Creativity Crisis in America – My Comments
Creativity Crisis
Newsweek, July 19, 2010 issue
Original article written by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman
The following are my comments about mistakes, errors and misinterpretations in the cover story article. The word STORY fits because of the misinterpretations and misstatements made on those mis-interpretations.
Initially I was very pleased to see Dr. E. Paul Torrance received notice and recognition in a magazine like NEWSWEEK.
Then as I already said in emails responding to your emails, I found statements made during yours and Po’s 4 min interviews to be incorrect, misleading or simply wrong while others were good to great to right on.
Then I read the FORGET BRAINSTORMING article and found it extremely incorrect and unfounded as many similar articles over the past 60 or so years since Alex Osborn wrote about his work with Brainstorming in his ad agency BBD&O from the late 20s or early 30s when he created the initial process through the various books he wrote about it in, including APPLIED IMAGINATION, plus the Yale study you quoted out of context as most people do who criticize brainstorming or the use of any creative thinking tool, technique or process who are trained in using them, trained in facilitating or trained in developing groups that can truly function as a team.
Finally I went back to the original article and read it again and found a variety of mis-statements, incomplete statements, mis-intrepretations and projections from isolated studies to the general population of the US.
Then I wrote a mixture of tweets and Facebook messages to people in my groups of friends or followers and onto others who I found using TWEETDECK who were tweeting about your article.
You article may have done some good to raise interest in creative thinking in our schools and society.
My major complaints relate to the implication that the US is having a CREATIVITY CRISIS based upon you referring to Kyung’s analysis of TTCT scores from 1990 to 2010.
As I promised here is a point by point review of your article.
If you would like a list of much stronger experts, scholars, researchers, writers, consultants of creative thinking in the US or around the world I will gladly do that.
Initially I would recommend you contact the following the next time
Creative Education Foundation, publisher of the 50+ year running JOURNAL OF CREATIVE BEHAVIOR and the sponsor of its 56 year running CREATIVE PROBLEM SOLVING INSTITUTE
International Center for Creative Studies at Buffalo State University in Buffalo New York. Director is Dr. Gerard Puccio. They have a large staff of faculty who teach courses in their programs and are actively involved with a wide range of research studies along with the studies that their masters students do for their degrees
Texas A&M University’s College of Education, Educational Psychology Dept
Dr. Joyce Juntune, Director
They offer a doctorate degree in creativity or creative studies two of my Singapore colleagues and friends are currently Ph.D. students in their program
American Creativity Association.
IFCO – International Forum of Creativity Organizations
Beyond this list I will gladly provide a list of individuals and other organizations.
—————— ———- ———— ———
The Creativity Crisis
For the first time, research shows that American creativity is declining. What went wrong—and how we can fix it.
How Creative Are You?
Back in 1958, Ted Schwarzrock was an 8-year-old third grader when he became one of the “Torrance kids,” a group of nearly 400 (were there actually 400 and not a number near 400) Minneapolis children who completed a series of creativity tasks newly designed by professor E. Paul Torrance. Schwarzrock still vividly remembers the moment when a psychologist handed him a fire truck and asked, “How could you improve this toy to make it better and more fun to play with?” He recalls the psychologist being excited by his answers. In fact, the psychologist’s session notes indicate Schwarzrock rattled off 25 improvements, such as adding a removable ladder and springs to the wheels. That wasn’t the only time he impressed the scholars, who judged Schwarzrock to have “unusual visual perspective” and “an ability to synthesize diverse elements into meaningful products.”
The accepted definition of creativity is production of something original and useful, and that’s what’s reflected in the tests. (this is ONLY ONE accepted definition of creativity).
Creating Creativity: 101 Definitions (what webster never told you) [Paperback]
Andrei G. Aleinikov
http://www.amazon.com/Creating-Creativity-Definitions-webster-never/dp/0970311001
There is never one right answer. To be creative requires divergent thinking (generating many unique ideas) and then convergent thinking (combining those ideas into the best result).
In the 50 years since Schwarzrock and the others took their tests, scholars—first led by Torrance, now his colleague, Garnet Millar—have been tracking the children, recording every patent earned, every business founded, every research paper published, and every grant awarded. They tallied the books, dances, radio shows, art exhibitions, software programs, advertising campaigns, hardware innovations, music compositions, public policies (written or implemented), leadership positions, invited lectures, and buildings designed.
