During some research on Thomas Edison I stumbled on the fact that he deliberately surrounded himself with a diverse range of expertise in order to generate new thinking and ideas, a creative council. In a recent post I referred to the concept of “casting widely” to make creative connections, Edison gathered people into his creative council to accelerate this. It is a practice that has been replicated by many visionaries, inventors and, more recently, innovative companies.
Classroom Creative Council
Andrew Carnegie called this creative council a “mastermind group alliance” a gathering of people towards a common creative goal. I was struck by this lovely idea, not so much in the sense of connecting classrooms with a varied external expertise, but the idea that you could convene an imaginary Classroom Creative Council.
Encouraging a creative mindset and learning about what this actually means can be done through creative inquiry processes such as design thinking. They emphasise the imperative of thinking and connecting deeply with a topic and developing a range of dispositions. But one hugely important element within an experience of creative inquiry is the modelling from peers, adults and who we might learn about.
Just picture an imaginary Classroom Creative Council of visionaries, inventors and innovators from our past and present, who epitomise the mindsets and dispositions we all want to uphold. A Creative Council filled with members that everyone in the class has learned about and who we recognise for their individual strengths.
Who Would Have A Seat?
You might plan for literacy, science and history lessons about these characters as they are introduced, or indeed offer the opportunity for the class to put forward their own recommendations for the council. The reason you would have such a reference group would be as Wily Walnut puts it, to:
“tune in” to the vibration, to the morphic field, to the archetypal meme, perhaps to the very soul of that person in order to share in their wisdom, insight and ways of thinking, acting and being.
With one of the members of the Creative Council in mind we might ask a series of questions and provocations to establish a new point of view about a project or idea. Imagine if Edison or Da Vinci, or any number of creative visionaries, were the subject of the following prompts:
What would…think?
How would … approach this problem?
What historical precedent or example can inform us about what to do next?
Who would be smiling about what we are doing and why?
What would … say are the biggest challenges to this approach?
What actions would … take next?
What would … say we had forgotten and why?
Would … be proud of us?
In order to answer these questions well, with a depth and authority that allows a new perspective to contribute to our work, we would need to better understand the people involved. The members of our council should be familiar to us, we would need to know their mindset and approach to work and life. Equipped with a deeper knowledge of these role models, we might be able to gain insight from their imaginary mentorship.
I am always inspired myself by historical figures who are beacons of creative light for us to follow and in some future posts I will outline some of the elements we might look for in those figureheads.
In the meantime why not make a suggestion in the comments as to who would be in your Creative Council. Who inspires you? Who would you like as a virtual mentor contributing to your ideas? Who would have a seat in your Creative Council chambers? I would be fascinated to learn who you would nominate.
pic – Portrait of Ada by British painter Margaret Sarah Carpenter (1836)
As we hit the midway point of this journey of a full month of blogging everyday, (#28daysofwriting) I am just looking back on where I started and some of the challenges that I faced establishing a steady habit and what I have learned.
So the 28 minute time constraint seems to have been pretty handy in setting a limit that still allows ideas to flow and some time to think whilst writing. I have had a few days in the last 2 weeks when I have wanted a little longer, but I am happy with how I have been able to carve out the half an hour or so everyday to sit and write. So I have learned I can find the time when I need to – even just half an hour. Time was cited as the biggest challenge by those involved. I am hopeful that for everyone taking part they will form a better understanding of how we create and protect this precious time – or simply why it is still such a challenge.
The image above is a word cloud of the biggest challenges to getting into a regular blogging habit shared by the 100+ people who are involved this month.
I have learned that writing in the evening has been my go-to time for the activity. I might switch over and do some morning writing and see how that goes for me during the remainder of the month. Learning when we write best or when we have a preference to do so is hopefully a better understanding those involved in #28daysofwriting will have.
One of the most important positive outcomes for me was a shift in the way I have been reflecting and thinking during the day. I actually felt this very early on and it has been something that has continued. I am thinking about my writing more and identifying aspects of my work, or concepts I want to explore in more detail. Previously this was something I felt only when I was sat staring at the blinking cursor, ready to go. I have learned that thinking about writing more regularly throughout the day has helped clarify my thinking. I have opened up the positive aspects of the thinking process that goes on with writing to be woven into the fabric of my day.
This is a recent resource I have shared on Twitter that has proven really useful and very popular with educators. Thanks to Rebecca Alber and Edutopia for sharing/creating the original.
You should complement this with some of the following great resources on questioning in the classroom.
Eleanor Duckworth’s work on Critical Explorers asserts that the combination of: teachers as curriculum designers and the focus on children’s thinking and not simply our own, is a powerful learning duo.
Today we take a further look at some practical questioning strategies she has outlined in her work and a hexagonal thinking strategy you can use. The following is from the Critical Explorers site where you can delve more deeply into the ideas she offers.
