Nurturing Creativity Takes Creativity

We need to ask the question "Do students gain any experience with problems that require both intuition and logic?"

In Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind (see last two posts), Claxton says that many scientific breakthroughs could not have occurred through knowledge and reason alone. A hunch, a willingness to "make a lot out of a little" and to speculate in imaginative ways also played a role. When do students get to do this? Again, it takes time.

Moreover, Claxton cites studies showing that the process of solving problems requiring insight and intuition can be hampered by the use of deductive thinking or even by the introduction of verbal hints or the need to talk about the problem-solving process as it is occurring. So too much focusing on the need to answer correctly in class and pass tests may be stifling creativity. "There is a wealth of evidence," Claxton says, "to confirm the common impression that when people feel threatened, pressurised, judged, or stressed, they tend to revert to ways of thinking that are more clear-cut, more tried and tested, and more conventional: in a word, less creative."