College Essay Art Music and Problem Solving Outside the Box

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Everybody has a creative potential and from the moment yous tin express this creative potential, you can starting time irresolute the world. —Paulo Coelho, writer and lyricist

Learning Objectives

By the end of this section, y'all will be able to:

Ascertain creative thinking
Identify the value of creative thinking in educational activity
Describe the impact of limitations (such equally rules) on artistic thinking
Describe the part of creative thinking skills in problem-solving

Creative Thinking

Call back about a time when you visited a museum or a sculpture garden, or yous attended an orchestral performance or a concert by a favorite performer. Did yous curiosity at the skill, the artistry, and the innovation? Did you imagine how wonderful it must experience to have those abilities?

If you lot've ever had thoughts like this, y'all must know you lot're not lonely. It'south hard for anyone to behold a great piece of work of art or performance and not imagine standing, even briefly, in the artist's shoes.

Only when you've admired artistic works or creative people, have you best-selling the seeds of inventiveness within yourself?

Yous might be surprised to know that everyone has creative abilities: It's true of everyone who fully expresses artistic abilities likewise as those who limited them very piddling or not at all. All humans are innately creative, especially if creativity is understood as a problem-solving skill.

Put some other style, creativity is inspired when there is a trouble to solve. For instance, when a sculptor creates an amazing sculpture, information technology'due south an act of problem-solving: perhaps she must determine which artistic fashion to use in social club to create the likeness of an object, or maybe she is deciding which tools will most suit her purpose or style, perhaps she is assessing how all-time to satisfy a customer's request or earn income from her fine art—you get the thought. In every case, the problem sparks the sculptor's inventiveness and she brings her creativity to behave in finding an artistic solution.

Considered as an human activity of problem-solving, creativity can be understood as a skill—every bit opposed to an inborn talent or natural "gift"—that can exist taught as well as learned. Problem-solving is something we are called upon to do every day, from performing mundane chores to executing sophisticated projects. The proficient news is that we can always meliorate upon our problem-solving and creative-thinking skills—even if nosotros don't consider ourselves to be artists or "artistic." The following information may surprise and encourage yous!

Artistic thinking (a companion to critical thinking) is an invaluable skill for higher students. It's important considering it helps yous look at bug and situations from a fresh perspective. Creating thinking is a way to develop novel or unorthodox solutions that practise non depend wholly on past or current solutions. It's a mode of employing strategies to clear your mind and then that your thoughts and ideas can transcend what appear to be the limitations of a trouble. Creative thinking is a manner of moving beyond barriers.^[1]
As a creative thinker, you are curious, optimistic, and imaginative. Yous encounter issues as interesting opportunities, and you challenge assumptions and append judgment. You don't give up hands. Y'all work hard.^[2]

Is this you? Even if you don't yet see yourself as a competent creative thinker or problem-solver, you lot tin can learn solid skills and techniques to help you become one.

Activity: Assess Your Creative Problem-Solving Skills

Objective

Evaluate your attitude toward problem-solving in the context of cultivating creative thinking.

Directions:

Access Psychology Today's Creative Trouble-Solving Test at the Psychology Today Web site.
Read the introductory text, which explains how creativity is linked to fundamental qualities of thinking, such as flexibility and tolerance of ambiguity.
So accelerate to the questions by clicking on the "Take The Test" push. The test has 20 questions and volition take roughly x minutes.
After finishing the test, yous will receive a Snapshot Report with an introduction, a graph, and a personalized estimation for one of your test scores.

Complete any further steps by following your instructor's directions.

Artistic Thinking in Teaching

Now that you have taken the creative problem-solving self-assessment test, practise you have a improve sense of which creative thinking skills and attitudes yous accept, and which ones you lot might want to improve upon?

Higher is slap-up ground for enhancing artistic thinking skills. The post-obit are some college activities that can stimulate artistic thinking. Are any familiar to you?

Design sample test questions to exam your noesis equally you study for a final.
Devise a social media strategy for a club on campus.
Advise an education programme for a major yous are designing for yourself.
Prepare a spoken language that you will requite in a debate in your course.
Develop a pattern for a costume in a theatrical production.
Arrange audience seats in your classroom to maximize attending during your presentation.
Arrange an eye-catching holiday brandish in your dormitory or flat building.
Participate in a brainstorming session with your fellow musicians on how y'all will collaborate to write a musical limerick.
Typhoon a script for a video product that will exist shown to several college administrators.
Compose a set of requests and recommendations for a campus role to ameliorate its customer service.
Develop a marketing pitch for a mock business you are developing.
Develop a comprehensive energy-reduction programme for your cohousing arrangement.