Catch students’ interest
Try to convey that you think they’ll enjoy exploring this image (or text, or map, etc.), and that what they are doing and saying sheds new light for you on the object. It always does.
Try to keep them thinking about it, even when they may think they have done all they can.
Try to find out what they are thinking about the image, and to follow their thinking as it changes.
For example:
Ask for observations:
Start with a question that allows for a very small answer, where everyone has something to say — for example, “What do you notice?”
Ask them to point to the image and show everyone what they are talking about.
Ask what else they notice.
Ask them to say more about an observation they’ve made.
Ask for clarification:
Ask them to refer back to the image itself to back up whatever they have to say about it.
Ask them to clarify something, or to explain what makes them say what they do.
Make a hunch about what is behind what they say, and check the hunch with them.
Ask about conflicting or contrasting ideas:
Draw attention to some seeming inconsistency in what they have said.
Ask what about the image puzzles them.
Ask how what they have said fits with another part of the image, or with something they said earlier, or with something someone else has said.
Ask them to think about other students’ ideas, and to refer to the image to explain why they agree or disagree.
To provide further support for children we have found that a hexagonal thinking activity gives them a clear way to structure their thinking, seeing the combinations of ideas they have and manipulating their thinking in a tangible way.
You can explore a range of resources and further reading about hexagonal thinking/learning such as one of David Didau’s original posts. This post is useful from Frances Brown that extends some of the ideas and of course HOOKed on Learning’s resource page which offers many a link journey to explore.
This summary presentation from my good friend Chris Harte, a Leading Teacher at the John Monash Science School, is a great place to start.
In “The Rules of Genius, Rule #9: Approach answers obliquely“, Marty Neumeier outlines a range of thinking strategies (in the italicised sections below) to explore a challenge in new ways. These strategies are always great to have in your toolkit when exploring a period of enquiry with children or adults.
In an effort to build on Neumeier’s thinking and develop something new, I have expanded on the various steps he has outlined with some additional thoughts and links to help you approach your own creative exploration in a holistic way and to think obliquely.
Note: I have created a handy little graphic from all of these great strategies you can download it here for free.
(1) Think in metaphors
A metaphor is a link between two dissimilar things: “The world is a stage.” By equating the world with a stage, you can more easily imagine that we’re all actors playing a part an insight you might not have had without the metaphor.
When you use a metaphor to link two ideas together, you are combining elements that have little or no logical connection. By breaking the rules of logic in this way, metaphors can open up the creative side of the brain – the part that is stimulated by images, ideas, and concepts. So metaphorical thinking can help you with creative problem solving: To use another famous metaphor, it helps you “think outside the box”.
(2) Think in pictures
Visual thinking can strip a problem down to its essence, leading to profoundly simple connections that language by itself can’t make. The ability to draw stick figures, arrows, and talk balloons is all you need to think visually.
Visualising your ideas in a simple way is a strategy we regularly use when working with groups. We encourage them to draw their initial idea on a post-it note and share it quickly with a colleague.
This quick sketch and share, precludes us from investing too deeply in a given idea and does force us to be open to hearing how to make it better from our peers – as we don’t have all the answers, and our idea is only roughly formed we are more likely to be open to advice.
You could also follow the “5 Sketching Secrets of Leonardo Da Vinci“: Look for new combinations; Engage your imagination; Collaborate with others when you sketch; Use annotations in your sketches; Sketch your ideas out 4-5 times.
(3) Start from a different place
When you grab for the “correct” solution, brilliant solutions will elude you. You’ll get stuck in the tar pits of knowledge, unable to free your mind of what you already know. The easiest way to escape this trap is by rejecting the correct solution—at least temporarily—in favor of the “wrong” solution. While the worst idea can never be the best idea, it will take your imagination to a different starting place.
Typically when we are exploring new solutions we have an invisible filter that is usually marked “safe”. Even with encouragement it is very hard to break that safe set and come up with a new set of ideas beyond the realms of feasibility. We rarely spend time in this fanciful place and so find it very difficult.
But coming up with your 5 Worst Ideas to solve a problem is a great way to let the pressures go a little, it often leads to lots of laughs and by inverting some of those negative elements there is often a kernel of something great there. Some nice little activity steps in this post about it.
(4) Steal from other domains
If you steal an idea cleverly enough, the theft will go unnoticed. While stealing is not the same as pure imagination, it does take a mental leap to see how an idea from one industry or discipline could be adapted to another.
Recognising the similarities with the handover disciplines (in emergency care) visible in the pit of a Formula One racing team, they invited the McLaren and Ferrari racing teams to work with them to examine how their processes could be more structured and effective. They went out to the pits of the British Grand Prix, met Ferrari’s technical managers at their base in Italy and invited some of them to come and observe their handovers at Great Ormond Street…The input of the Formula One pit technicians resulted in a major restructuring of their patient handover from theatre to the ICU.
