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In modern age, creativity has its unique space and importance literally everywhere. Corporate houses and most industries have now accepted that creativity in their business is the way forward. Most of the employers want their staff to be creative. To be able to achieve that staff members have training, workshops, seminars on creativity. Even education system is also no exception to that (which is a very good thing).
But the question is; what is creativity? Plenty of efforts have been made to define creativity. But the most accepted definition comes from the father of ‘creativity’, Mr. Edward De Bono. As per him Creativity is all about generating alternatives. Creativity enables us to be able to acquire more options or solutions for a particular problem.
Creativity tells us that there is always an alternate course of actions. There are always more answers to a question, there are always different approaches to a problem.
Now the million dollar question is how to become creative. What could be the first step? As far as I am concerned, it is the sense of possibility which opens up the door for creativity. You must have been thinking, is it some language teachers trying to solve a math or a scientific problem? But before you make any conclusions, hear me out.
Most of us would consider scientists, mathematicians, painters; sculptures and musicians creative in their work. So do you think any of their work could have been done without them thinking it is possible? Thinking possibilities is a necessary skill to become creative. Most of the people stress on critical thinking which only teaches us what is wrong and what is right. But for being creative, critical thinking skills are not enough. To generate new ideas one needs to be thinking about the different possibilities.
In the field of math, proof is very integral part of the process. But at times proof is nothing but the lack of imagination.’ A’ causes ‘B’. We get the proof for it and once we prove it, everyone has to accept it and we are very happy. But there could be more reasons for B to happen. Unless you think there is a possibility for an alternate solution, there is no way you can come up with the alternate solutions. If Wright brothers did not think that we can travel in air we would not have air planes today. I know it was a very boring example but it is very fundamental and no one can deny that.
How can I conclude my article without talking about this topic in context of education? Being a teacher, sometimes it becomes very frustrating when our students do not understand the simplest of the things. No matter how many times we teach them the same topic it may seem impossible to teach them and we choose to believe that the student is dull and doesn’t make efforts to learn. What can we do? Well I believe we need to develop the skill of thinking possibilities. Unless we believe it is possible to make students understand, we cannot come up with alternate explanations. That is what I call being a creative teacher. So next time someone asks you how to become creative, just tell them it is “POSSIBLE”.

The Tradition of Initiatives

January 23, 2010/0 Comments/in AVM Updates /by AVM Teachers

The basic philosophy of education at Atmiya Vidya Mandir is to develop the innate critical and creative thinking capabilities of children. All the children are born with a unique talent. The child should be given his own space to explore, adapt and flourish through learning and experiencing variety of things. Teaching at Atmiya Vidya Mandir is aimed at holistic development of a child; we truly believe that creativity is not an inherent skill or only for those with a talent for it; it could be successfully taught to and used by people of any age, walk of life or cultural background.
We need to start looking at our children 10 years from now and help them develop skills that they can use then. We provide resources, recognition, and ample of opportunities to our students, their parents and teachers for the development of the students’ optimal educational potential. We empower the teachers and learners with a new set of skills to read critically, think and reason logically and solve complex problems. We provide the children hands on experience through well equipped math lab, science labs and computer labs. We also have resourceful language and social science labs. We also organize frequent competitions like debates, quizzes etc school wide. To validate from a third party that has done extensive research in the field of education and to know if the school is on the right track developing skills, encouraging thinking, questioning, analysis and higher order thinking, we also encourage our students to participate in national competitions like Spelling Bee, ASSET, International Olympiad etc. Our efforts have also have been recognized by ASSET and are featured in their 2010 brochure which is attached with this post. Thus the students of Atmiya Vidya Mandir are thus exposed to a larger environment and assess their abilities in relation to their counterparts in other places of the world.

The link to the brochure is given below:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/25653453/ARO-2010-Brochure