Sparking Creativity: How to Promote Imaginative Thinking in Children

Facilitating or Inhibiting the Development of Creativity

(adapted from Growing Up Gifted: Developing the Potential of Children at Home and at School, B. Clark)

Conditions that Facilitate

• Provide an environment that is rich and varied in stimulation, safe, and accepting.
• Teach with materials and methods harmonious with each other and with the teacher.
• Delineate clearly and repeatedly the aims of this type of program.
• Allow free interplay of differences.
• Make environment and materials friendly and nonthreatening, thereby allowing disagreement and controversy without hostility (this allows children to engage freely in behavior underlying creativity).
• Reduce anxiety in classroom, especially that created by teacher
• Find integrative elements in differences and positive ways to handle conflict.
• Allow unifying concepts to emerge.
• Allow individuation and differentiation within the unity.
• Foster positive change in directions congruent with student’s predilections in cognitive and affective areas.
• Provide situations that present incompleteness and openness.
• Allow and encourage lots of questions.
• Produce something, then do something with it.
• Grant responsibility and independence.
• Emphasize self-initiated exploring, observing, recording, translating, inferring, testing inferences, and communicating.
• Provide bilingual experiences resulting in development of greater potential creativity due to the more varied view of the world, a more flexible approach to problems, and the ability to express self in different ways that arise from these experiences.
• Allow rather than control.
• Be receptive.
• Value and model intuitive behavior.
• Give opportunities to investigate ideas of successful, eminent people who used intuitive processes.
• Give opportunities to try out intuitive behavior (e.g., in problem-solving).
• Treat the child with respect and allow freedom to explore the universe.
• Create an atmosphere with really good music, books, and pictures as a natural part of the child’s world.
• Treat ideas and questions respectfully.
• Respect the child’s privacy.
• Value the unusual, the divergent.
• Help the child learn by mistakes.
• Avoid sex-role stereotyping.
• Encourage self-expression.
• Teach the child to look and really see.
• Help the child learn to trust the senses.
• Permit the child’s own creativity to emerge.

Conditions that Inhibit

• Need for success, limiting risk-taking or pursuit of unknown.
• Conformity to peer group and social pressure.
• Discouragement of exploration, using imagination, inquiry.
• Sex-role stereotyping.
• Differentiation between work and play (e.g., learning is hard work).
• Adherence to “readiness” viewpoint for learning.
• Authoritarianism.
• Disrespect for fantasy, daydreams.
• Reward systems.
• External locus of control.
• Need for closure and rigid timelines.
• Need for security and acceptance of product.
• Perfectionism.
• Low self-concept.
• Trying to be creative.
• Anxiety.
• Competition.