Would have preferred that you mentioned how many of the original total number were actually reached and including in the 22nd, 40th, 50th follow-up surveys.
I have asked Garnet and other Torrance scholars for the numbers.
Related Article: Forget Brainstorming »
I have great challenges about the FORGET BRAINSTORMING. Jonathan Vehar has already addressed those in his short rebuttal article
Nobody would argue that Torrance’s tasks, which have become the gold standard in creativity assessment, measure creativity perfectly.
Dr. Torrance did not measure CREATIVITY he measured the propensity for selected traits, skills that are generally found in people who are accepted as highly creative in their fields, occupations or professions NOT CREATIVITY.
“We can not measure what we can not define.” Dr. Paul Torrance.
He sought to measure the propensity of creative thinking skills and traits in the people who completed the various forms of the TTCT.
Dr. Torrance’s approach and focus over the 50 years since his early studies with ACE PILOTS was to examine initially 4 skills/traits:
FLUENCY
FLEXIBILITY
ELABORATION
ORIGINALITY
Over the years the original 4 were expanded to 21 variables that are scored through the various forms of the TTCT.
Which he did using statistics and probability tools.
What Dr. Torrance’s TTCT were constructed was existing traits, skills that the 22nd, 40th, 50th follow-ups surveys indicated that they were valid, reliable predictors of potential creative output. NOT CREATIVITY and NOT CREATIVITY PERFECTLY
What’s shocking is how incredibly well Torrance’s creativity index predicted those kids’ creative accomplishments as adults. Those who came up with more good ideas on Torrance’s tasks grew up to be entrepreneurs, inventors, college presidents, authors, doctors, diplomats, and software developers.
Jonathan Plucker of Indiana University recently reanalyzed Torrance’s data. The correlation to lifetime creative accomplishment was more than three times stronger for childhood creativity than childhood IQ.
My understanding through Torrance colleagues and scholars is that Plucker did his work in the 80s or 90s. But I can not speak to his specific publications or work.
Like intelligence tests, Torrance’s test—a 90-minute series of discrete tasks, administered by a psychologist—
The TTCT are administered by people who have been trained in the scoring of the TTCT. Those people have and continue to include: psychologist, professors, teachers, counselors, and other people.
has been taken by millions worldwide in 50 languages. Yet there is one crucial difference between IQ and CQ scores. With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect—each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling.
Kyung Hee Kim at the College of William & Mary discovered this in May, after analyzing almost 300,000 Torrance scores of children and adults. Kim found creativity scores had been steadily rising, just like IQ scores, until 1990. Since then, creativity scores have consistently inched downward. “It’s very clear, and the decrease is very significant,” Kim says. It is the scores of younger children in America—from kindergarten through sixth grade—for whom the decline is “most serious.”
Please provide a citing that shares in detail what Dr Kyung’s study covered?
Your leap to a CREATIVITY CRISIS from this one study that indicates a drop in TTCT scores…which scores? all the scores? I believe is a stetch.
What other evidence beyond the comparison of TTCT scores are you prepared to share that there is a CREATIVITY CRISIS IN AMERICA?
Yes art, music, drama, dance, creative writing classes have been methodically removed from school curriculums around the US.
Yet the FUTURE PROBLEM SOLVING PROGRAM, created by Paul & Pansy Torrance in the 1970s, still is active both inside classrooms and after school.
Yet the Oydessy of the Mind, Destination Imagination and several Invention focused programs are still thriving in the US.
Yet the newest of these programs, IMAGINE IT! Is spreading around the US.
Yet there are still creativity, creative thinking, creative problem solving classrooms taught in education, gifted education, business, design colleges in many colleges and universities.
Yet the nearly 40 year old Creative Studies Masters Degree Program is still thriving at Buffalo State University.
