Creativity

One quote I found that really caught my eye was from the article Researching Creative Learning "the arts can provide fertile ground for creative learning, but the use of the imagination, multimodal communication, project based work, self assessment, collaboration, and student self direction may occur in any school subject, and, importantly, through the experience of creative learning students can gain the intellectual and emotional maturity to contribute to designing the kind of education they need and desire" (p. 3). This opened my eyes to realize that students really need a creative environment, and right now I feel as if they are in such a structured test driven environment that can be incredibly stressful and overwhelming.The article about Ted Schwarzrock was incredible, an 8 year old boy comes up with unique and creative ideas on how to improve a fire truck for a psychologist after completing creativity tasks with E. Paul Torrance. Torrance had the right idea when he came up with his tasks because he understands how important creativity is, when many people do not see it as a thing of high importance. A quote from this article, The Creativity Crisis, gives a definition of creativity: "...creativity is production of something original and useful, and that’s what’s reflected in the tests....To be creative requires divergent thinking (generating many unique ideas) and then convergent thinking (combining those ideas into the best result)." This is exactly what Ted did when the psychologist asked him to come up with ideas on how to improve the toy fire truck to make it better, he didn't come up with 5 or 10, he came up with 25 different ways. This is another quote of an impressive statistic that cannot be overlooked (especially those who think IQ scores and standardized tests show you a child's capability): "Those who came up with more good ideas on Torrance’s tasks grew up to be entrepreneurs, inventors, college presidents, authors, doctors, diplomats, and software developers. Jonathan Plucker of Indiana University recently reanalyzed Torrance’s data. The correlation to lifetime creative accomplishment was more than three times stronger for childhood creativity than childhood IQ." There is so much that can come out of having a creative mindset, a man looked at a picture in a newspaper of birds on telephone wire and saw a music staff and notes, AMAZING! Anyone else would simply flip through the pages and not pick out things like that; but it is a whole different world to creative people, and it is an exciting world to live in. Creativity is not a test and it is unconventional, you cannot time creativity. If you time creativity you are stunting and preventing the minds of your students to express their ideas and feelings. This video is titled very appropriately and it is something that everyone should take a look at: Creativity Requires Time
If you watch the students do the activity in 10 seconds they feel rushed and many of them only have time to add one or two things to the picture. If they get 10 minutes, they make so many different things and add color. This proves that my final point because this video sums everything up better than I could: "creativity is not inspired by the pressure of time, but by the freedom of playfulness and the fun."


My URL citations are linked into the articles I used!