Advanced Art Lesson Plans

Creative Thinking

The following attitudes and activities seem to be necessary for creative thinking, and have been observed in all truly creative people regardless of profession.

• Training and practice of right brain functions


• Suspension of judgment; making disconnected jumps in thinking


• Openness to new stimuli, new ideas, new attitudes, new approaches


• Willingness to take risks; making "leaps of faith", lessening inhibitions


• Freedom in subjective thinking; expression of emotions and personal realities


• Intuitiveness, "playing hunches" to generate spontaneous ideas


• Freedom to make outlandish responses; rejecting fear of being "wrong" or unconventional


• Rejecting destructive criticism, prejudices, indiscriminate praise


• A childlike attitude of creative play; tinkering with ideas, materials, structures, a "fun" attitude toward experimentation


• Freedom to fantasize, unconventional imagining


• Divergent thinking: simultaneous processing of ideas, fluency of ideas


• Acceptance of non-ordinary realities, contradictions; ability to tolerate and manipulate puzzles, ambiguities

Do Schools Kill Creativity -- Ken Robinson