Has anyone, particularly a teacher, ever said to you, “Be creative!”?
Probably not. Most of the instructions we receive in our P-20 years ask for recall of specific facts. Even so-called analytical and assessment questions are framed so that students can demonstrate they read the text and amount to paraphrases of the authors’ views.
Creative thinking researchers have long recognized the existence of something called “The Be-Creative Effect.” (Tweet this quote.) As Nusbaum, Silvia, and Beaty (“Ready, Set, Create: What Instructing People to `Be Creative’ Reveals About the Meaning and Mechanisms of Divergent Thinking,” Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 2014) point out, “The `be creative effect’—instructing people to `be creative’ before a divergent thinking task makes the responses more creative” (1). On the other hand, if you ask students to generate as many ideas as possible (e.g., how many uses for the paper clip can you figure out?), you are in essence privileging quantity over quality.
Our Introduction to Applied Creative Thinking (2012) focuses on developing creative minds by the deliberate exploration of our so-called “nifty nine” strategies (e.g., perception shift, piggybacking, brainstorming), and a key concept we stress early is that “One goal of this book is to make you metacognitive. We want you able not only to apply creative thinking, but at least in the beginning to be aware that you are intentionally doing it” (xiii). Our fundamental and powerful concept here is that you need to be very aware of the importance of precise instructions when teaching applied creative thinking.
Nusbaum, Silvia, and Beaty stress that “asking people to be creative yielded better but fewer responses” (1). (Tweet this quote.) Perhaps education needs a rededication to quality. If you try to teach the entire canon of Gothic tales, for instance, you are probably going to force your students to stand on the bottom rungs of Bloom’s Taxonomy, remembering and understanding, but if you were to focus solely on “Ligeia,” this strategy would allow you to help them ascend through applying, analyzing, assessing, and even creating. In fact, with only one story, you could have your students analyze the basic traits of a Gothic tale, and to test this analysis, you could have individuals/groups see if they could apply these traits to other Gothic works chosen at random.
And at the end of the unit, why not say “Be creative and write me a Gothic tale set in your own house.” You are clearly demanding quality here over quantity, and you have created an interesting assignment, one very different from the usual. One of our favorite “essay questions” was to ask our students to write prequels and sequels to extant works. In other words, what would happen if Leroy in Mason’s “Shiloh” were to run into his ex-wife, Norma Jean, in the local K-mart five years after their breakup (the end of Mason’s story)?
Another interesting detail that Nusbaum, Silvia, and Beaty note is that “asking people to be creative allows smarter people to put things into action that other people can’t” (7). Typical assignments in the remembering and understanding categories set the bar low enough for an academic limbo contest, but the “be creative” assignments raise the bar so as to allow all students to stretch their creative minds.
Author
Charlie Sweet is currently Co-Director of the Teaching & Learning Center (2007+) at Eastern Kentucky University. Before going over to the dark side of administration, for 37 years he taught American Lit and Creative Writing in EKU’s Department of English & Theatre, where he also served as chair (2003-2006). Collabo-writing with Hal Blythe, he has published well over 1000 items, including 15 books; of his 11 books with New Forums. Meet Charlie.