Yet the number of creativity focused conferences is increasing. Yes some have had reduction in their attendance numbers and others they are increasing
CPSI, ACA, Innovation Network, Mindcamp. Florida Creativity Weekend, Atlanta Creativity Exchange and several others that can be trace back to the original, now 56 years old, CREATIVE PROBLEM SOLVING INSTITUTE sponsored by the Creative Education Foundation that Alex Osborn, creator of BRAINSTORMING, founded and then with Dr. Sidney J. Parnes continued and expanded over the past 55 years.
On top of that there are hundreds of various creativity workshops, mini-conferences focused on various art forms.
Add to these the IDEAS Festivals held in different cities, including the most recent ASPEN IDEAS FESTIVAL.
In addition there is the now nearly 30 year old TED – TECHNOLOGY – EDUCATION – DESIGN conferences that have spread from one per year to many TEDx conferences around the US and the world.
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Mostly in the short interviews it was the over-generalizations and the minor examples that were provided by both of you from a field that has been growing since 1900 with Maria Montessorit, John Dewey to business school professors in the 20s through to the major number of business schools with classes on creativity and / or innovation.
The potential consequences are sweeping.
I do not see examples of SWEEPING CONSEQUENCES based upon my 30 years in the field of creativity and creative thinking development or my 66 years of being born, raised and educated in the US and working for 50 years in either fields typically classified as creative: architect, interior design, graphics and signage, cartooning, writing, creative thinking speaking and consulting.
The necessity of human ingenuity is undisputed. A recent IBM poll of 1,500 CEOs identified creativity as the No. 1 “leadership competency” of the future.
When that article was released there was a flurry of Facebook messages and Twitter Tweets challenging the over mis-interpretation of that statement.
A higher percentage of the CEOS surveyed listed creativity in the top ten. But if my memory is correct that percentage was in the 20 to 30% range not 80 to 100% as the implication of that statement “identified creativity as the No. 1 ‘leadership competency’ of the future.
Over the past 30 years I have presented over 3500 keynote speeches, breakout/concurrent sessions at conferences, ½ day to 3 day long workshops and do direct consulting with a wide mix of clients including about 75 different Fortune 500 companies or have had engineers, scientists, marketing people, middle managers from most of the 500 companies and have not seen a long-last focus on creativity being a trait in leadership.
In the September 25, 1985 issue of TIME magazine the cover story was
AM I CREATIVE?
In the article the authors provided examples of programs and consultants held inside corporations.
Over the past 30 years I have interview many people from those companies and found that the reported programs were short lived and never truly became ongoing programs. Even the famous 15% rule at 3M is only in the minds of a few of the rebel researchers such at the one that is usually referenced, Art Fry (Post-It note fame). I have interviewed him twice about his experiences at 3M and have listened to a variety of current and retired or down-sized or quit employees from 3M over the past 10 years. It appears that only those researchers with guts or tenure actually apply the famous “15% rule” and usually having to fight their latest managers along the way.
Yet it’s not just about sustaining our nation’s economic growth. All around us are matters of national and international importance that are crying out for creative solutions, from saving the Gulf of Mexico to bringing peace to Afghanistan to delivering health care. Such solutions emerge from a healthy marketplace of ideas, sustained by a populace constantly contributing original ideas and receptive to the ideas of others.
The United States may rightly have created its wealth through ingenuity, necessity, creativity and innovation over the past 250 years but when you are surviving you need to create or die.
It’s too early to determine conclusively why U.S. creativity scores are declining. One likely culprit is the number of hours kids now spend in front of the TV and playing videogames rather than engaging in creative activities. Another is the lack of creativity development in our schools. In effect, it’s left to the luck of the draw who becomes creative: there’s no concerted effort to nurture the creativity of all children.
Hopefully you will do a follow up article with more examples of the causes of the
Drop in TTCT creativity scores.
I have been using a basic exercise around the world since 1980 related to traits of highly creative people. Over 250,000 people have done the exercise and have not seen a distinct dropping of traits people pick as being descriptive of them.
The number of art stores, music lesson, dance studios, creative thinking workshops seems to continue to be rising.
Around the world, though, other countries are making creativity development a national priority.
When I have checked into programs such as these the people in those countries I have spoken with (teachers, professors, consultants, business people) have pointed out that they may be promoted as campaigns but are not necessarily being integrated into the schools. Often the people I have spoken with face to face, by SKYPE phone or in person in their offices, schools, homes are/were not aware of the programs written about in magazines and newspapers or blogs.
