Want To Be More Creative?

Creativity has long been a big part of what we do in gifted education. When I was a teacher of the gifted, we spent a fair amount of class time each week devoted to creativity activities. I enjoyed seeing them wrestle with a problem, think deeply, and ultimately come up with interesting solutions. When you ask kids if they are creative, the answer is almost always a resounding YES! However, if you ask a group of adults if they are creative, they are not nearly as willing to say that they are creative. In working teachers, I can not tell you how many times I have heard, “I am just not creative.” It really breaks my heart every time.

To combat this, I started using Droodles in an activity to help boost people’s confidence and comfort with creativity. Droodles were created by Rogers Price are simple sketch drawings on cocktail napkins. The name is a combination of "drawing”, “doodle”, and “riddle”. Droodles were wildly popular in the 1950s and 1960s appearing in newspapers, books and even for a period of time a TV game show on NBC. With each image, Price included a very clever and often ironic title. These were intended to be the "right" answer, but were something that would most likely never be there first or even tenth thing that you came up with. Yet, after you learned the title then it was obvious. 

Droodles were featured in the episode Use It or Lose It of the National Geographic Channel show BrainGames, ​and demonstrate a way that we can work to become more creative in our thinking. 

Here is how it works. Take a look at the image below. Take 1 minute to come up with as many different things that the image could be. Unlike with Roger Price’s Droodles, there is not one right answer. Simply come up with as many things as possible. Go ahead, I will wait. 

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So, how did you do? I have done this activity with dozens of groups. In every group about 75% of the participants come up with 3 or fewer responses. Yet as we saw on BrainGames, kids younger than 5 tend to come up with significantly more responses than adults. This leads to an interesting discussion as to why are kids so much better than this than adults. Quite simply kids are better at this because they have no rigid rules for the task. They are no afraid of using their imagination and coming up with ideas that are frankly quite absurd. As adults, we are so afraid of getting the wrong answer or being judged for what it is that we might say that we filter our ideas and limit our creativity. I have actually seen adults erase and scratch out things that they have written in this activity because they think that it can not be right. 

While young kids tend to be able to produce the most ideas, as they get older, they tend to limit their own thinking as school has conditioned them to search only for the right answer. To overcome these creative blocks, we need to give ourselves permission to think like a kid. Go ahead, try it. Channel your inner five year old. Ok, now that you are thinking like a kid, we are going to try this again. Remember you have 1 minute to come up with as many different things that the image could be. When you are ready CLICK HERE. 

How did you do this time? I bet you did significantly better. People who got 3 or fewer in the first round are usually able to get 5 to 10 after giving themselves permission to think like a kid. This type of thing gets easier the more that we practice. Here is a link to a collection of Droodles found online. You might also ask your students to create their own Droodles. When they create their own, have them come up with a creative title just like Roger Price. 

Many of you might see a connection between Droodles and the Figural section of the Torrance Tests for Creative Thinking. However, the images on the TTCT are incomplete, and you must complete image to form a complete drawing. I used this type of creativity activity with great frequency with my students and have continued to use this in workshops. Rather than using the prompts from the TTCT, I like creating my own starting points. I even used to grab a Sharpie and draw a squiggle on a piece of paper and then make a class set of the copies. What I like about creating my own is that there is no top or bottom. Also the image can be arranged either horizontally or vertically. It could even be positioned diagonally. I like to give about 5 minutes for this activity. This gives enough time to create much more elaborate designs. As part of this activity, ask your students to include a title for their creation. This adds another layer to the creative process. 

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The TTCT is scored on four scales: 

• Fluency. The total number of interpretable, meaningful, and relevant ideas generated in response to the stimulus.
• Flexibility. The number of different categories of relevant responses.
• Originality. The statistical rarity of the responses.
• Elaboration. The amount of detail in the responses.

Sharing this with your students helps them to realize that there are a variety of ways to be creative and depending on the situation and the task you may have to adapt your creative thinking. For example, in the Droodles activity, the primary goal is fluency. In the first round, there is a tendency to produce more elaborate responses and therefore produce fewer responses. With the drawing activity, the focus is on elaboration. Both activities have ample room for originality. By having students share their responses they will be able to see that many of their ideas were similar to what others have come up. Once they see this, they may try to produce ideas that are more original. 

In the many years that I have been using these activities, I am always surprised by the responses that students come up with, and it is usually the students that I am not expecting the response from that come up with the most original ideas. More than a few times it has helped me to gain a deeper insight into what is going on in the minds of the students that I am working with. 

I would love for you to try out these ideas with you students and share your experiences here.