Parallel Session Proceedings »
2.9.5 Seeing the World of Possibilities: Creative Problem Solving
Creativity, “the crucial 21st century skill” (Robinson 2009), was elaborated almost 70 years ago as Creative Problem Solving (CPS), with the publication of Alex Osborne’s Applied Imagination. Researchers have analyzed and updated CPS, providing teachers with effective strategies that encourage students to apply personal creativity in their lives. In fact, CPS has become popular in the corporate world, encouraging creative thinking and innovative problem solving to improve organizational communication and interpersonal skills. Participants will practice CPS and develop confidence in developing scenarios that will encourage students to use both divergent and convergent thinking in ways that result in balanced decisions.
Sir Ken Robinson, knighted in part for his exploration of creativity and education, has said “the challenges we currently face are without precedent” (Robinson, 2009). Creativity research has provided a variety of models to better understand the concept (e.g., Lubart, 2017), and scholars contend creativity is something that can be developed. Models of gifted education (e.g., Renzulli’s Schoolwide Enrichment Model and Gagné’s Differentiated Model of Giftedness and Talent) incorporate creativity, and scholars in the field such as Sternberg and Williams (2003) provide tips for developing creativity, from questioning assumptions to redefining problems and tolerating ambiguity and even mistakes.
An exploration of the skills essential for effective problem solving is important in a world that is facing unprecedented challenges In 1953, Alex Osborne published Applied Imagination and popularized a seven-stage model of Creative Problem Solving (CPS), introducing the concept of brainstorming. Since the 1960s, scholars (e.g., Noller, Parnes, Isaksen, Treffinger) have refined a CPS model crucial for challenging gifted students, balancing creative and critical thinking. The emergence of constructivism as a learning theory has inspired “new directions for a descriptive, and less prescriptive” CPS (Treffinger & Isaksen, 2005), encouraging teachers to implement stages of CPS in ways that emerged as effective in their own classrooms, encouraging their students to identify problems that inspire and engage them to search for meaningful solutions. Because organizations have embraced CPS, introducing the stages and strategies prepare students for many of the innovative workplaces open to them in their adult lives.
This session will allow educators to engage with CPS, including application to a scenario that could be shared with students, modeling the application of CPS to content and more complex learning.