creative | Eat.Sleep.Teach.

5 Steps to Creative Ideas

Beginning tomorrow morning every single one of us is going to sell Ideas! …What we are not clear about is just how to get ideas. So I said maybe you could tell us. – James Web Young (2003)

So, how do I get ideas?

In James Webb Young’s brilliant book, A Technique for Producing Ideas, he argues that coming up with an idea is actually a rather straight-forward process. In fact, the reason why ideas differ so enormously is because it is simply a new combination of old elements and the way we view relationships between them. So, in Young’s view, some will see each piece of fact as a separate bit of knowledge whilst others will see a link in a chain of knowledge with relationships and similarities. For the latter, facts are more like an illustration of a general law applying to a whole series of facts. Therefore, for someone who is quick at spotting patterns and relationships several ideas will be produced. When relationships are seen they in turn lead to the extraction of a more general principle which, when understood, suggests the way to a new combination – the new idea. This process can of course be cultivated as Young states:

The production of ideas is as definite a process as the production of Fords; that the production of ideas, too, runs on an assembly line; that in this production the mind follows an operative technique which can be learned and controlled; and that its effective use is just as much a matter of practice in the technique as is the effective use of any tool

5 Steps to Creative Ideas (influences from Young)

Step 1. Gather Material

As with all professions without understanding the key facts you have nothing. If you sit and wait for a revolutionary idea to strike you, think again! Johannes has worked as mentor and Associate Tutor for many years and have helped new teachers who sometimes would start planning their lessons without having done any research into the topic. His advice was always to ensure that subject knowledge was sound before planning begins. Teaching a lesson without understanding the subject content is impossible. Lack of understanding leads to poor teaching (see Musings on Creativity in Teaching Part 1: Knowing Your Knowledge). That said, outstanding teachers not only have specific knowledge of their topic but also a general understanding of their subject which enable them to understand the ‘bigger picture’. We also suggest a third element, namely to have a wider perspective in other subject areas. Outstanding teachers gather anecdotes, information and stories from a range of areas for example architecture, music, business, nature and film etc. The latter is essential in the creation of ideas. It is the new combination of specific knowledge about a topic coupled with a general understanding and wider perspective about the subject and other areas that will make ideas occur. The task of gathering material is a life-long one , be it an interesting quote, enigmatic photo or recent news story, find ways of cataloguing/storing these snippets of data.

Step 2. Oblique Strategies

This part is less concrete as it involves thinking more abstractly about the facts you have, looking at each one individually, bringing two facts together to see if they fit, as well as beginning to synthesize and spot relationships. For this process to work you should try not to think too directly at each element but do what Young refers to as ‘listening’ for their meaning without ‘looking’ for it (Young 2003, p30). What tends to happen here is that you will get initial, sometimes rather odd, ideas but don’t disregard these as they will help to shape your future ideas. Whilst engaged in this process you’ll also feel like you’ve ran into a wall, but don’t give up just yet. It’s the same feeling you have when you’re engaging in a long brainstorming-session with a team and it feels like you’re getting nowhere – but you are! It is crucial to continue just a little bit longer before stopping, not giving up, but stopping as you have exhausted you mind for the time being. Cue: Step 3.

Step 3. No Efforts – Stop Thinking

This is the time for your unconscious mind to do some work. Like you say to your students, remember not too cram everything the night before… Well, the reason you say that is also because the mind needs to rest to synthesize the information properly – to take it all in. However, sleeping will not be the only solution to your ideas. The best way of letting your mind rest whilst topping up the creative juices is to undertake another creative, yet relaxing, activity for example go for a nice run or long walk, watch a decent film, listen to music and so on. You are not only giving your mind time to reflect but also providing additional material which has nothing to do with the topic at hand but will serve to keep your mind working without you having to think about it.

Step 4. It Just Came to Me

Just like that, the idea popped into your head when you least expected it, in the middle of the night, early in the morning or sometimes annoyingly when you’re driving or in a situation where frantically writing down things may not be regarded as something positive. So, when you stop pushing for ideas and gone through a period of rest, they’ll show up.

Step 5. The Bleak Reality

When you take out your new idea to the harsh reality you might realise that it’s not as wonderful as you once thought. This is the hardest part; moulding your idea into the structures and conditions so it can work. It is during this period when most people give up and put their idea in the half-baked drawer together with hundreds of its counterparts. Solution: don’t protect your new idea, throw it to the Devil Advocates! You will then see that your idea carry self-generating qualities as it stimulate those who examine it and consequently will help develop into the final masterpiece.

