Can Effective Creativity Be Taught? A Qualitative Small-Sample Study of High School Science Teachers

Maital, S (Shlomo)¹, Lavi, R (Rea)
¹S Neaman Institute, Technion, Technion City, 32000, HAIFA

 

Submission type

Poster only

Scheduled

Hallway, 10-07-2019, 15:30 - 17:00

Keywords

effective creativity, teaching creativity, structured ideation, personal creativity machine

Summary

       During the fall semester 2018/19, for 14 weeks, six students were enrolled in the graduate course  Effective Creative Thinking, offered by the Faculty of Science & Technology Education, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology.  Four of the six sought career change from high-tech to education.   The course provided a structured method for discovering creative ideas, validating them, and implementing them (for teachers themselves and for their future students).  At the onset of the course each student provided a “personal creativity machine” – a visual or textual description of the process they use for effective creativity.  At the end of the course, each student did the same exercise.   

        A core difficulty in teaching people to be more creative is that creativity is highly personal, unique to each individual’s personality, background, knowledge, intelligence and motivation.  A flexible structured approach, within which each individual can adapt and personalize their own method, proved  effective.   Our six participants all showed significant (in our view) improvement in the systematic manner in which they discover ideas, sort them, test them and then activate them.

References:  S. Maital.  Dismantle!  How to Deconstruct Your Mind and Build a Personal Creativity Machine.  Harper Collins (India),  2018.  

Auteurs