How to improve the creative abilities of students?

Creative abilities can be enhanced if appropriate, supportive behaviour and classroom practices are provided. Following are the techniques of attaining this.

(1) Encourage unusual or odd questions:

As a teacher you should encourage your student’s curiosity and accept unusual question. For instance, a student may ask you, how does a cloud form? Using the following activity you may illustrate the answer as follows:

The teacher takes a half-filled beaker with boiling water and closes the top with an ice piece. Students are asked to observe what happens. They notice evaporation and a cloud-link formation in the upper portion of the beaker. In the ensuing discussion they relate water, heat, evaporation, temperature, cloud, and rain all this leads further to the concept of different states of matter.

Your acceptance of the questions encourages the student’s curiosity to know. Quite often teachers dismiss such questions by saying, ‘you find for yourself’. An indifferent or negative attitude of a teacher damages a student’s thinking process and creative effort.

Suppose you are asked by a student-why does the moon change shape every night? If you don’t know the answer, welcome the question and help him find out an appropriate answer through discussion or using reference materials.

(2) Provide activities to promote creative thinking/abilities:

For instance, ask students to list unusual uses they can think of the following:

Discuss the answers and help each student to understand leis or her fluency, flexibility and originality. Continue the exercise using different items.

(3) Organize brainstorming sessions:

This is a strategy where each member of the group generates ideas to find solutions to a given problem. The leader (you, as a teacher) presents the problem to the brainstorming group and directs each member of the group to state one idea at a time.

After one rounds, one is encouraged to generate an idea based on another’s idea (hitch hiking) but not allowed to criticize another member’s idea. Ideas thus generated, are further scrutinized by members for choosing the idea with the most potential to solve the problem.

(4) Use Synaptic:

Synaptic is a strategy based on analogies to generate ideas. Analogies provide a structure to generate ideas by connecting a familiar content with a new content, or looking at a familiar content from a new perspective. You can use direct analogy or personal analogy.

In direct analogy you compare two objects or ideas. To help students get an insight into the mechanics of a car, for instance, compare it (the mechanics of a car) with the movement of a bird. The students list the connections they see between a car and a bird.

Car Engine petrol mechanical connections break down. Now ask students to write a short paragraph indicating the analogical connections. In personal analogy an individual is asked to empathies with an object or an idea to be compared. If the discussion is about air, ask students to imagine them to be in the air and express what they feel.

(5) Provider student’s situations to evaluate their own ideas or thinking:

Students who make evaluation of their own thinking are less likely to be inhibited in future questioning.

(6) Extra credit for creative thinking:

While evaluating student’s performance in your subject, look for creative ideas. Students exhibiting creative effort should be recognized and rewarded by extra credit. Well, creativity cannot be fostered unless as a teacher, you display originality in your classroom behaviour.