How to Stimulate Creative Thinking

The post-obit video, How to Stimulate the Artistic Procedure, identifies half-dozen strategies to stimulate your creative thinking.

Sleep on information technology. Over the years, researchers have plant that the REM sleep bicycle boosts our creativity and problem-solving abilities, providing us with innovative ideas or answers to vexing dilemmas when nosotros awaken. Go along a pen and paper by the bed and then you can write down your nocturnal insights if they wake you lot up.
Get for a run or striking the gym. Studies indicate that exercise stimulates artistic thinking, and the brainpower boost lasts for a few hours.
Let your listen to wander a few times every day. Far from being a waste product of time, heedless has been plant to be an essential part of generating new ideas. If you're stuck on a problem or creatively blocked, remember well-nigh something else for a while.
Keep learning. Studying something far removed from your surface area of expertise is peculiarly effective in helping you think in new ways.
Put yourself in nervus-racking situations once in a while to fire upward your encephalon. Fear and frustration can trigger innovative thinking.
Continue a notebook with yous and then you lot e'er have a way to record fleeting thoughts. They're sometimes the best ideas of all.

A Brainstorm of Tips for Creative Thinking

The all-time mode to have a good idea is to take lots of ideas. —Linus Pauling, double Nobel Laureate, pharmacist, biochemist, and peace campaigner

Below are some additional tips to help you tap into original and creative thinking in your higher assignments and endeavors:

Sensing

Use all your senses—see, gustatory modality, odor, touch, hear, remember, speak.
Be a good observer of people, nature, and events around yous.

Thinking

Engage thinking on the right side of your encephalon (intuition, open-mindedness, visual perception, rhythm . . .).
Change your interpretation of an event, situation, beliefs, person, or object.
Let ideas to incubate.
Be open to insight equally ideas pop into your mind.

Imagining

Begin by generating ideas with a grouping of people.
Ask, "What would happen if . . ."
Ask, "In how many dissimilar ways . . ."
Develop ideas and aggrandize their possibilities.
Envision the future.

Speaking and Writing

Use your words and your "voice" when carrying your original ideas.
Avoid using clichés or overly familiar responses to questions or problems.
Explain how your ideas movement beyond the status quo and contribute to a discussion.
Have notes.

Cartoon

Use mind-mapping to capture ideas; start with a cardinal concept and write it in the center of your page; use connecting lines, radiating from the central concept, and write downward whatever connected or related ideas that come to you.
Create pictures or drawings of situations ("rich pictures") to testify them in a unlike way.

Learning

Find means to demonstrate your personal investment in projects.
Gather knowledge and acquit research.
Have more fun learning!

Moving

Practice physical activities to engage the creative areas of your brain and recall differently.

Resting

Have breaks.

Creative Thinking Fiction and Facts

As you continue to develop your creative thinking skills, be alert to perceptions near creative thinking that could slow down progress. Call up that creative thinking and problem-solving are ways to transcend the limitations of a problem and run into by barriers. Information technology'southward a style to think "outside of the box."

	FICTION	FACTS^[3]
1	Every problem has simply one solution (or ane correct answer)	The goal of problem-solving is to solve the problem, and most problems can be solved in whatsoever number of ways. If you discover a solution that works, it's a good solution. Other people may think up solutions that differ from yours, but that doesn't make your solution incorrect or unimportant. What is the solution to "putting words on paper"? Fountain pen, ballpoint, pencil, marker, typewriter, printer, printing printing, word-processing . . .?
two	The all-time answer or solution or method has already been discovered	Look at the history of any solution and you'll see that improvements, new solutions, and new right answers are e'er being found. What is the solution to man transportation? The ox or horse, the cart, the wagon, the railroad train, the car, the airplane, the jet, the space shuttle? What is the best and last?
iii	Creative answers are technologically complex	Only a few problems require complex technological solutions. Near problems you'll encounter demand only a thoughtful solution involving personal action and perhaps a few simple tools. Fifty-fifty many bug that seem to require technology can be addressed in other means.
4	Ideas either come or they don't. Zip will help— certainly not structure.	In that location are many successful techniques for generating ideas. Ane of import technique is to include structure. Create guidelines, limiting parameters, and concrete goals for yourself that stimulate and shape your creativity. This strategy can help you lot get past the intimidation of "the blank page." For example, if you desire to write a story about a person who gained insight through experience, you lot can stoke your creativity by limiting or narrowing your theme to "a young daughter in Cambodia escaped the Khmer Rouge to find a new life equally a nurse in French republic." Employ this specificity and structure to any creative attempt.

