Creative thinking
High performing students benefit from opportunities to engage to apply creative thinking.
What is Creative thinking
- Generating diverse ideas: the ability to provide multiple ideas or solutions to a given problem or scenario.
- Generating creative ideas: the ability to generate original and useful ideas.
- Evaluating and improving ideas: the capacity to assess the quality of ideas, improve them, and select the most effective or appropriate ones.
For high performning students, creative thinking involves learning to use a variety of approaches to solve problems, analyse multiple viewpoints, adapt ideas, and arrive at new solutions.
Creative thinking for high performing students is taught through STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics) subjects. In these subjects creative thinking teaches students to use a variety of approaches to solve problems, analyse multiple viewpoints, adapt ideas, and arrive at new solutions.
Examples of creative thinking
- articulating ideas and solutions through written components such as design folios, reflective journals, and presentations.
- creating visual representations of solutions such as sketches, models, or digital designs.
- considering diverse perspectives when presented with a problem.
- applying scientific thinking by formulating hypotheses, conducting experiments, and analysing data.
- applying thinking process to innovate on an idea
Alongside classroom lessons, competitions also engage high performing students in creative thinking. For example, the NSW Department of Education’s Game Changer Challenge and Maths Olympiad present complex, real-world problems that require innovative and original solutions, and encourage students to apply various creative thinking skills.
Initiatives such as a school Science Fair also provide platforms for creative thinking. Science Fair projects that include fair testing and/or design thinking enable students to generate and experiment with ideas and produce novel and effective responses and solutions.
At Ashfield Public School we provide opportunities for high performing students to develop creative thinking skills in all classrooms. It is expected that creative thinking is goal directed with students learning that generating, evaluating and improving ideas is driven by some purpose, and towards an end.
By teaching creative thinking we support students to become innovative problem-solvers who can undertake increasingly complex challenges with confidence and curiosity.