It is a fine example of a group being able to see beyond their own discipline in order to seek out innovative ways to solve existing challenges.
(5) Arrange blind dates
Great ideas are often two ideas that haven’t previously been introduced. Using a technique called “combinatory play,” you can throw unrelated ideas together to see if the create a new idea. Look for combinations that have a natural fit.
Maria Popova shares a post on Brain Pickings about the elemental work of combinatory play in the creative process, of course referring to Einstein’s take on it: “Combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought.” However Popova shares a lovely introduction to the concept herself:
For as long as I can remember — and certainly long before I had the term for it — I’ve believed that creativity is combinatorial: Alive and awake to the world, we amass a collection of cross-disciplinary building blocks — knowledge, memories, bits of information, sparks of inspiration, and other existing ideas — that we then combine and recombine, mostly unconsciously, into something “new.” From this vast and cross-disciplinary mental pool of resources beckons the infrastructure of what we call our “own” “original” ideas.
(6) Reverse the Polarity
Write down as many assumptions about the problem as you can think of. Reverse them. Think about what it would take to make the reversed assumption true. Some of these may lead to new ideas.
Assumptions are often the baggage that we bring along on a journey of change. The way things have always been “done” has a powerful influence on the decisions we make and indeed the ambition we often hold for change. With too much room they can stultify organisational change.
When I am working in education there are many assumptions being made because the challenges we face are often deeply complex and involve different people. We need to be open enough to Name them and Challenge them.
Human nature is such that when we assume we know how to do something, we perform the act without much thought about the assumptions we make. History is replete with thousands of examples of what happens when people don’t challenge assumptions.
This is taken from What Monkeys Teach Us about the Assumptions We Make, by Michael Michalko the author of Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative Thinking Techniques. Make sure you explore the post and read the great story of where assumptive practice can blindly lead us.
(7) Ask simple questions
What else is this like? Who else believes this? What if I changed it slightly? What can I eliminate? What can I substitute? Is this the cause or the effect? What if I changed the timing? What if I made it bigger? What would happen if I did nothing?
No doubt this is linked with our ability to challenge those assumptions we hold, asking questions is, in my humble opinion, the pre-cursor to any creative process, rarely are they missing.
exploration of one of the simplest, but most fundamental, aspects of how students learn and how students display their learning in lessons: higher order questioning. It is simply about getting students to ask ‘why‘ and an exploration of the crucial value of such deep questioning.
(8) Watch for accidents
You can sometimes make the best discoveries when you’re searching for something else. Pay attention to anomalies, surprises, or feedback that confounds your expectations. These can open up exciting new areas of inquiry.
One wonders whether the rare ability to be completely attentive to and to profit by, Nature’s slightest deviation from the conduct expected of her is not the secret of the best research minds and one that explains why some men turn to most remarkably good advantage seemingly trivial accidents. Behind such attention lies an unremitting sensitivity.
(9) Write things down
Not all your ideas will be worthwhile, but they might trigger new ideas. Make a list of your thoughts as you work through any problem. Keep a notebook, a sketchbook, a scrapbook, or an idea file. A pencil can be a crowbar for lifting ideas from your subconscious.
I like that description from Neumeier of the pencil being an idea-crowbar. In this particular field, Da Vinci has set us some incredible precedent as explored earlier.
Thomas Alva Edison has much to offer as well in this particular note-taking technique. In this post exploring Edison’s creative process in further detail it suggests that historians have discovered over 3500 detailed notebook belonging to him. In those books there is over four million pages of idea, sketches and notes he made.
What is immediately apparent is that Edison’s mind wandered through a vast spectrum of unrelated projects in an apparent free flow of associations. This is a critical point to understand. The mind grows through the number of connections it can make. Genius finds relationships between the most diverse things….Frequently, one of Edison’s inventions would spawn another in an unrelated field, which in turn would give rise to another in a different area of interest. It’s as though by pushing, experimenting and thinking in one direction, Edison simultaneously benefitted in all the other projects that he was working on. This points to the concept of the holographic mind. Affect one part and you affect all the parts. Nothing is wasted.
Whether we are exploring a period of curriculum enquiry with our class, tackling a challenge in our organisation or embarking upon a period of creative development, our thinking and the tools we use to do it, need to offer us as much breadth as possible. Typically we need to be able to see complex themes or challenges from as many different angles as we can.
Taking this type of multi faceted thinking strategy not only provides us a more comprehensive creative approach, it gives us all the best possible chance to break new ground and reveal opportunities that have yet to be discovered.
FREE Bonus Thinking Divergently Resource
My Thinking Divergently resource summarises these approaches in a useful little graphic format.
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