Creative Problem Solving
Most of us in education are looking for a new resolve for fostering the development of creative problem solving within our schools and classrooms. Some of the motivation behind this quest for developing new instructional methods of helping students seek ways to solve problems is driven by the mass amounts of available information. Students today have to learn how to access, sort, decipher, and curate information that is being produced at a phenomenal rate. Not only is information at its highest level at any point in mankind's existence, it is surmountable to ever grasp the connections needed to find the origins of a single idea. What becomes even more prevalent in this quest is that their seems to be a thought that there are a limited number of students who are graduating from our schools who know how to creatively solve problems. These are the graduates who outwardly seek a creative solution to a given problem when it appears to get in the way of goal achievement. This perception is directly correlated with the lack of economic growth through productivity. Many say that this down turn in economic growth is the fault of a inadequate education system, some say it is the over regulation of governmental accountability policies and others say that schools need to be reinvented. To this end educators are seeking a definition that will guide them to the answer of the question of, "what is creative problem solving?"
Nobel prize winner, Albert Szent-Gyorgi sums it up very nicely for us. He states that “Creative problem solving is looking at the same thing as everyone else and thinking something different.” What he is describing is an individual who perceives the world through a different lenses. A lens that is not filtered by routine standards that are predominate practiced in our society. Gyorgi gives us a starting point in our quest of understanding the ideas behind creative problem solving as it relates to an individual. These are individuals that are not stuck in one discipline at a time, they want to know about all kinds of things because they never know when an idea might come together. If we begin to add these characteristics together then we begin to find the substance of how to develop creative problem solving minds.
To give example we first have to define knowledge. Most would agree that knowledge has been defined by the obtainment of skill sets that allows an individual to write a sentence correctly or to provide the correct answer to a given mathematical problem. This would include sentence structure, or knowing mathematical tables and associating these skill sets during assessment time. But what if we defined knowledge in another way. What if we said that knowledge is the stuff from which new ideas are made. Yet knowledge alone will not make a creative problem solver. Creative problem solving is what an individual does with the exploration of chunks of knowledge to blend ideas from a knowledge experience. This is like a science experiment when given a battery, two wires and a light bulb to complete a circuit with no guidance. You know that the battery is a power source, that wires conduct power and the light bulb needs both to complete a circuit. Yet the creative problem solver wants to break the rules of circuitry and goes outside the box to experiment with other objects that might do the same job in a different way. They are the ones that break the rules by exploring alternatives to the solution by bridging impractical ideas and begin to make them practical. To this end we have defined creative problem solving by example, it may seem crazy or foolish but sometimes the impractical ideas do cross over to the development of practical ideas. It is this statement of impractical to practical that teachers must allow students to explore in their classrooms. In this section I will explore some of the ways that teachers can use technology to aggregate curate facilitate and evaluate the creative problem solving process?
Nobel prize winner, Albert Szent-Gyorgi sums it up very nicely for us. He states that “Creative problem solving is looking at the same thing as everyone else and thinking something different.” What he is describing is an individual who perceives the world through a different lenses. A lens that is not filtered by routine standards that are predominate practiced in our society. Gyorgi gives us a starting point in our quest of understanding the ideas behind creative problem solving as it relates to an individual. These are individuals that are not stuck in one discipline at a time, they want to know about all kinds of things because they never know when an idea might come together. If we begin to add these characteristics together then we begin to find the substance of how to develop creative problem solving minds.
To give example we first have to define knowledge. Most would agree that knowledge has been defined by the obtainment of skill sets that allows an individual to write a sentence correctly or to provide the correct answer to a given mathematical problem. This would include sentence structure, or knowing mathematical tables and associating these skill sets during assessment time. But what if we defined knowledge in another way. What if we said that knowledge is the stuff from which new ideas are made. Yet knowledge alone will not make a creative problem solver. Creative problem solving is what an individual does with the exploration of chunks of knowledge to blend ideas from a knowledge experience. This is like a science experiment when given a battery, two wires and a light bulb to complete a circuit with no guidance. You know that the battery is a power source, that wires conduct power and the light bulb needs both to complete a circuit. Yet the creative problem solver wants to break the rules of circuitry and goes outside the box to experiment with other objects that might do the same job in a different way. They are the ones that break the rules by exploring alternatives to the solution by bridging impractical ideas and begin to make them practical. To this end we have defined creative problem solving by example, it may seem crazy or foolish but sometimes the impractical ideas do cross over to the development of practical ideas. It is this statement of impractical to practical that teachers must allow students to explore in their classrooms. In this section I will explore some of the ways that teachers can use technology to aggregate curate facilitate and evaluate the creative problem solving process?