bigthink.com: 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.
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My instinctual response when I saw the title of this article was “No.” Creativity is something that comes from within, that is manifested in your imagination or your ideas. But after reading, and more consideration, I realize that even if a teacher in a classroom cannot gift the skill of a creative mind, they can foster it. One example I enjoyed from the article and the video was the notion of building off of others. Originality is often equivocated with creativity, but these two could be considered separate entities. Wild, free, outside the box ideas are stellar, yet so is observing and learning from a master. Knowing the rules before you can break them is a maxim often employed in the art world, specifically with painters. For example, Pablo Picasso was a skilled pencil artist who focused in portraits in his youth. This foundation of fine art talent was always present, always brewing. This is what allowed him to burst out of the bubble and into the cubism movement.
I so whole heartedly believe creativity can be taught, it is a skill just like any other. A program that I participated in starting in 3rd grade and continued through to my senior year of high school was Odyssey of the Mind, which is a creative problem solving competition, and I think so much of myself and ability to be creative came from that, and the training it gave me. Creativity really is just thinking differently and new. By practicing in real applications you can become better and quicker, just like so many other skills. This article does a really good job of breaking down what creativity is, how someone can learn how to be more creative and shows the science behind it. I will say that I think while it is good to show a process of how to brainstorm and generate ideas, not everyone works that way, and thats okay. Especially because the second you start putting creative thinking into a method, it becomes less creative.
I don't think creativity can be taught but like the article says, it can be fostered and developed. I do believe that the level of creativity in individuals do differ but that is determined by what one considers creative. I find the breakdown the author of the article made very informative and eye opening on the process it takes to foster creativity. The important aspect the author makes note of is that the process is not going to be easy and it is fine to be okay with failure. I think that is an important aspect when it comes to creativity. I believe an idea is not what defines creativity, it is the process that is taken to achieve the idea that defines it. Creative thinking and process can be developed by allowing ideas and thoughts to go off the bend sometimes. Placing limitations on the way people develop their creativity can be very damaging.
I believe that certain aspects of creativity can be taught, and must be taught. First, creativity is a very abstract concept for most people, and is difficult to obtain and understand. One thing that this article states is that “divergent thinking is important and relevant for teaching and becoming creative. I think that this is accurate, as “divergent thinking” means straying from the norms of society, which is what being creative is really all about. Yet, at the same times, there are many ways to stray from societal norms, and I do not think that any of them are inherently more right than any others. I think that most creative professionals today see the way to stray from societal norms as abstraction, yet I disagree with this analysis. I believe that in the creative business, abstraction has become the norm, and that we rely too much on “modernism.” I believe that it may be time to return to the era of realism, especially since our world is crazier than it ever has been before.
I'm not sure if I really agree or disagree with the argument in this article. I do not believe creativity can be taught because I don't believe it is a skill. I have always believed that the ability to be creative is just a part of everyone, like other basic things such as breathing and feeling. Creativity must be fostered. I agree with the point in the article about having to master a skill before you can think creatively about it. Those skills, of course, must be taught, but once they are mastered the creativity should come on its own. If it doesn't, you might want to reevaluate if you've really "mastered" the subject enough yet. One thing that I believe can strengthen one's ability to think creatively, is to try and do it as often and as early as possible. With basic skills that you learn in elementary school, such as reading and spelling, it's important to let students start using those skills creatively right away so they can begin practicing their creative thinking. The more often you practice it, the better you'll become at it.
I think that everyone is creative to a certain extent. Each person is as creative as they let themselves be, whether this be because of the environment they learned to think in or because of their own lack of belief in their own creativity. I agree with this article that a lot of this is due to fear of failure. It holds true for even those with greater expression of their creativity, when they are feeling more afraid to fail they tend to hold themselves back. One thing i think this article didn’t touch on that can really help foster creativity is confidence. It’s a mixture of confidence in oneself and confidence that your ideas are not going to be shut down immediately, which loops back to the fear of failure and rejection. Creativity cannot be taught, I believe, because it does not have to be. Creativity does, however, need to be fostered and encouraged to bring everyone to their true potential.
This article hits hard for a lot of people. It is essentially the great debate in our industry of whether true creativity can be taught or if it is something that has to be there already and can only be increased and refined. It the classic you have it, or you don't debate. I personally feel that tru creativity cannot be taught and that there is some manner of having it to start with. However, I also think that well creativity cant be taught, creative thinking can be. This is to say that the way we look at problems and the world around us and in which ways we critically analyze things can be. It's a hard distinction to make, and the lines can feel blury at times, but that's what I feel at this point in my life. i agree with the articles thoughts and system of incubation saying that "Making connections between classroom work and real-life situations, engage curriculum in multiple ways, extend learning opportunities outside of classroom settings."