One I am very familiar with is Singapore. I have spoken with a variety of professionals about the “SUPPOSED” national campaign each time I have gone to Singapore and often via the internet for years since 2001. There may be some announcement and yes there may be some classes held at some of the colleges and universities such as Singapore Management University and Ngee Ang Poly tech but not in the elementary, junior high or high schools except for isolated sessions or workshops done by outside vendors such as Edward de Bono, Destination Imagination.
The appearance is that there is a lot of talk but seldom much substance or longevity to the programs.
In 2008 British secondary-school curricula—from science to foreign language—was revamped to emphasize idea generation, and pilot programs have begun using Torrance’s test to assess their progress. The European Union designated 2009 as the European Year of Creativity and Innovation, holding conferences on the neuroscience of creativity, financing teacher training, and instituting problem-based learning programs—curricula driven by real-world inquiry—for both children and adults.
Also the ECCI/EACI has been holding creativity conferences in different countries each year or two for 20 years. CREA-Italy, started by graduates/leaders of the CEF’s CPSI (56 years running) program, has just done their 8th international conference. Plus others have been started and lasted for 1, 2, 3 years. I have presented at many of those.
Yes the Japanese Creativity Society has been in existence for over 30 years and holds an annual academic type conference.
The American Creativity Association has been holding their annual conference for 20 years and in 2008 they held it in Singapore.
In China there has been widespread education reform to extinguish the drill-and-kill teaching style. Instead, Chinese schools are also adopting a problem-based learning approach.
I would prefer some citings and evidence of the WIDE –SPREAD ness of the reform
Plucker recently toured a number of such schools in Shanghai and Beijing. He was amazed by a boy who, for a class science project, rigged a tracking device for his moped with parts from a cell phone. When faculty of a major Chinese university asked Plucker to identify trends in American education, he described our focus on standardized curriculum, rote memorization, and nationalized testing. “After my answer was translated, they just started laughing out loud,” Plucker says. “They said, ‘You’re racing toward our old model. But we’re racing toward your model, as fast as we can.’ ”
I believe too much is being taken for granted and stressed by this isolated anecote
No the US is not RACING TOWARD OUR OLD MODEL
The US never had a CREATIVITY OR CREATIVE THINKING focused on actually a problem solving focused educational curriculum. It has been experimented with often over the past 50 years to 160 years since public schools became a reality in the US.
Remember those great examples in Biology, Chemistry, Physics. Did you truly learn how to solve problems or did you merely follow the prescribed steps to reach the answers in the teachers’ manuals.
Study the work of Charles Kettering related to education in the US or the work of the Problem Solving or Thinking Skill focused people in the US over the last 50+ years.
Overwhelmed by curriculum standards, American teachers warn there’s no room in the day for a creativity class.
This argument has been used for 50 years by weaker, stressed, over-worked, less-dedicated teachers depending upon who their principals were, what their current school boards focused upon, the economic times, the support or lack of support of the parents of their students.
Kids are fortunate if they get an art class once or twice a week. But to scientists, this is a non sequitur, borne out of what University of Georgia’s Mark Runco calls “art bias.”
Art classes have been cut or removed for decades from district to district state to state. This is not a phenomenon unique to the past 10 years of No Child Left Behind or the “lastest” attempt at standardized education.
Please listen to current political candidates and you will hear the arugment that has been around for decades against any form of standardized education, curriculum, teaching methods or National control of Education in any state.
The age-old belief that the arts have a special claim to creativity is unfounded.
Your sentence tends to imply that this is a unique reality not known for decades.
Ask anyone you know or 12 people randomly on the street anywhere in the world “ARE YOU CREATIVE?”
Their answers will be “NO I’m NOT CREATIVE I CAN’T DRAW, SING, OR DANCE!”
Ask any class of kindergardeners if they an draw, dance, sing and watch nearly 100% of their hands shoot up.
Ask any class of 10th graders and watch maybe a few hands go up.
Dr. Paul Torrance, among the hundreds of varied studies he did that far outwight the Minnesota tests 50 years ago, is his 4TH GRADE SLUMP studies that showed that TTCT scores dropped drastically, nearly 80% from kindergarten to the 4th grade.
