Teach Secondary -Issue 15.1

CREATIVE BURST Encourage your art students to venture beyond the conventional and embrace the strange with some creative thinking activities, suggests Alice Guile M any art and design departments will run GCSE ‘taster sessions’ for their KS3 students ahead of them choosing their options, but it’s possible to take this in a more interesting direction. Why not offer an exciting and engaging workshop that explores the psychology behind creativity? Creativity – the ability to create novel ideas and come up with unusual solutions to problems – can be influenced by qualities such as openness and persistence. Rather than coming from a specific area of the brain, it’s thought that creativity instead emerges frommultiple neural networks all collaborating with each other and the executive control centre that turns thoughts into actions. Providing students with opportunities to let their minds simply wander is therefore very important; the act of making connections between previously unrelated objects or topics is a key component of creativity. Divergent thinking When teachers facilitate creative thinking opportunities, it strengthens the brain’s ability to get those different areas working at once – what’s described as divergent thinking. Divergent thinking is almost diametrically opposed to much of the learning that’s done in school, which typically involves learning the correct answers to specific questions. This internalising of facts for the purpose of responding with right answers is convergent, or linear thinking. Students who happen to be neurodivergent may be especially adept at divergent thinking tasks. This could present opportunities to discuss with pupils how people who live with autism, dyslexia and ADHD have brains that work differently, and that scientific research has shown how they may be at an advantage when tackling tasks that require divergent thinking. Where artmeets psychology The Surrealists – of whom the most famous is, of course, Salvador Dali – would deliberately employ creative thinking exercises to boost their creativity, and you can do the same thing with your students. The Surrealists were particularly interested in the work of Sigmund Freud and his investigations of the subconscious. They saw the subconscious mind as a huge realm of unexplored creativity, and crafted exercises in an effort to access and further develop this part of their psyche. I’ve previously used similar exercises in lessons as part of a Surrealist scheme of work, while also introducing students to Sigmund Freud and his ‘iceberg theory’ of the id, ego and superego. Afterwards, they told me that they’d found exploring these links between art and psychology made it much easier for them to understand and engage with the work of the Surrealists. As a first step, you could use a PowerPoint presentation to familiarise students with the psychology of creativity, and how this helped the Surrealists to develop highly imaginative work. You could then try to run some of the creative thinking activities detailed in the ‘Try it yourself’ panel. What about other subjects? Some creative thinking activities can be potentially adapted and used in the context of other subjects. ‘30 Circles’, for example, may work as a good introduction to a creative writing assignment in English, or the devising of an original scene in drama. If running a general creative thinking workshop, we could also take inspiration fromEdward de Bono’s thinking exercises. Edward de Bono was a doctor and creative thinking expert who wrote numerous books, and originally coined the term ‘lateral thinking’. One of his ideas was the ‘Six thinking hats’ model: • White Hat: Presents objective facts and data • Red Hat: Provides emotional responses, feelings and intuition without judgment • Black Hat: Critically evaluates risks, points out problems and explains why an idea might not work “Creativityutilisesmultiple areas of the brainat once” 62 teachwire.net/secondary