When I started reading I was struggling with detaching the word “creativity” from the artsy mindset, and thinking, “You can teach art theory, but you can’t teach a standard way to do art”. We tend to think of ‘creativity’ from an artistic stand point, and relate it directly to art & crafts. Yes, Artists are very creative, but in reality, creativity is in every field. This article focuses mainly in ‘divergent thinking’ which in summary is: understanding there is not a correct way to achieve a result, or a correct answer to the question. As I read, I found myself agreeing with the statement of ‘creativity can be taught’, training humans in approaching problems from different angles and using the most suitable ones could potentially change the way we run our daily life. “Thinking outside the box” shouldn’t be the norm… there shouldn’t be a box in the first place.
Personally I think every kindergartener has just about the same amount of intrinsic creativity in them. Learning to unleash it is what produces creative adults. Therefor I believe creativity can most certainly be noutured and expanded. Here's the thing: because I believe people are instinctually creative, not that it's taught to them over time, you couldn't teach something already in people. Additionally I believe creativity can be untaught or more accurately suppressed as well as well. A great example is in a class where a teacher insists you use “their method to try and solve a problem, Students are then stopped from trying to find creative solutions to the problem. Every time those students encounter a problem like that they will try to adapt that teachers method instead of trying to come up with new and creative ways to reach the answer. The Article brings up some good methods, but they are not creating creativity out of nothing, they are simply nurturing what has been there all along.
I hope so, or else I’m paying $60,000 a year for a scam. But in all seriousness, I do think creativity can be taught, and this article goes a long way toward mapping out exactly how. I think a lot of people who argue creativity can’t be taught are actually just limiting their definition of creativity, or confusing it with artistic eye. Often people conflate artistry and creativity, as they are so closely related. But it is possible to be creative but not artistic. Or artistic but not creative. I’ve spent a pretty decent amount of time in the mathematics department here at CMU, and one of the biggest things professors over there try to teach is creativity. They often open their lectures, homeworks, or recitations with riddles to try and get the students to think in different ways. I imagine creativity plays a large part in every STEM field, or really in every field to some extent. I do think I’ve learned to be more creative at CMU, whether that was from the classes or the projects or simply from meeting new people at a new place has yet to be determined.
I’m not sure if I was fully convinced by this article. It describes the teaching methods in which they argue that creativity can be ‘taught’, such as promoting ‘divergent thinking’, emphasizing problems with multiple correct answers, and using models like the Creativity Model or Incubation Model to encourage creative student thinking. I’m not totally sold, however, due to my own experiences in the educational system. I’ve found that there are people who are just naturally more creative than others. My brother, for example, will sit down at a table with a blank piece of paper and a pen and fill up the entire page with doodles of new character ideas, each with a name and personality and different outfit. He has an endless capacity for creating new things, and I’ve never been as good at that. When I do traditionally ‘creative’ things like drawing or designing, I will always look for sources and draw inspiration from those. I find it very difficult to just sit down and create something new on my own. Looking at these strategies, many of them have already been implemented in one form or another, and they haven’t felt very effective to the students. A good deal of my high school curriculum was geared towards ‘making real-world connections’ and class discussion with no wrong answers, and other examples of strategies described in the article. I never felt like it promoted creative thinking- it usually ended up being another hoop for both the teachers and students to jump through. I feel as though creativity can only be ‘taught’ to an extent, and that some people are just naturally more creative than others. Students who are better logical thinkers would end up hating an educational system geared towards open-ended creative thinkers as much as the creative types dislike the current system, and I don’t think it can really be ‘taught’ in either direction.
I feel like creativity is a pretty broad term that everyone interprets a little differently. One’s creativity can definitely be nurtured and fueled, but I don’t think that creativity itself can necessarily be taught. I think that you can be taught many different aspects of how things work and the different tools they can use in order to make or do things, but at the end of the day, people’s brains work differently, and some work much more concretely than others. Some people’s creativity can be expanded more than others, and some may just stop at a certain point. I think the article does a pretty poor job in talking about how to go about instilling creativity into people, and it seems pretty counterintuitive to have “creativity testing,” as if creativity is a tangible thing. You can test someone on their memorization of facts, physical capabilities, problem solving, or other skills, but creativity is so widespread and in so many different forms that it’s pretty uncreative to set bounds and test for it. I just think to have more creative people, schools should just push more self expression and expose kids to a myriad of different ways to push boundaries in every aspect of academics, not just the arts.
I am typically of the opinion that pretty much anything can be taught. I have given my "natural talent is a myth" speech to enough people at this point that I could probably write it out in formal persuasive rhetoric without much effort. I am unsurprisingly not diverging from this opinion when it comes to creativity. Over the past summer, I read and talked a lot about the "fixed" mindset versus the "growth" mindset when it comes to skills. The "fixed" mindset believes that essentially you are just refining the natural skills you were born with, and so it is a waste of time to invest effort in places where you are not naturally good to start. The "growth" mindset believes that while people might start at different levels on a spectrum, you can move up and down that spectrum drastically based on the amount of time and effort you put in. I don't see any reason why creativity would be any different than any other skill, for all creativity really is is learning to think laterally and look at problems from lots of different perspectives, rather than just head-on.
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