What is Creative Thinking?

Teachers today recognise the need to encourage creative thinking. Society and industry acknowledge the need for creative, lateral thinkers, who can come up with original, outside-the-square ideas - both to solve problems and to come up with new methods, new strategies, new ways of doing things. As the old adage says, “You can’t use the same old thinking that got you into the problem in the first place...”

Creative thinking activities need to be incorporated into teachers’ daily plans. With only a few minutes a day devoted to creative thinking, you will soon notice the difference: as they hear others’ ideas, students become more willing to risk-take, to think outside the square; they begin to elaborate more; and social skills can also improve as students realise the value of listening and piggybacking on others’ ideas. Creative thinking cannot be taught; it can most certainly be enhanced.

There are four main areas in creative thinking:

     1. fluency (i.e. the number of ideas generated)
     2. originality (i.e. unique, unusual ideas)
     3. elaboration (i.e. the ability to vividly elaborate or add details to ideas, use vivid          vocabulary)
     4. flexibility (i.e. the variety of ideas)

Typical lessons in Creative Thinking

You can address creativity through oral, written and hands-on activities. Following are some examples to get you started. We strongly suggest that you do activities for Fluency, Originality and Elaboration (FOE) only to begin with. Marking for flexibility is time-consuming and is much more enjoyable if addressed separately. You will find that once your students have spent some time on FOE activities and are producing large quantities of quality responses, you will want to move on to something new. Flexibility produces a very enjoyable next step!

Check out the following examples of ready-to go creative thinking activities. Do print them out and try them out with your students to see how they benefit from this type of activity (the only thing missing is the evaluation sheet which is provided in the actual book!):

printable free sample from Creativity Starters

printable free sample from Creativity Extenders

printable free sample from Design It

printable free sample from Brain Busters

The above is an excerpt from the book "How To Teach Thinking Skills" by Jean Edwards - available from ThinkShop.

Like to see more books and games for creative thinking?