Creativity/Divergent Thinking

Creativity can be defined as “The use of imagination or original ideas to create something; inventiveness” (Oxford English Dictionary, 2014) the ability to do this is something that has always been seen as an important trait.  “Creativity means connecting the previously unconnected in ways that are new and meaningful to the individual concerned” (Duffy, 2006)School children should inspire to have great levels of creativity as this will help them solve problems in later life.  All learners have this ability to be creativity which needs to be nurtured.

 Creativity is important for us as people as it helps us:

·         Express our deepest thoughts.

·         Think about and create new meanings

·         Solve problem and explore our curiosity.

·         Gain self-esteem from our ideas.

·         To make up our own minds on our view of the world.

 

In schools I believe that we should be inspiring to teach our children in the best environment to garnish this creativeness.  We could then test our children to see if their creativeness is nurtured. A test of creativity that can be done with school children which engages them to open their minds and to think as wildly and as imaginative as they can is called the alternative uses task. (Guildford, 1967) In this task students are asked to list as many possible uses for a common house hold item, such as a paper clip, brick or chair etc.

Scoring for this task then involves four components. These are:

·         Fluency

·         Originality

·         Flexibility

·         Elaboration

Fluency judges you on the amount of ideas you have come up with. Originality judges you on how uncommon and unique each idea is. Flexibility judges how many differing areas you’ve covered, for example ‘gun’ and ‘attacking someone’ would both fall under the area of weapon. Finally elaboration judges how much detail went into the response so door stop is a worth less than a door stop that is being used to stop wind slamming a door closed (Indiana University, n.d.)

This is a fun way to warm a student’s mind up and to get them engaging in learning in a creative manner instead of just having them sit in front of a teacher whilst the teacher just spouts information at them. This task also shows that all children can be creative and that creativity should not just be seen as something that elitists do.

This sort of test shows a person’s ability at divergent thinking. It I very interesting on the basis of this topic “is education killing creativity” that in a study of 1500 kindergarten children that was undertaken, a massive 98% achieved a score of genius level. These same children were then tested again when they were older and they scored less. This trend continued when they were later tested again. This shows that we are all born with huge levels of creativity and that we do in fact get taught out of being creative. (Robinson, 2010)

Another way of testing divergent thinking that can be done to see a pupil’s level of creativity are the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT). These were created by Torrance and I will be focusing on the picture construction task that I tried out in class.  In this task the pupils are given shapes for example a circle or potato like shape or squiggly lines. The pupils are then asked to draw pictures in which the shape that has been given is the main part. They should paste it wherever they want on the paper and add to it to make any novel picture. They then have to think of a name for the picture and write it underneath the picture. This is also interesting and is an enjoyable experience for the children to test creativity and interaction with one another as scoring for this can involve getting judgment from your fellow pupils on the same four scoring components as seen in the other test (Fluency, Originality, Flexibility and Elaboration) simply put the more creative the drawing is the better it will get scored. These tests will be beneficial to our school children.