Teaching for Creativity: From Theory to Practice

Practical experience in education repeatedly shows that almost all students have degrees of creativity which can be enhanced with appropriate pedagogy. Innovative thinking has been a significant characteristic in human evolution. It is arguably more important now than ever before. Independent thinking is more than receiving, processing, and applying information. It is the ability to interpret, to critically appraise, to handle abstract ideas, and to create. This is not incremental learning, which simply increases what we already know, but transformative learning. In the transformative brain, the qualities of "connectivity" and "integration" are important. When we link ideas in the creative act, sometimes apparently unconnected ones, we have the ability to enhance both learning and creativity. This pedagogy for creativity combines a macro-scale model for a course, unit, or lesson with a microstructure for the diverse elements of the process. The representation of the holistic, dynamic model is a learning wheel. In its diagrammatic form, purpose, product and engagement drive and interconnect the transformative process of learning. In addition to the model, a template is used in the process as an aid for the classroom teacher in applying the creative pedagogy. It provides a guide for planning beforehand, and a framework for reflective appraisal afterwards. The elements of the pedagogy are distilled from research literature on creativity and its relationship to language and learning. Research data on learning across the curriculum were collected over five years from the rich contexts of actual lessons and activities in one school.