Liz Malone's List: Creativity

• But what we really have to get hold of is the idea that you can't be creative if you don't do something.
• creativity is a process of having original ideas that have value
• So an essential bit of every creative process is evaluation
• misconception
• special people
• A policy for creativity in education needs to be about everybody, not just a few.
• special activities
• creativity is really a function of everything we do
• about the whole curriculum, not just part of it
• just about letting yourself go
• disciplined path of daily education
• extraordinary insights, breakthroughs, and discipline they have brought to their work.
• Why do you think creativity is especially imp
• ortan
• right now?
• More peopl
• challenges we currently face are without precedent
• Technolog
• strain on the world's natural resources
• transforming how people work, think, and connect. It's transforming our cultural values.
• strains on our political and financial institutions
• on health care, on education
• we're going to need every ounce of ingenuity, imagination, and creativity to confront these problems.
• massive unpredictability
• "We need people who can be innovative, who can think differently."
• Fortune 500 companies
• America is now facing the biggest challenge it's ever faced—to maintain it's position in the world economies.
• innovation, creativity, and ingenuity
• And when you find things you're good at, you tend to get better at everything because your confidence is up and your attitude is different.
• people perform better when they're in touch with things that inspire them.
• People often associate creativity with the individual. But is there a social dimension to creativity that's particularly relevant in the 21st century?
• Most original thinking comes through collaboration
• creative processes benefit enormously from collaboration
• one of the great skills we have to promote and teach—collaborating and benefiting from diversity rather than promoting homogeneity
• collaboration, diversity, the exchange of ideas, and building on other people's achievements are at the heart of the creative process
• Can you teach creativity?
• two ways of thinking about teaching creativity
• teach generic skills
• divergent thinking
• analogies, metaphors, and visual thinking
• personal creativity
• If creativity and innovation are so important, should we assess them?
• Whether there would be an individual grade for creativity, that's a larger question. Certainly giving people credit for originality, encouraging it, and giving kids some way of reflecting on whether these new ideas are more effective than existing ideas is a powerful part of pedagogy. But you can't reduce everything to a number in the end, and I don't think we should.
• When I hear people say, "Well, of course, you can't assess creativity," I think, "You can—just stop and think about it a bit."

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