briefly and then said, ‘But how do I think about it?’
The boy’s question changed the direction of my thinking about thinking and has guided the work I’ve done in developing the hopefully practical ideas and techniques you’ll find in this book and others I’ve written.
We can visualise the principles underlying creative thinking by imagining the ‘pyramid of creativity’.
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First and foremost we have the basic resources of the mind, those of memory and imagination. By memory I do not mean recall, which is our ability to call back into conscious awareness ideas and events that we have experienced in the past. In all of us this is limited to a greater or lesser extent. While creative thinking relies upon recall to some degree, it also taps into the vast amount of subconscious information that all of us possess.
One function of subconscious processing – mental activity that happens outside the realm of our conscious awareness – is to assimilate new ‘data’ (experiences) into the sense we have up to that point made of the world. This vast network of associations is sometimes called the ‘map of reality’, though like any map it is not the territory itself but a unique interpretative impression of how we think the world works and how we fit into it.
Much more could be said about this, but suffice to say that the subconscious mind is an incredibly rich and powerful aspect of the thinking we do, one that forms the basis of creativity.
Imagination is the ability we have to draw information from the subconscious, alter it, reconfigure it, evaluate and refine it. In other words we can generate new ideas from information we already possess. Another feature of the imagination is our ability to create mental scenarios that need have nothing to do with our immediate circumstances. We can envision endless possibilities beyond what is happening here and now. This phenomenon expresses itself in what I call ‘systematic daydreaming’ and reverie. While as educators we appreciate the value of thinking time as a precursor to carrying out all kinds of mental tasks, it is also important to be clear about what kind of thinking we want our pupils to be doing during that time. Deliberate, self-aware daydreaming is one valuable ‘tool’ we have in our mental toolbox.
Key elements of creative thinking – thinking that generates new associations, ideas and insights – are the facilities we have to link previously disparate thoughts and to look at ideas in different ways (what is often called ‘thinking outside the box’).
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As I’ve said, the subconscious ‘map’ is a vast network of associations, continually being enriched by new experiences and knowledge. Many, many techniques exist for facilitating this idea-generating process and, as you will see, many of the activities in this book aim to achieve this.
The points made so far can be summed up in these two principles:
• How many ideas can I have and what use can I make of them?
• To have our best ideas we need lots of ideas.
This first idea makes use of two distinct modes of thinking. To create new ideas and insights we rely on the subconscious mind to ‘throw up’ material that we had not previously considered. This often takes the form of fresh associations that take us by surprise (which we experience as the well-known ‘aha!’ moment). It is the basis of the established technique of brainstorming.
This spray of new thoughts forms the raw material that we must then explore and evaluate using different kinds of conscious thinking – speculating, considering different options, refining, reconnecting, judging, coming to conclusions – that we do in order to realise and develop the potential of those ideas.
The second principle highlights the playful and exploratory attitude that nourishes the development of creative thinking skills. When we set children a creative task we encourage them to have ideas in the plural. This not only provides us with more raw material to work on further, but can itself lead to the formation of further linkages between those thoughts.
Creative thinking can and should be enjoyable. Children should feel good when they have new ideas. Thus I emphasise the importance of fostering the attitude of curiosity and playfulness within the creative thinking environment. Children most often display this attitude through the specific behaviours of noticing and questioning. Noticing includes pupils being observant about the world around them and also becoming more aware of their own thinking (known as metacognition). Asking questions feeds the subconscious resource of pre-existing information and sharpens up critical thinking skills as new knowledge is evaluated and incorporated into the sense that children have already made of the world.
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In terms of establishing a creative thinking environment, the key concept is –
Flexibility within a structure
In other words, set the children tasks having offered them at least one ‘how to’ mode of thinking, but without being too prescriptive at this point about outcomes or the quality of the ideas you want them to produce.
Things to do:
Show your class the pyramid of creativity and explain the principles behind creative thinking and what it will ‘look like and feel like’ when it is happening.
Be explicit about the kinds of thinking the children do. If a pupil, let’s say, speculates about what the world might be like in thirty years’ time, tell them what they have just done – ‘Ah, you’re using things you already know to imagine that future world. We can call this speculating or predicting.’ If you further ask the pupil why they think the world might be like that, you are asking for them to reason and infer (two important critical thinking skills embedded within a creative thinking context.
And most importantly, model the behaviour. When you set the children a creative thinking task, tackle it yourself and be open about any difficulties you had in completing this. In other words, join in with the fun.
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ALPHA STONES
You will need some small beach pebbles or rounded pieces of polished mineral or glass beads or marbles. The ‘alpha’ in the title refers to brainwaves produced when we are in a state of ‘relaxed alertness’. This is the state of daydream, when the conscious mind is settled so that we can notice ideas and trains of thought coming from ‘out of the blue’ (actually from the endlessly creative subconscious part of the mind).
Thinking – and noticing what we think – is the precursor to all creative activity. Being able to switch to alpha state at will is a useful mental skill which can be developed through the use of anchors. An anchor is a link that is established between a desired behaviour and something over which you have direct conscious control. There are many kinds of anchors; we will explore some of them in this book. An alpha stone is a kinaesthetic (physical/tactile) link that is made between holding the stone and switching to the mental state of relaxed alertness.
Practise with your own alpha stone first. Choose a pebble that looks attractive to you and that sits comfortably in the hand. This will be your stone from now on. If you are right-handed, hold the stone in your left hand. Prepare to feel relaxed and calm – you m...
