Teaching Excellence Learning Modules

Things to Know About Teaching Creative Thinking Skills

1. What is the definition of creative thinking?  “[Creative thinking is a] novel way of seeing or doing things that is characterized by four components-FLUENCY (generating many ideas), FLEXIBILITY (shifting perspective easily), ORIGINALITY (conceiving of something new), and ELABORATION (building on other ideas)” (Cotton, 1991).[1]
    

2. Research has shown that teaching thinking skills results in a positive difference in academic achievement.  Specifically, advances in academic achievement have been shown when students have been taught critical and creative thinking skills such as decision making, problem solving, fluency, observation, exploration, classification, and generating hypotheses.
    

3. Research on the skills deemed necessary in today’s workplace has named creative thinking and adaptability as one of the seven most important skill sets that employers are looking for in interviews.  Therefore, not only for success in school, but for success in life it is very important to teach these skills to students.
    

4. Research in higher education classrooms has shown that the trend in today’s colleges is to teach students to …value certainty rather than doubt, to give answers rather than to inquire, [and] to know which choice is correct rather than to explore alternatives” (New Horizons for Learning, p. 15).[2]
    

5. Some effective strategies for teaching creative thinking skills include;

   1. Redirection/Probing/Reinforcement.  Getting your students to think more critically about an academic area will help to improve their knowledge regarding that content.

   2. Asking higher order questions.  Instead of asking yes/no questions or questions that only require one-word answers, ask questions that allow students to “think outside the box” and come up with some hypotheses of their own.

   3. Lengthen the wait time.  Wait longer after a question has been asked to give students longer to analyze the material and develop critical and creative thoughts regarding that material.
       

6. One of the best ways to implement this in the classroom is to create an environment in which students feel comfortable asking questions, posing their own questions, and occasionally not getting an answer right.

Resources for Teaching Creative Thinking Skills:

Creative Thinking Skills for Life and Education: www.asa3.org/ASA/education/think/creative.htm

Creative Thinking in the Higher Education Classroom: tlcweb.np.edu.sg/lt/articles/creativity.htm