Teaching creativity

Fostering creativity
Daniel Pink, in his 2005 book A Whole New Mind, repeating arguments posed throughout the 20th century, argues that we are entering a new age where creativity is becoming increasingly important. In this conceptual age, we will need to foster and encourage right-directed thinking (representing creativity and emotion) over left-directed thinking (representing logical, analytical thought).

Nickerson provides a summary of the various creativity techniques that have been proposed. These include approaches that have been developed by both academia and industry:
 * 1) Establishing purpose and intention
 * 2) Building basic skills
 * 3) Encouraging acquisitions of domain-specific knowledge
 * 4) Stimulating and rewarding curiosity and exploration
 * 5) Building motivation, especially internal motivation
 * 6) Encouraging confidence and a willingness to take risks
 * 7) Focusing on mastery and self-competition
 * 8) Promoting supportable beliefs about creativity
 * 9) Providing opportunities for choice and discovery
 * 10) Developing self-management (metacognitive skills)
 * 11) Teaching techniques and strategies for facilitating creative performance
 * 12) Providing balance

Some see the conventional system of schooling as "stifling" of creativity and attempt (particularly in the pre-school/kindergarten and early school years) to provide a creativity-friendly, rich, imagination-fostering environment for young children. Compare Waldorf School.

A growing number of psychologists are supporting the idea that there are methods of increasing the creativity of an individual. Several different researchers have proposed approaches to prop up this idea, ranging from psychological-cognitive, such as:

and to the highly-structured, such as:
 * Osborn-Parnes Creative problem solving
 * Synectics;
 * Inventium and science-based creative thinking
 * Purdue Creative Thinking Program;
 * lateral thinking (courtesy of Edward de Bono),
 * TRIZ (the Theory of Inventive Problem-Solving);
 * ARIZ (the Algorithm of Inventive Problem-Solving), both developed by the Russian scientist Genrich Altshuller; and
 * Computer-Aided Morphological analysis.