Developing Creative Thinking Skills

An Introduction for Learners

Brad Hokanson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138939554
• eBook ISBN: 9781317380474
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Based on over fifteen years of groundbreaking research, Developing Creative Thinking Skills helps learners demonstrably increase their own creative thinking skills. Focusing on divergent thinking, twelve inventive chapters build one's capacity to generate a wide range of ideas, both as an individual and as a collaborator. This innovative textbook outlines a semester-long structure for the development of creative thinking skills and can easily be utilized as a self-directed format for those learning outside of a classroom. Readers are stimulated to maximize their own creativity through active exercises, challenges to personal limits and assumptions, and ideas that can help create powerful habits of variance.

1
An Introductory Story

Imagination is more important than knowledge. For while knowledge defines all we currently know and understand, imagination points to all we might yet discover and create.

—Albert Einstein

One weekend years ago, I rode my bicycle 12 miles over to where I was working. My parents and friends were out of town, and I was using the time get a little more work done. On the way home, I had a flat in my rear tire down the street from a drug store. I didn’t have a patching kit to fix it, and neither did the gas station on the corner. I remember thinking that I needed to be very inventive or I would have an extremely long walk home with my forlorn bicycle.

The image of that long, long walk home may have motivated me to come up with a creative solution, so I went into the drug store and started scanning the shelves for something that would spark an idea. In the school supplies aisle I found rubber cement. In the party section I found balloons. Together these approximated the materials of a repair patch kit. It worked, and I walked the bike to the corner and filled the tire at the gas station’s air hose, and then I rode home in good time.

I didn’t anticipate the problem and didn’t have a defined solution, a situation we all encounter frequently. But it’s illustrative of the large and small changes we will need to address in our lives. Having the ability to develop many and different creative answers to the problems that inevitably pop up can save us from fates far worse than a long walk home.

Creativity will always be in demand because the future will always be different from the present in which we are comfortable. We will always be faced with problems and opportunities we couldn’t anticipate. All of us hear of trends and changes that are occuring in the world. New technologies are being invented, the climate is changing, and social structures are evolving and in conflict. We will need to deal with these changes in our everyday lives, and in how we work, govern, and interact with other people. More “new” is coming, whether in cereal, cars, laws, ideas, or problems. The rules are going to change. We will need new habits of mind to meet these challenges.

What we know now will not be enough to address future changes and challenges. Knowledge is not static in any field, and anyway simply having knowledge is not enough, because knowledge must be synthesized, and challenged. How we will solve problems will involve a lot more than just having more information. We—you—will need to be creative. You will need to be creative in what information you use, find, combine, and manipulate; creative in what information you find and in what information you ignore; and creative in what tools, resources, and skills you apply to the problem. Finally, you will have to be creative in who you work with, who you don’t work with, and in how you collaborate and work with others. While we are going to live and work in a knowledge economy, with information as its currency, shaping and directing the use of that currency depends on our own creativity.

In business, at work, in life, and as you enter the university, one skill will be the most important to your success: your ingenuity, which is your ability to be creative. Businesses around the world recognize this skill as important and seek out the most creative workers for their enterprises. A recent poll by IBM of over 1,500 business executives from around the world listed creativity as the most desirable competancy for leaders in business. Significantly, countries around the world have changed their school curricula to improve the creativity of their students. The United Kingdom, for example, has reorganized its secondary school curriculum to encourage the ability for students to develop new ideas (Cox, 2005). China is changing its educational direction to develop more than cognitive intelligence and to encourage more creativity as described in Zhao’s World Class Learners (2012). Similar efforts are underway in Singapore, Korea, Taiwan, and Denmark. This is a need of national and world importance. In general, innovation and inventiveness build prosperity by developing new products, services, and processes. It is in a nation’s interest to have a creative workforce.

Creativity is not limited to the arts. There is a difference between visual ability and creativity. Some exceptionally skilled painters may be proficient in representational art without being terribly creative. They’re just painting what they see. And while many people claim they aren’t creative because they can’t draw, they may be exceptionally skilled at inventing solutions to challenging problems. We are all creative to some extent and can build on our current creative capability.

Like artistic skill, intelligence is often linked to creativity, but being smarter doesn’t necessarily make you more creative. However, like intelligence, creativity can be improved through effort. Both are needed to be successful. Once you’re at a certain level of intelligence, the difference in success can be ascribed to creativity. This is recognized through the achievements of a lifetime; research has shown that creativity is three times as strong an indicator of lifetime achievement as intelligence (Plucker, 1999).

Happily, your level of creativity is not fixed, and this book will help you enhance and extend your creativity. Creative problem solving can be developed and improved using a number of well-understood techniques and sources. This book presents some of those techniques through learning activities and challenges, projects, and quizzes.

