Creative Classroom Techniques

The 21st century will require creative minds to produce solutions to complex problems facing society; therefore, the cultivation of creativity is essential to prepare students to meet the challenges of the 21st century. Classrooms with teachers who value creativity and celebrate flights of fantasy, random insights, and off-beat analysis that force one to reconsider the wisdom of convention provide a safe haven for students to explore, thus nurturing creativity. This entry presents some techniques that can be used in classrooms to encourage creative thinking.

Paul Torrance's work defines and expands the identification of giftedness to include students who are creatively talented and have the ability to generate many different ideas. The Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking provide a scaled score to measure fluency, generation of numerous ideas at a time; flexibility, an ability to generate many different kinds of ideas; originality, ideas that are unique and innovative; and elaboration, attention to and inclusion of detail. Students who are identified for gifted programs using these criteria benefit from being placed in classrooms that capitalize on and expand these strengths.

SCAMPER activities introduce and enhance the creative thought process. Students are encouraged to look at things from new perspectives. The acronym comes from the seven modifiers of: (1) substitute, (2) combine, (3) adapt, (4) modify, magnify, or minify, (5) put to other uses, (6) eliminate, and (7) reverse or rearrange. For example, students may be asked to speculate about the elimination of currency in our society, possible outcomes of the South winning the Civil War, or the impact of increased sensory perception on the human body. SCAMPER modifiers can be applied to content in all subjects from the arts to mathematics.

Lateral thinking, a deliberate thought process that combines creativity, insight, and humor, and offers an approach that provides for the generation of many new ideas and problem solutions, differing from vertical thinking that yields only one solution. The nine-dot problem (three rows of three dots each that must be linked using only four straight lines without lifting the pencil off the paper) is an example of a lateral thinking problem. The solution gives a visual of out-of-the-box thinking, which becomes another name for this thought process. Lateral thinking is about paradigm breaking; freeing the mind from prisons of accepted concepts and constructs. Judgment is delayed in favor of exploration of the idea.

Brainstorming is a practice frequently used by classroom teachers as a means of simply generating as many ideas as possible. Judgment is suspended because all ideas, both sensible and improbable, are welcome. Brainstorming opens the door to unexpressed thoughts that may be deemed silly or wild. Students learn to take risks and to play with the divergent solutions presented. An excellent introduction to a brainstorming event is to ask students to create a list of things that were once considered impossible: the Internet, cell phones, space travel, and so on.

Programs that teach and develop creativity in group settings can also be incorporated. Destination ImagiNation®, Odyssey of the Mind®, and Future Problem Solving, a program started by Torrance, require collaboration and imagination and are designed to nurture these abilities and demonstrate that creative levels can be elevated with practice. These open-ended activities stretch students' minds and allow them to draw from and incorporate their individual strengths in finding solutions to problems posed. Importantly, these programs help students develop their convergent and divergent thought processes by generating numerous solutions and critically examining each.

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