2. What is Creativity?
Creativity refers to the ability to create or discover
something that is novel and has some value for the
society.
“Creativity is the capacity of persons to produce
compositions, products or ideas of any sort which
are essentially new or novel, and previously
unknown to the producer.”-Drevdahl
“Creativity is the ability to produce work that is
original, but still appropriate and useful.”-Berk
3. Components of Creativity
Divergent Thinking- thinking process involved
in generating more than one ideas or answers to
a given problem.
Ability to sense problems: It means an awareness of the
defects, needs and deficiencies in the environment.
Fluency: It refers to the ability to express/generate
multiple solutions of a given problem/concept .
Flexibility: ability to state a variety of solutions/answers
to a problem and reflects the ability to change the direction
of one’s thinking. Variety of solutions created and not the
number of solutions is considered under flexibility.
4. Originality:It means the ability to produce unique/new ideas.
Inventions are the most common example of this aspect of
creativity.
Elaboration: Ability to develop well an idea/insight. A
thinker’swriter’s greatness lies in making the idea elaborate
with explanations, situations and implications/plots, characters
and dialogue.
Redefinition: Ability to improvise operations in situations
where a familiar function is performed with an object which is
not normally used to perform such a function.
5. Creativity & Intelligence
Creativity relates to divergent thinking.
Intelligence involves cognition and convergent
thinking
Knowledge and motivation are linked to creativity.
Every intelligent person may not be creative but a
very high percentage of creative people possess
intelligence to a high degree.
Many correlational studies show that intelligence
and creativity go hand in hand up to a certain limit
and get separated after that limit.
6. Teacher’s role in fostering creativity
•Encourage unusual or odd questions:A teacher should encourage
student’s curiosity and accept unusual questions.
•Provide activities to promote creative thinking/abilities
•Organise brainstorming sessions:This is a strategy where the
teacher presents the problem to the brainstorming group and each
member of the group generates ideas to find solutions to a given
problem. Generated ideas are scrutinised by members for choosing
with the most potential to solve the problem.
7. •Provide students 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.
•Extra credit for creative thinking:While evaluating students
performance in your subjects, look for creative ideas. Students
exhibiting creative effort should be recognised and rewarded by
extra credit.
•Use synectics: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