When scholars gave creativity tasks to both engineering majors and music majors, their scores laid down on an identical spectrum, with the same high averages and standard deviations. Inside their brains, the same thing was happening—ideas were being generated and evaluated on the fly.
Also often teachers of students at risk or in detention and several times drop outs they have found both IQ scores and creative thinking scores tended to be higher than the average student who stayed all the way through the 12th grade.
Researchers say creativity should be taken out of the art room and put into homeroom. The argument that we can’t teach creativity because kids already have too much to learn is a false trade-off. Creativity isn’t about freedom from concrete facts. Rather, fact-finding and deep research are vital stages in the creative process. Scholars argue that current curriculum standards can still be met, if taught in a different way.
My primary objection to most articles in popular media is the use of the word creativity and the mis-interpretation that creativity can be taught. It is creative thinking techniques, tools, methods, processes, systems that can be taught that tend to lead to higher levels of creativeness and higher amounts of creativity or creative products.
To understand exactly what should be done requires first understanding the new story emerging from neuroscience. The lore of pop psychology is that creativity occurs on the right side of the brain. But we now know that if you tried to be creative using only the right side of your brain, it’d be like living with ideas perpetually at the tip of your tongue, just beyond reach.
Thank you for that paragraph. The metaphor/simile that creativity is right brained centered has been a round since the early 70s and has always been wrong.
Any reference to right brain is sketchy and un-scientific.
When you try to solve a problem, you begin by concentrating on obvious facts and familiar solutions, to see if the answer lies there.
That is one approach to working on problems. It represents a small portion of thinking or problem solving style approaches that human beings use.
This is a mostly left-brain stage of attack. If the answer doesn’t come, the right and left hemispheres of the brain activate together. Neural networks on the right side scan remote memories that could be vaguely relevant. A wide range of distant information that is normally tuned out becomes available to the left hemisphere, which searches for unseen patterns, alternative meanings, and high-level abstractions.
Please provide citings that verify this over-simplication and metaphor reference (pop culture) to right or left brain. The brain has multiple portions from the cerebral areas to the medulla
Having glimpsed such a connection, the left brain must quickly lock in on it before it escapes. The attention system must radically reverse gears, going from defocused attention to extremely focused attention. In a flash, the brain pulls together these disparate shreds of thought and binds them into a new single idea that enters consciousness. This is the “aha!” moment of insight, often followed by a spark of pleasure as the brain recognizes the novelty of what it’s come up with.
Now the brain must evaluate the idea it just generated. Is it worth pursuing? Creativity requires constant shifting, blender pulses of both divergent thinking and convergent thinking, and others to combine new information with old and forgotten ideas. Highly creative people are very good at marshaling their brains into bilateral mode, and the more creative they are, the more they dual-activate.
Is this learnable? Well, think of it like basketball. Being tall does help to be a pro basketball player, but the rest of us can still get quite good at the sport through practice. In the same way, there are certain innate features of the brain
This is even debated in neuroscience publications.
that make some people naturally prone to divergent thinking.
It is far more complex that what portions of the brain’s complex structure are accessed by individuals….nature-nature-environment-education-family-background-life experiences also impact whether someone tends more towards divergent thinking or convergent thinking..
But convergent thinking and focused attention are necessary, too, and those require different neural gifts. Crucially, rapidly shifting between these modes is a top-down function under your mental control. University of New Mexico neuroscientist Rex Jung has concluded that those who diligently practice creative activities learn to recruit their brains’ creative networks quicker and better. A lifetime of consistent habits gradually changes the neurological pattern.
Just because someone paints, sculpts, dances, sings, does any form of craftwork does not mean they are being creative or using creative thinking.
Most of these never get beyond the level of copying, imitating existing examples or models. Walk through any typical weekend art and crafts fair and look for examples of creative thinking and not just copying, imitating, replicating.
The results of all that is an expansion of physical, 2, 3, 4 dimensional skills over the 1 dimensional skills of hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting and touching to recording of information in our brains.
Might people tend to risk more, diverge more, become more open to new ideas, and to generating more ideas and become more original in their thinking?