If you find the topic about ideas interesting you might want to get your hands on a copy of these books, they have stimulated us to write some of the posts on Eat.Sleep.Teach.

Ten Faces of Innovation by Tom Kelley

Making Ideas Happen – Scott Belsky

The Back of the Napkin – Dan Roam

The Art Of Innovation – Tom Kelley

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Ideas for Encouraging Collaboration and Creativity Part II: how to brainstorm properly

If you are looking to start an innovations group either in your school or across county and you want to focus on a particular issue then you probably need to thrash out some ideas before you decide. A good old-fashioned brain-storming session will be great starting point for your collaboration. We also mentioned a few ideas about brainstorming and collaborating online in this post: How to collaborate virtually. Here follows a set of ideas which we use to work and plan together on projects, books or workshops and we feel they work very well.

Alien Worlds

The key to a successful brainstorming session is what you and other people bring to the table. So, let’s see what you have! Take out a piece of paper, a comfortable pen and list or map out your thoughts about this question for 3-5 minutes (be as specific as possible – you may need to break down ‘my experience’ to smaller chunks for example) :

What will I bring that will benefit the brainstorming session/planning meeting?

Now think about this question:

What will other people bring?

The aim is of course to have a varied group of people with different experiences but that is not possible all the time so what do you do then? If you want to ensure that there is a constant flow of creativity within the group try to:

Read different literature e.g. books that indirectly have little to do with your area of expertise (see the end of the post for suggestions that will encourage creativity and innovation).
Subscribe to an inspirational magazine e.g. WIRED UK
Investigate new music and art e.g. try iTunes Essentials, Live365 or Spotify for new music, visit Banksy’s website to get inspired with street art, learn something new at LifeHacks or discover how almost anything works at How Stuff Works.
Give each member of the group a new persona, or role to play based on Tom Kelley’s Ten Faces of Innovation to really push yourselves to become more innovative (read this post about using Ten Faces of innovation with students).

Building up a portfolio of ideas takes time and a lot of hard work so it is important get into a sort of routine of collecting and recording as you go along. List books you want to buy, rip out magazine articles, save online using tools like EverNote or Awesome Note, note down quotes and words of wisdow or interesting websites. These might be invaluable one day.

The Idea Board

The idea board is a place where you add not only your ‘light bulb’ moments but also what may seem like minor ideas at the time. One such way could be to keep stickies nearby, adding notes to a Moleskin sketch-book, use your mobile phone to save thoughts or keep a washable mini-whiteboard in your office. Most of our ideas have come from some of these fleeting thoughts, and this plays a crucial part in the creative process.

Dumping Ground?

There are different ways of brainstorming, some structure their chaos by adding, ‘dumping’, all their ideas and suggestions on a long list – the more words the better. ‘Dumpers’ then organise their additions on a mind-map and can therefore categorise and group ideas more easily (this method is explained in more detail in the book Thinking Skills and Eye-Q).

Another way is to assign a scribe and everyone throws suggestions at them to write down on a flip-chart or similar. The key thing here is that there is no order except from the fact that the scribe ensures that all voices are heard – quantity is important here, not quality (well at least not yet!). Don’t be put off if all your ideas seem impossible or even stupid, because they are not. Think of each suggestion as a stepping stone to the team’s final idea and without these initial thoughts none of you would have got anywhere, so keep thrashing out ideas but leave the devil’s advocate outside (at least for a while).

Distance and Fuel

If you prepared well by stimulating your mind and recorded your thoughts of inspiration on the Idea Board as well as filled your dumping ground, or not, with lots of interesting (and let’s face it, not so interesting ideas), now is the time to take a well deserved break. Distancing yourself from all the suggestions, ideas, solutions and problems as well as refueling on coffee, water, biscuits and food is crucial if you are to come up with a truly innovative idea. This may only involve going for a brief walk, ordering a decent espresso or ‘sleeping on it’, you know what works best for you. But don’t skip this bit, you might regret it.

North or South?

This is the time to decide which way to go or what idea to run with and it might take some time. We have found that running with one seemingly obvious idea sometimes leads to the actual idea, perhaps one that was mentioned at the start of the process. Yet, this is not wasting time as without this creative activity we wouldn’t have thought of the end product and it’s always different to what we thought – but very exciting!

Creative Books

Here follows a list of books we have read and used often when we meet up to work. Some are just for inspiration whilst others have become great guides for us both.