Problem-Solving with Creative Thinking

Creative trouble-solving is a type of problem-solving. It involves searching for new and novel solutions to problems. Unlike disquisitional thinking, which scrutinizes assumptions and uses reasoning, creative thinking is well-nigh generating alternative ideas— practices and solutions that are unique and effective. Information technology's about facing sometimes dingy and unclear problems and seeing how "things" tin be done differently—how new solutions can be imagined.^[4]

The following words, past Dr. Andrew Robert Baker, are excerpted from his "Thinking Critically and Creatively" essay introduced earlier. Below, Dr. Baker continues to illuminate some of the many means that higher students will be exposed to creative thinking and how it can enrich their learning experiences.

Thinking Critically and Creatively

While disquisitional thinking analyzes information and roots out the true nature and facets of problems, it is creative thinking that drives progress frontward when information technology comes to solving these problems. Exceptional artistic thinkers are people that invent new solutions to existing issues that do non rely on past or current solutions. They are the ones who invent solution C when everyone else is even so arguing between A and B. Artistic thinking skills involve using strategies to articulate the mind so that our thoughts and ideas can transcend the current limitations of a problem and let u.s. to see beyond barriers that prevent new solutions from being plant.

Brainstorming is the simplest example of intentional creative thinking that most people have tried at least once. With the quick generation of many ideas at once, nosotros tin block-out our encephalon'southward natural tendency to limit our solution-generating abilities so we can access and combine many possible solutions/thoughts and invent new ones. It is sort of like sprinting through a race'southward finish line only to find in that location is new track on the other side and we tin can go along going, if we choose. Equally with disquisitional thinking, higher education both demands creative thinking from the states and is the perfect place to exercise and develop the skill. Everything from word problems in a math class, to opinion or persuasive speeches and papers, call upon our creative thinking skills to generate new solutions and perspectives in response to our professor's demands. Creative thinking skills ask questions such as—What if? Why not? What else is out there? Can I combine perspectives/solutions? What is something no one else has brought-up? What is being forgotten/ignored? What about ______? It is the opening of doors and options that follows trouble-identification.

Consider an assignment that required you to compare two different authors on the topic of instruction and select and defend i equally improve. Now add to this scenario that your professor clearly prefers one author over the other. While critical thinking can get you as far as identifying the similarities and differences between these authors and evaluating their merits, it is creative thinking that you lot must employ if you wish to challenge your professor's opinion and invent new perspectives on the authors that have not previously been considered.

So, what tin can we do to develop our critical and creative thinking skills? Although many students may dislike it, group work is an excellent way to develop our thinking skills. Many times I have heard from students their disdain for working in groups based on scheduling, varied levels of commitment to the group or projection, and personality conflicts too, of course. True—it's non ever easy, but that is why it is so effective. When nosotros piece of work collaboratively on a projection or problem we bring many brains to behave on a subject. These dissimilar brains will naturally develop varied ways of solving or explaining problems and examining information. To the observant private nosotros see that this places us in a constant state of back and along critical/creative thinking modes.

For example, in grouping work nosotros are simultaneously analyzing data and generating solutions on our own, while challenging other's analyses/ideas and responding to challenges to our own analyses/ideas. This is part of why students tend to avert group piece of work—it challenges usa as thinkers and forces united states of america to analyze others while defending ourselves, which is not something we are used to or comfy with equally most of our educational experiences involve solo work. Your professors know this—that's why nosotros assign information technology—to help you grow as students, learners, and thinkers!

—Dr. Andrew Robert Baker, Foundations of Bookish Success: Words of Wisdom

Resources for Creative Thinking

Games That Stimulate Creativity
Creative Thinking Skills
45 Websites on Artistic Thinking and Creative Skills
Creativity Techniques A To Z

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Source: https://courses.lumenlearning.com/collegesuccess-lumen/chapter/creative-thinking-skills/