That is possible but not guaranteed.
Frederick Kiessler said in published interviews in the early 60s
5 to 10% of architects are creative and produce new creative ideas.
10 to 15% of architects are innovative and take the creative architects’ ideas and put them to use in their work
75% to 85% of architects are IMMITATIE they merely copy the innovative architects not ever learning about the ideas that the creative architects discovered or produced let alone understanding them.
A fine example of this emerged in January of this year, with release of a study by University of Western Ontario neuroscientist Daniel Ansari and Harvard’s Aaron Berkowitz, who studies music cognition.
I enjoyed hearing Dr. Berkowitz’s responses during the Charlie Rose Interview that you were part of.
They put Dartmouth music majors and nonmusicians in an fMRI scanner, giving participants a one-handed fiber-optic keyboard to play melodies on. Sometimes melodies were rehearsed; other times they were creatively improvised. During improvisation, the highly trained music majors used their brains in a way the nonmusicians could not: they deactivated their right-temporoparietal junction. Normally, the r-TPJ reads incoming stimuli, sorting the stream for relevance. By turning that off, the musicians blocked out all distraction. They hit an extra gear of concentration, allowing them to work with the notes and create music spontaneously.
Charles Limb of Johns Hopkins has found a similar pattern with jazz musicians, and Austrian researchers observed it with professional dancers visualizing an improvised dance. Ansari and Berkowitz now believe the same is true for orators, comedians, and athletes improvising in games.
Actual material describing Limb’s work and discoveries would have been helpful but the length of your article had restrictions.
The good news is that creativity training that aligns with the new science works surprisingly well. The University of Oklahoma, the University of Georgia, and Taiwan’s National Chengchi University each independently conducted a large-scale analysis of such programs. All three teams of scholars concluded that creativity training can have a strong effect. “Creativity can be taught,” says James C. Kaufman, professor at California State University, San Bernardino.
What is the NEW SCIENCE you refer to? There are many sciences, theories, beliefs, many disagree with others from the past through to the present yet their studies show evidence to justify their theories, claims, findings.
“Creativity can be taught.” Poor choice of term and incorrect….we can not teach what we do not clearly and distinctly define.
Creative thinking skills
Tendency to be more divergent, future oriented, humorous and the others of the list of 21 traits of creative behavior
Yes much research over the past 50 to 60 years has demonstrated that there is a high propensity of that being true.
What’s common about successful programs is they alternate maximum divergent thinking with bouts of intense convergent thinking, through several stages. Real improvement doesn’t happen in a weekend workshop. But when applied to the everyday process of work or school, brain function improves.
So what does this mean for America’s standards-obsessed schools? The key is in how kids work through the vast catalog of information. Consider the National Inventors Hall of Fame School, a new public middle school in Akron, Ohio. Mindful of Ohio’s curriculum requirements, the school’s teachers came up with a project for the fifth graders: figure out how to reduce the noise in the library. Its windows faced a public space and, even when closed, let through too much noise. The students had four weeks to design proposals.
Yes this is true
Check into the Cleveland Area Schools that used to send many teachers to the annual Creative Problem Solving Institute in the 70s and early 80s until money ran out or support for creative thinking died once again.
Working in small teams, the fifth graders first engaged in what creativity theorist Donald Treffinger describes as fact-finding.
Fact-Finding is the second step of the 56 year old Osborn-Parnes Creative Problem Solving Model and many others not a term that Don (excellent researcher and teacher) invented. It also is the process that designers, engineers, scientists, medical people, business people, etc. use to solve problems in their respective fields.
How does sound travel through materials? What materials reduce noise the most? Then, problem-finding—anticipating all potential pitfalls so their designs are more likely to work.
What you are describing is the Osborn-Parnes Creative Problem Solving Model. It has been taught each year at CPSI and since at many creativity public and private workshops by thousands of consultants, teaches, professors and others .
Also the Creative Studies Program at both undergraduate and masters lever teach their most current version of the initial model.
CPSI conferences teach the process to many people each year through their 18 to 20 hour long SPRINGBOARD program that was in the 60s and 70s up to 40 hours long, like the one my late wife, Dr. Merry Black, and I took in Fort Lauderdale in 1978.
