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