Learning And Teaching Creative Cognition

At the onset, this book provides explanations/definitions for what it is to be "creative." Research-based viewpoints and personal perspectives on creativity lead to an introduction of an Interactive Methodology (IM) and interactive instructional strategies focused on The Interactive Book Report (IBR). Learning-through-play is emphasized. Special needs students, learning styles, thinking and feeling, a psychologist and scientist’s perspectives, effect and affect of the IM and IBR with leadership building are presented. Differentiated instruction activities, mindfulness, neuroplasticity, five case studies involving classroom use of the book’s creative cognition operatives are given explicit attention.

To what extent do creativity and imagination decline in childhood? What factors might influence a decline? Theories of cognitive development show only uni-directional progress (although theorists may disagree whether such progress occurs steadily in small continuous improvements or comes in stages separated by plateaus during which developmental gains are consolidated). Declines in levels of skill are quite uncommon, yet many have observed just such an unusual pattern with regard to the development of creativity and of the imagination. Is there something about the development of one kind of thinking that undermines imaginative and creative thinking? Is it perhaps the process of schooling itself, with its focus on the acquisition of knowledge and the production of correct (rather than imaginative) answers, which promotes this decline? This book explores these questions from a variety of perspectives. Essays from psychologists and educators from diverse backgrounds discuss the relationships among creativity, reason, and knowledge.

This workbook contains over sixty activities for learning-through-play. The activities were created by teacher-candidates, retired educators, and student-learners. They include interdisciplinary activities for first through twelfth grade levels. Each activity includes how-to-implement instructions along with applicable learning standards.

The author of this volume addresses particular areas of creativity research from the point of view of applications to education. The focus is on understanding, measuring and developing the creative thinking and problem-solving skills in all students, not simply the intellectually gifted.

Creative Cognition combines original experiments with existing work in cognitive psychology to provide the first explicit account of the cognitive processes and structures that contribute to creative thinking and discovery. Creative Cognition combines original experiments with existing work in cognitive psychology to provide the first explicit account of the cognitive processes and structures that contribute to creative thinking and discovery. In separate chapters, the authors take up visualization, concept formation, categorization, memory retrieval, and problem solving. They describe novel experimental methods for studying creative cognitive processes under controlled laboratory conditions, along with techniques that can be used to generate many different types of inventions and concepts. Unlike traditional approaches, Creative Cognition considers creativity as a product of numerous cognitive processes, each of which helps to set the stage for insight and discovery. It identifies many of these processes as well as general principles of creative cognition that can be applied across a variety of different domains, with examples in artificial intelligence, engineering design, product development, architecture, education, and the visual arts. Following a summary of previous approaches to creativity, the authors present a theoretical model of the creative process. They review research involving an innovative imagery recombination technique, developed by Finke, that clearly demonstrates that creative inventions can be induced in the laboratory. They then describe experiments in category learning that support the provocative claim that the factors constraining category formation similarly constrain imagination and illustrate the role of various memory processes and other strategies in creative problem solving.

This book provides a comprehensive account of teaching for creativity. It is based on the views of over one thousand teachers and further education lecturers in the United Kingdom (working in a wide range of subject areas with young people from 5 to 18x years) about creativity development and its relation to everyday classroom life. It is set in the context of the most relevant research on which the author, a qualified teacher, lecturer and psychologist, offers her individual perspective. Suggestions for future educational practice and creativity research are offered. The book explores what is involved in creativity, how this can be assessed, and how to recognize creative behaviour and understand the creative process. The teachers' and lecturers' views on every aspect of developing creativity are included, together with practical guidelines for developing appropriate problem-solving skills. Attention is drawn to the landmark work of key creativity development practitioners. The author argues that creativity and innovation need to be taken as seriously in education as in successful modern organizations, to enable young people to deal effectively with the accelerating rate of technological, social and economic change.

​This book focuses on rethinking creativity for 21st century education. The specific emphasis examines the way that creativity spans disciplines, through a set of common thinking skills that the most accomplished thinkers in any field use. These seven transdisciplinary thinking skills are rooted in historical exemplars of creativity across disciplines. We examine these skills in more detail, chapter by chapter, to offer examples of what each skill looks like in disciplines ranging from art to science, or music to math, and beyond. This set of thinking skills reflects the way that creativity may look different across fields, yet there are common paths of creative thinking that cut across disciplinary boundaries. Beyond this each chapter also considers applications for such skills in 21st century educational contexts, with an eye toward creative teaching and technology. In all of this, the book weaves together broad cultural examples of creativity and the seven transdisciplinary skills, alongside specific application-based examples from technology and teacher education.

There is considerable interest in education around the world in flexible thinking and learning skills but very little consensus as to the nature of these skills and how best to promote them in schools. This book puts forward a clear and practical framework for understanding thinking, creativity and learning to learn as the fruits of engagement in dialogue. It also outlines in detail how this framework can be applied to teaching across the curriculum at both primary and secondary level, drawing on the best practices associated with the teaching thinking; creativity; and learning to learn movements explaining their success in terms of dialogic theory. In particular the book incorporates aspects of a number of thinking skills approaches, such as Lipman�s Philosophy for Children approach, as well as features of contemporary innovations in education such as assessment for learning and the development of creativity. Each chapter opens with a vignette to set the scene and continue into a light and popularly written exposition of theory, before moving on to a description of practice and concluding with practical guidelines for how to teach for thinking and creativity in schools and classrooms. The first six chapters in the book have more of a focus on developing core theoretical themes and the following six chapters in the second half of the book focus more on practice-led themes. The relationship between theory and practice is treated as flexible and dynamic, theory being developed by practice as much as practice implementing theory.