Next, idea-finding: generate as many ideas as possible. Drapes, plants, or large kites hung from the ceiling would all baffle sound. Or, instead of reducing the sound, maybe mask it by playing the sound of a gentle waterfall? A proposal for double-paned glass evolved into an idea to fill the space between panes with water. Next, solution-finding: which ideas were the most effective, cheapest, and aesthetically pleasing? Fiberglass absorbed sound the best but wouldn’t be safe. Would an aquarium with fish be easier than water-filled panes?
Then teams developed a plan of action. They built scale models and chose fabric samples. They realized they’d need to persuade a janitor to care for the plants and fish during vacation. Teams persuaded others to support them—sometimes so well, teams decided to combine projects. Finally, they presented designs to teachers, parents, and Jim West, inventor of the electric microphone.
Along the way, kids demonstrated the very definition of creativity: alternating between divergent and convergent thinking, they arrived at original and useful ideas. And they’d unwittingly mastered Ohio’s required fifth-grade curriculum—from understanding sound waves to per-unit cost calculations to the art of persuasive writing. “You never see our kids saying, ‘I’ll never use this so I don’t need to learn it,’ ” says school administrator Maryann Wolowiec. “Instead, kids ask, ‘Do we have to leave school now?’ ” Two weeks ago, when the school received its results on the state’s achievement test, principal Traci Buckner was moved to tears. The raw scores indicate that, in its first year, the school has already become one of the top three schools in Akron, despite having open enrollment by lottery and 42 percent of its students living in poverty.
With as much as three fourths of each day spent in project-based learning, principal Buckner and her team actually work through required curricula, carefully figuring out how kids can learn it through the steps of Treffinger’s Creative Problem-Solving method and other creativity pedagogies. “The creative problem-solving program has the highest success in increasing children’s creativity,” observed William & Mary’s Kim.
As I already have said it is not, nor has ever been TREFFINGERS’S CPS METHOD nor do I believe having known Don since 1978 when I met him at CPSI and my 10 year old daughter went thru the CPSI Youth program he coordinated then would ever claim.
The home-game version of this means no longer encouraging kids to spring straight ahead to the right answer. When UGA’s Runco was driving through California one day with his family, his son asked why Sacramento was the state’s capital—why not San Francisco or Los Angeles? Runco turned the question back on him, encouraging him to come up with as many explanations as he could think of.
Preschool children, on average, ask their parents about 100 questions a day. Why, why, why—sometimes parents just wish it’d stop. Tragically, it does stop. By middle school they’ve pretty much stopped asking. It’s no coincidence that this same time is when student motivation and engagement plummet. They didn’t stop asking questions because they lost interest: it’s the other way around. They lost interest because they stopped asking questions.
Having studied the childhoods of highly creative people for decades, Claremont Graduate University’s Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and University of Northern Iowa’s Gary G. Gute found highly creative adults tended to grow up in families embodying opposites. Parents encouraged uniqueness, yet provided stability. They were highly responsive to kids’ needs, yet challenged kids to develop skills. This resulted in a sort of adaptability: in times of anxiousness, clear rules could reduce chaos—yet when kids were bored, they could seek change, too. In the space between anxiety and boredom was where creativity flourished.
Suggest you see the book…
Cradles of Eminence: Childhoods of More Than 700 Famous Men and Women by Victor Goertzel, (re-released in 2004)
My copy was dated in the 70s or early 80s
It’s also true that highly creative adults frequently grew up with hardship. Hardship by itself doesn’t lead to creativity, but it does force kids to become more flexible—and flexibility helps with creativity.
In early childhood, distinct types of free play are associated with high creativity. Preschoolers who spend more time in role-play (acting out characters) have higher measures of creativity: voicing someone else’s point of view helps develop their ability to analyze situations from different perspectives. When playing alone, highly creative first graders may act out strong negative emotions: they’ll be angry, hostile, anguished. The hypothesis is that play is a safe harbor to work through forbidden thoughts and emotions.
In middle childhood, kids sometimes create paracosms—fantasies of entire alternative worlds. Kids revisit their paracosms repeatedly, sometimes for months, and even create languages spoken there. This type of play peaks at age 9 or 10, and it’s a very strong sign of future creativity. A Michigan State University study of MacArthur “genius award” winners found a remarkably high rate of paracosm creation in their childhoods.