Througout the book, you will be given a number of challenges that are designed to cultivate creative mental habits. You will do things you have never done before and things you have only wished you could do. The great value of this book is that the work is yours, and your work will be much of what is talked about in the book. While much of the book is focused on challenges and exercises, there will also be supporting informational material to help you better understand creativity. This book is founded on a rich body of knowledge on creativity that will support your developing practice. The idea here is of “doing” this book. It contains a lot of exercises and challenges designed to help you understand yourself and creativity. Finally, you can even use this book as an excuse when trying new things. When undertaking one of the exercises that follow, just say “it’s for class,” and most people will give you carte blanche. You’ll engage other people in your school, family, or community, and you will hopefully have fun during the process. In the end, your creative thinking skills will have increased, and you’ll also have a better understanding of creativity as a skill that can be learned and fostered.

It’s time to talk about commitment. In order to get the most out of the material, you’re going to need to consciously choose to be more creative. It will influence your life and those around you but will take some time and practice. In the end, you will be more creative.

Though you probably have a lot to do in your life in addition to this book and its activities, we know that mastery of any skill—whether it is tennis, French, or creativity—takes practice. Therefore, in order to get the best results from the book, it’s important for you to make a commitment to becoming more creative. Good habits developed here will to improve your performance and integrate creativity into your already busy life.

First, I’d suggest that you set aside a specific time to complete the work from the book every week. This may be every Friday afternoon, every Saturday morning, or Monday in the middle of the night. Just keep that time consistent. That’ll help you complete the work. The time is your choice, but building this habit will help you accomplish that much more.

I’d also recommend you work with a partner, a small group, or even a class. Having others to share your experiences with is a great learning experience, and there are exercises that require a partner to complete later in the book.

Make sure you check out the Textbox examples that support the development of your creativity, as well as the larger Do Something Different projects that you will see throughout the book.

Finally, I’d strongly recommend you use a journal to record your thoughts and to save your pictures of the things that you do. You’ll be able to see your progress and be able to share your effort with others, and it’s also a good way to record your ongoing ideas.

Now, let’s get started!

2
How Creative Are You?

The quantity of civilization is measured by the quality of imagination.

—Victor Hugo

Testing Your Creativity

As with any learning activity, it can be helpful to know just how skilled you really are. There should be an honest evaluation of your capability for originality before you read any further. This will help you understand your current capabilities as well as those that can be developed during the course of reading this book. So, just like we weigh ourselves when we start a diet, we’ll check our creativity before we begin.

In addition, trying these ways of assessing your creativity will also help you understand the nature of creativity itself. Not only can each test help you understand how creative you are, but it also will give you a better understanding of the phenomenon of creativity, and you’ll know a little more how to improve yourself, as well.

There are a number of different ways to evaluate creativity, each looking at different aspects of creativity and variants of its definition. This chapter will describe some of these methods and give you the chance to test yourself to develop an understanding of how creative you, the reader, are. The next chapter will focus on many of the definitions of creativity and how it is recognized. Having a measure of your own creativity will also help you understand the ideas presented throughout the book.

One common way to evaluate creativity is through the creative accomplishments of your life: your creative production in generating new ideas, products, artifacts, or procedures. We could also look at really creative individuals and see their efforts. Some researchers find this to be most valid as it accurately measures performance in the real world, not just over the course of a small test on one day. However, measurements of creativity like this are historical; they look back at your life as opposed to being predictive, anticipating your future progress. And in the case of the famous creatives, they don’t tell us about our own creativity.

Evaluating Yourself

We could, of course, just ask how you are. Chances are, if you say you are creative, likely you are a little more creative than people who say they’re not. It also could be that those who claim to be creative are more willing to accept risks, try new things, and reach for different ideas—all components of being creative. You know your own habits. And saying you’re creative might actually be an accurate evaluation of your capability. It might also reflect other people’s opinions. If they think you are creative, there is a good chance that you are. It also means you have an open license to try new things, so it’s a win-win. And the correspondence principle of psychology holds that thinking you are creative and seeking more creative activities will develop your creativity further.

However, having someone “self-report” their level of cr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. An Introductory Story
• 2. How Creative Are You?
• 3. Methods of the Book
• 4. Understanding Creativity
• 5. Modes of Thinking
• 6. Evaluating Creativity
• 7. The Creative Process
• 8. Techniques for Idea Generation
• 9. Expressing Creativity
• 10. Extending Our Cognitive Resources for Creativity
• 11. Your Progress
• 12. Ten Guides to Being More Creative
• Resources
• Index