Put yourself in nerve-racking situations once in a while to fire up your brain. Explain how your ideas move beyond the status quo and contribute to a discussion. Embracing new opportunities and trying new things. There are huge benefits to learning to think a little differently. Avoid using clichés or overly familiar responses to questions or problems. Create pictures or drawings of situations (“rich pictures”) to show them in a different way. Considered as an act of problem-solving, creativity can be understood as a skill—as opposed to an inborn talent or natural “gift”—that can be taught as well as learned. Studies indicate that exercise stimulates creative thinking, and the brainpower boost lasts for a few hours. Critical Thinking Skills There are many successful techniques for generating ideas. Did you imagine how wonderful it must feel to have those abilities? Andrew Robert Baker, Foundations of Academic Success: Words of Wisdom, 45 Websites on Creative Thinking and Creative Skills, https://creativecriticalthinking.wikispaces.com/Creative+Thinking, http://textbooks.opensuny.org/foundations-of-academic-success/, CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike, Every problem has only one solution (or one right answer). Creative answers are technologically complex. Be a good observer of people, nature, and events around you. What is the solution to “putting words on paper”? Develop a comprehensive energy-reduction plan for your cohousing arrangement. Did you marvel at the skill, the artistry, and the innovation? Compose a set of requests and recommendations for a campus office to improve its customer service. Develop ideas and expand their possibilities. Although many students may dislike it, group work is an excellent way to develop our thinking skills. The good news is that we can always improve upon our problem-solving and creative-thinking skills—even if we don’t consider ourselves to be artists or “creative.” The following information may surprise and encourage you! Foundations of Academic Success: Words of Wisdom. Devise a social media strategy for a club on campus. Our assumptions go unchallenged, and our views tend to get reinforced. There are a number of tools and techniques that you can use to stimulate creative thinking. Creative Thinking Techniques, See also: Most problems you’ll encounter need only a thoughtful solution involving personal action and perhaps a few simple tools. Your professors know this—that’s why we assign it—to help you grow as students, learners, and thinkers! Go for a run or hit the gym. After finishing the test, you will receive a Snapshot Report with an introduction, a graph, and a personalized interpretation for one of your test scores. updated for 2020. "Creativity simply means being able to come up with something new. What else is out there? Once we have a piece of information, we tend to use it again: that’s how we learn. Evaluate your attitude toward problem-solving in the context of cultivating creative thinking. Material from skillsyouneed.com may not be sold, or published for profit in any form without express written permission from skillsyouneed.com. The best answer or solution or method has already been discovered. Taking time to enjoy arts or create something in your leisure time will help you to broaden your horizons more generally. This strategy can help you get past the intimidation of “the blank page.” For example, if you want to write a story about a person who gained insight through experience, you can stoke your creativity by limiting or narrowing your theme to “a young girl in Cambodia escaped the Khmer Rouge to find a new life as a nurse in France.” Apply this specificity and structure to any creative endeavor. Many times I have heard from students their disdain for working in groups based on scheduling, varied levels of commitment to the group or project, and personality conflicts too, of course. Even if you don’t yet see yourself as a competent creative thinker or problem-solver, you can learn solid skills and techniques to help you become one. We all tend to get on best with people who are like us, and particularly people with the same background and overall views on life. Change Your Eating Habits. Taking time to actively go out and meet new people—and particularly more diverse people, who are not so like you—will help you to challenge your assumptions. This might be a picture, or a piece of music—but it might also be a new idea. Allow your mind to wander a few times every day. All humans are innately creative, especially if creativity is understood as a problem-solving skill. Unlike critical thinking, which scrutinizes assumptions and uses reasoning, creative thinking is about generating alternative ideas— practices and solutions that are unique and effective. Arrange an eye-catching holiday display in your dormitory or apartment building. What is the solution to human transportation? Everyone can benefit from creative thinking from time to time. Obviously not everyone can go and live abroad for a period, but actively seeking out and taking up opportunities to do something new could have the same effect. These include: ‘ Spreading your social wings ’ to get to know a wider and more diverse group of people. "Born This Way: Is Creativity Innate or Learned? The test has 20 questions and will take roughly 10 minutes. Creative thinking can be stimulated both by an unstructured process such as brainstorming, and by a structured process such as lateral thinking. Is this you? The following are some college  activities that can stimulate creative thinking. Propose an education plan for a major you are designing for yourself. You work hard. Believe it or not, but what you eat can impact your creativity. Brainstorm by generating ideas with a group of people. Develop a marketing pitch for a mock business you are developing. Why not? They’re sometimes the best ideas of all. Of course it is possible to think creatively all the time. Creative thinking is the ability to look at things differently, and find new ways of solving problems. As a creative thinker, you are curious, optimistic, and imaginative. Fear and frustration can trigger innovative thinking. On occasions like this, it may be worth doing some ‘formal’ creative thinking, and using a trained facilitator to help the group get the most out of the session. Are any familiar to you? The thinking is that these activities help us to see things from a new perspective, and therefore to think more creatively. Creative thinking, therefore, is the ability to think differently: to see a problem or issue from a new angle or perspective. People who have expanded their creative-thinking skills are able to review an item or product from a unique perspective. —Paulo Coelho, author and lyricist. You'll get our 5 free 'One Minute Life Skills' and our weekly newsletter. Keep learning. It’s a way to think “outside of the box.”, Creative problem-solving is a type of problem-solving. Do physical activities to engage the creative areas of your brain and think differently. 5 Routines to Enhance Creativity and Imagination, Subscribe to our Newsletter | Contact Us | About Us. We'll never share your email address and you can unsubscribe at any time. However, for most people, creative thinking requires more effort. Creative thinking skills ask questions such as—What if? —Dr. The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas. However, most if not all have some science behind them, and certainly some evidence that they work. So, what can we do to develop our critical and creative thinking skills? When we work collaboratively on a project or problem we bring many brains to bear on a subject. Consider an assignment that required you to compare two different authors on the topic of education and select and defend one as better. This has huge advantages—for example, it means that we don’t have to learn how to use a knife and fork every time we eat—but it also has some disadvantages, in that we tend to stop thinking about things that we do, see or say regularly. There is more about suitable tools and techniques for creative thinking in our page on Creative Thinking Techniques. Creative thinking (a companion to critical thinking) is an invaluable skill for college students. The answer lies in their ability to use creative thinking. Creative thinking skills involve using strategies to clear the mind so that our thoughts and ideas can transcend the current limitations of a problem and allow us to see beyond barriers that prevent new solutions from being found. ", Harris, Robert. Exceptional creative thinkers are people that invent new solutions to existing problems that do not rely on past or current solutions. 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. It can open the way to getting others to support your thinking, as well. They are natural problem-solvers and innovators. In every case, the problem sparks the sculptor’s creativity and she brings her creativity to bear in finding an artistic solution. This is part of why students tend to avoid group work—it challenges us as thinkers and forces us to analyze others while defending ourselves, which is not something we are used to or comfortable with as most of our educational experiences involve solo work. You see problems as interesting opportunities, and you challenge assumptions and suspend judgment. But when you’ve admired creative works or creative people, have you acknowledged the seeds of creativity within yourself? The study found that people who had lived abroad were better able to think creatively to solve a problem. Without even realising that you are doing so, you will start to think more widely, and see things differently. It’s important because it helps you look at problems and situations from a fresh perspective. 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