The following excerpt is from my part of a conversation on the Learning, Education, and Training Professionals Group on LinkedIn.
Amy Stempel: There is a big difference between intellectual creativity and artistic creativity and I think we confuse the two all the time. Intellectual creativity is not “anything goes” nor is it especially artistic. Albert Einstein had to work within and explain the known rules of the universe before he could convince people of the Theory of Relativity. Truly creative people do not, in fact cannot, ignore the realities in which they find themselves. What they do is to interpret and make connections between and among facts and disciplines in ways that no one else has previously done. True intellectual creativity requires making peace with limits and constraints. That's why it's creative.
Now, can you teach it? Yes and no. Counterintuitively, people need frameworks to begin creative thinking (see text structures). Those can be taught. However, only practice, participation, and experience with these structures and intellectual "problems" can develop intellectual creativity.
The only way to adequately teach “higher-order thinking”, “critical thinking”, or "creative" thinking is through the written analysis of facts and data, just like the only way to lose weight is to exercise and eat healthy food. However, we have tried just about everything to avoid the teaching of thinking and writing, just like millions will try anything to avoid exercise and healthy food—pills, fad diets, sweat lodges, you name it. Why is this? We know it works; why do we avoid it? Because, it takes discipline, deep knowledge, and constant reflection. It's not "inspiration" (at least not alone). It's not "you have it or you don't". Like anything worth developing it takes helpful teaching and extensive individual use, feedback, and more practice.
Glen Hoffherr (Chief Learning Officer at USA Graduate.com): Amy you are correct, however, creativity is more often a result of synthesis than analysis in my experience.
Amy: I agree. If analysis is the breaking apart of information/ideas, then synthesis is the "rebuilding" of those ideas in a new way. However, the only way to do that effectively is to know the parts extremely well so that one can see how they interact. I work with secondary students and I find when we try to go straight to synthesis; they fail miserably because they do not have deep knowledge of the parts. I really think there is a "process" to creativity. It may be a highly idiosyncratic process, but every "creative" person has one. One solution to teaching intellectual creativity is to teach process AND then require lots and lots of practice. I think the practice piece gets forgotten in schools/organizations these days.
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There is an element of problem solving, both creative and not, "I've seen this somewhere before! This is how we solved it." But even rote learning can give you pattern matching, that's how even first year computer science students can write programs to do simple, basic analysis.
ReplyDeleteWhat is interesting and fascinating, in my opinion, is the "almost" pattern matching- both with humans and from a computer science/machine learning perspective. "I've seen a solution before, it doesn't quite match, but I recognize the differences and how to work around it." How much of an "almost" is the measure, here. In my experience, it takes being comfortable with nonlinear thinking to make the connections that cross the greater distances, the connections that few other people see,and that's when you start getting into "out of the box thinking" or "creative thinking." But to make that work, you need two forms of analysis: How my example differs from our current problem; and does the world work in such a way that the example is useful, or are the variables the wrong sort, and it won't pan out? Without some practical experience, you're floundering on the second one, there.
Practice also helps for those of us who are very intuitive about our shifts- I've had several occasions where when faced with a problem, I immediately knew, innately, what the cause was, but it took a while to back up my intuition with something concrete. If I cannot express my analysis coherently - to myself or others- I cannot test my hypothesis, nor can I explain to anyone else, and they would have no more reason to listen to my solution than to a ouija board.