From fourth grade on, creativity no longer occurs in a vacuum; researching and studying become an integral part of coming up with useful solutions. But this transition isn’t easy. As school stuffs more complex information into their heads, kids get overloaded, and creativity suffers. When creative children have a supportive teacher—someone tolerant of unconventional answers, occasional disruptions, or detours of curiosity—they tend to excel. When they don’t, they tend to underperform and drop out of high school or don’t finish college at high rates.
They’re quitting because they’re discouraged and bored, not because they’re dark, depressed, anxious, or neurotic. It’s a myth that creative people have these traits. (Those traits actually shut down creativity; they make people less open to experience and less interested in novelty.) Rather, creative people, for the most part, exhibit active moods and positive affect. They’re not particularly happy—contentment is a kind of complacency creative people rarely have. But they’re engaged, motivated, and open to the world.
The new view is that creativity is part of normal brain function. Some scholars go further, arguing that lack of creativity—not having loads of it—is the real risk factor.
Torrance never believed that there is/was a lack of creativity in any child. The tendencies for creative thinking that he found in early age children mostly faded into the background by the time they reached the 4th grade in the US and other cultures.
It isn’t a lack of creativity or lack of creative thinking traits or skills it is a lack of support, promotion, recognition/rewards, encouragement of, application of and development of in our schools and workplaces or even in some homes.
In his research, Runco asks college students, “Think of all the things that could interfere with graduating from college.” Then he instructs them to pick one of those items and to come up with as many solutions for that problem as possible. This is a classic divergent-convergent creativity challenge. A subset of respondents, like the proverbial Murphy, quickly list every imaginable way things can go wrong. But they demonstrate a complete lack of flexibility in finding creative solutions. It’s this inability to conceive of alternative approaches that leads to despair. Runco’s two questions predict suicide ideation—even when controlling for preexisting levels of depression and anxiety.
In Runco’s subsequent research, those who do better in both problem-finding and problem-solving have better relationships. They are more able to handle stress and overcome the bumps life throws in their way. A similar study of 1,500 middle schoolers found that those high in creative self-efficacy had more confidence about their future and ability to succeed. They were sure that their ability to come up with alternatives would aid them, no matter what problems would arise.
When he was 30 years old, Ted Schwarzrock was looking for an alternative. He was hardly on track to becoming the prototype of Torrance’s longitudinal study. He wasn’t artistic when young, and his family didn’t recognize his creativity or nurture it. The son of a dentist and a speech pathologist, he had been pushed into medical school, where he felt stifled and commonly had run-ins with professors and bosses. But eventually, he found a way to combine his creativity and medical expertise: inventing new medical technologies.
Today, Schwarzrock is independently wealthy—he founded and sold three medical-products companies and was a partner in three more. His innovations in health care have been wide ranging, from a portable respiratory oxygen device to skin-absorbing anti-inflammatories to insights into how bacteria become antibiotic-resistant. His latest project could bring down the cost of spine-surgery implants 50 percent. “As a child, I never had an identity as a ‘creative person,’ ” Schwarzrock recalls. “But now that I know, it helps explain a lot of what I felt and went through.”
Creativity has always been prized in American society,
Has it?
I wonder what examples you can use to demonstrate that statement.
Art museums, art galleries, dance recitals, and other forms of creative production are not highly supported.
National Art Foundation has been the blunt of many politicians criticism.
Fundamentalism in religion, philosophy and general thought in the US continues to show their lack of support or prizing of creativity in American society.
but it’s never really been understood. While our creativity scores decline unchecked, the current national strategy for creativity consists of little more than praying for a Greek muse to drop by our houses.
Hmmm? People work hard at solving problems if they are asked to or they have to solve them, themselves they do not PRAY FOR A GREEK MUSE to drop by their houses.
The problems we face now, and in the future, simply demand that we do more than just hope for inspiration to strike. Fortunately, the science can help: we know the steps to lead that elusive muse right to our doors.
IDEA GENERATION SERVICES
Alan
creative thinking – creativity – creative problem solving – creative thinking consultant
