# Beyonder and creativity

> 95% of children enter school creative, only 32% are by 10th grade, 2% of graduating undergraduates

> Creativity in adolescence is 3x more predictive of adult personal and public excellence than IQ

## Creativity Manifesto
1. Don’t be afraid to fall in love with something and pursue it with intensity and depth
2. Know, understand, **take pride in**, practice, develop, use, **exploit**, and **enjoy** your greatest strengths.
3. **Learn to free yourself from the expectations of others and to walk away from the games that others try to impose upon you.** Free yourself to “play your own game” in such a way as to make good use of your gifts. Search out and cultivate great teachers or mentors who will help you accomplish these things.
4. Don’t waste a lot of expensive energy in trying to do things for which you have little ability or love. Do what you can do well and what you love, giving freely of the infinity of your greatest strengths and most intense loves.

### Beyonder characteristics
- **Love of work**
- **Tolerance of mistakes**
- **Feeling comfortable as a minority of one**
- **Well-roundedness**
- Persistence
- Purpose in life
- Diversity of experience
- High energy
- Creative self-concept
- Risk taker
- Open to change
- Deep thinking

> Better predictor of lifelong personal and publicly recognized creative achievement than IQ or divergent thinking


## ‘Beyonder’ Skills for Teaching / Training Creativity
1. The Problem: recognition or awareness of a situation; definition of the problem and commitment to deal with it; recognizing the essence of the difficulty and identifying sub problems that are manageable or can be solved.
2. Produce and Consider Many Alternatives: fluency, amount; generating many varied ideas.
3. Be Flexible: creating variety in content; producing different categories; changing one’s mental set to do something differently; perceiving a problem from different perspectives.
4. Be Original: moving away from the obvious; breaking away from habit bound thinking; statistically infrequent responses; the ability to create novel, different or unusual perspectives.
5. Highlight the Essence: identifying what is most important and absolutely essential; discarding erroneous or relevant information; refining are dealers, abandoning unpromising information; allowing a single idea to become dominant and synthesizing this all at the same time.
6. Elaborate But Not Excessively: adding details or ideas and developing them; filling in the details for possible implementation.
7. Keep Open: resisting premature closure; resist the tension to complete things in the easiest quickest way.
8. Be Aware of Emotions: recognize verbal and non-verbal cues; responding, trusting and using feelings to better understand people and situations.
9. Put Your Ideas in Context: putting parts of experience into a bigger framework; putting experiences together in a meaningful way; making a connection between things; giving situations and ideas a history, background and story.
10. Combine and Synthesize: making new connections with the elements within our perceptual set; combining relatively unrelated elements; hitchhiking; making the familiar strange and the strange familiar.
11. Visualize It Richly and Colorfully: using vivid, exciting imagery; creating colorful and exciting images that appeal to all five senses.
12. Enjoy and Use Fantasy: imaging, play and consider things that are not concrete or do not yet exist.
13. Make It Swing Make It Ring: using kinesthetic and auditory senses; responding to sound and movement.
14. Look at It Another Way: being able to see things from a different visual perspective; being able to see things from a different psychological perspective.
15. Visualize the Inside: pay attention to the internal dynamic working of things; picturing or describing the inside of things.
16. Breakthrough Expand the Boundaries: thinking outside the prescriber requirements; changing the paradigm or system within which the problem
resides.
17. Let Humor Flow and Use It: perceiving incongruity; responding to a surprise;
recognizing and responding to perceptual and conceptual discrepancies.
18. Get Glimpses of the Future: predict, imagine and explore things that do not yet
exist; wonder and dream about the possibilities; view events as open-minded.

`Torrance, E. P. & Safter, H. T. (1999). Making the creative leap beyond. Buffalo, NY: The Creative Education Foundation`

## Mind Brain and Education Science
1. Human brains are as unique as human faces. While the basic structure of most human brains is the same (similar parts in similar regions), no two brains are identical. The genetic makeup unique to each person combines with life experiences (and free will) to shape neural pathways.

2. Each individual’s brain is differently prepared to learn different tasks. Learning capacities are shaped by the context of the learning, prior learning experiences, personal choice, an individual’s biology and genetic makeup, pre- and perinatal events, and environmental exposures.

3. New learning is influenced by prior experiences. The efficiency of the brain economizes effort and energy by ensuring that external stimuli are first decoded and compared, both passively and actively, with existing memories.

4. The brain changes constantly with experience. The brain is a
complex, dynamic, and integrated system that is constantly
changed by individual experiences. These changes occur at a
molecular level, whether simultaneously, in parallel, or even
before they are visible in behavior.

5. The brain is plastic. Neuroplasticity exists throughout the life span.

## Incubation model
1. **Heightening expectations and motivation**
This stage prepares the student for learning. It is the warm up that provides motivation for learning. This is critically important for all students, but specifically for adolescents.
• Create the desire to know
• Heighten Anticipation and Expectation
• Get Attention
• Arouse Curiosity
• Tickle the Imagination
• Give Purpose and Motivation
2. **Deepening expectations or digging deeper.** This stage expects the student to dig deeper
• Go beyond the surface issue.
• Requires students to listen and share and synthesize information
• Involves deferring judgment
• Making use of all the senses
• Opening new doors
• Targeting problems to be considered or solutions to try
3. **Going beyond or keeping it going.** This stage asks the learner to apply
what they are learning to the real world.
• The teacher at this stage wants to be an encourager and allow the stu-
dents to figure out solutions to problems.
• Genuinely encourage creative thinking beyond the learning environ-
ment in order for the new information or skills to be incorporated into
daily lives.