The Ten Faces of Innovation: Strategies for Heightening Creativity

Dan Pink: Drive The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

Harris, Caviglioli, Thompson: Thinking Skills and Eye Q: Visual Tools for Raising Intelligence

Banksy: Wall or Piece

Steve Jobs: The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to Be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience

Alain de Botton: The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

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Making Learning Relevant: using street art in lessons

I came across a Tweet by DLFresources which showed four new pieces produced by the interesting street artist Banksy. Using graffiti in the classroom does not go without controversy but it does give us the opportunity to examine why artists and ordinary people, ever since the Roman times, have turned to producing messages of various kinds on walls and buildings in their own surroundings. Banksy is a prime example of how graffiti artists mirror their view of a particular aspect of society in their work. There’s a brilliant opportunity for students to learn from studying street art. Take a look at the examples below:

We could begin by asking why a specific piece has been created in a particular way and what the artist is trying to convey. Perhaps an even better idea is to allow students to create their own pieces which reflect e.g. the most significant time period in history (piece 1), a critical eye on environmental politics (piece 2), or the dark side of tourism. This requires them to really think about the core of the message they are trying to put across. Alternatively get students to think of headings to existing artwork, for example what could they name these Banksy images:

Using street art in the classroom is an excellent opportunity to involve students in something many of them are already familiar with whilst at the same time introduce them to new ideas and concepts that could otherwise be difficult – in true ‘sticky’ style : ) . As a side issue, it’s also worth exploring the history behind graffiti and why we, ‘humankind’, has always expressed ourselves through drawings on everything from cave walls, in catacombs, on ceilings, city walls and buildings.

You can explore more of Banksy’s work in his book: Wall or Peace

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An answer to the question, “How long does it have to be sir?”

I have just finished a round of assessment with my Year 9 SEN group. They are not yet at the stage where we can do extended writing, but given that their last assessment was a verbal presentation, I wanted to get them to write something and think about how words can be used.

I have been a fan of ‘mini-sagas’ in the classroom for a while now. They are a great revision tool and can make students really think about what are the essential elements of a story or topic (see http://is.gd/1j46p). I thought that it might help this group if the assessment was reduced down to 50 words and I made them think about what they had to write rather than how much.

The task was to look at the story of a woman called Kitty Eckersley, whose story appears in the excellent book, ‘Forgotten Voices of the Great War’ by Max Arthur (see bit.ly/90PZwC). I wanted students to explore the relationship between big events in History and the impact on people’s lives. The key skills being tested here were diversity and chronology – for as we call it ‘Patterns in History’. I mini-saga seemed to fit in this appraoch and so I created a seessment sheet ATY9 Kitty’s Storyand we began to draft…

The results were very good, with some students going down a poetic route and others focusing on telling a memorable story. A couple of the mini-sagas can be seen below:

“Kitty worked in a mill. She found love, they got married. He went to war and she didn’t see him for six months. She worked in a leather factory when he came back and bought her a hat. He returned to war, but she got pregnant. Then came THE LETTER.”

“Working hard every day, married a young man who decided to go to war – was terrified. After six months and a lonely Christmas he arrives in January. Pregnant. Seven months later I got a letter saying “I am sorry to tell you of the death of your husband.” Tears fall.”

So, we assessed the impact of the Great War in 30 minutes and in 50 words, which stopped all those annoying questions about how long the assessment has to be. The next step is to work out how we can move students on and allow them to access the higher levels of thinking; getting them to explore the difference between the outbreak of war, which passes Kitty by, and the recruitment drive, which impacts her significantly.

Getting creative with SEN

Today my Year 9 low ability / SEN class made this:

Collage created by Year 9 at Copleston High School

It was the result of a lesson that started by analysing current adverts for their message. We then went on to look at the story of Kitty Eckersley and why her husband joined the Army.

Next, we brainstormed (properly – in fours and in silence, then sharing!) why men might volunteer to fight. With a little help, we came up with four ways that the government might try to persuade people to ‘join up’:

– Patriotism
– Anti-German messages
– Heroism
– Shame

Students then looked at six posters from WWI and identified one of the four elements within them, choosing specific parts and not whole posters.

As an extended plenary, students used the free form capture tool on the whiteboard to cut out the areas for their theme and designed new posters using the bits they had selected. We were able to save it as an image and print it out.

For homework, the students are comparing the posters they created to the Kitty Eckersley story and identirying which of the four methods most influenced her husband.

What was really good to see was students making informed choices and debating whether certain sections could be included under two headings. By allowing the creative task to come to the forefront of the lesson we unlocked a new set of thinking: students were thinking about the interplay of images and text, as well as how to create an overall effect. They got an end product and were willing to invest time in making it look good. Also, they wanted it to work.

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