Coming up with New Ideas

Jonathan Firth's Memory & Metacognition Updates #80

You might have noticed in the post I shared last time that two of my upcoming talks are about creativity.

I’ve been writing a lot about creativity this week, and I’ve also shared some ideas in previous updates, especially these two:

• Creativity—What’s the Role of Memory? (Update #28)

• Metacognition Boosting Creativity (Update #29)

This week, I’ve been thinking (and writing) about the issue of learners make connections, and come up with new creative ideas.

As explained in the posts above, creativity and memory are not in conflict. Quite the opposite—we need to have well stored and accessible memories in order to come up with new ideas.

Obviously, though, creativity is not the same thing as retrieving from memory. There is also a process of making novel connections. This could mean taking existing ideas and looking at them in new ways, re-ordering them, or otherwise combining familiar elements. For example:

• When writing a poem, the poet is usually not devising new words, concepts or images, but combining these elements into a new whole.

• When a scientist comes up with an idea for an experiment, they draw on existing methodology and facts, yet create a new experimental design.

In teaching, we can facilitate this by engaging in retrieval tasks (e.g., practice testing) before setting a creative task. This helps students to bring key facts back to mind. It will be much easier for them to use their stored knowledge if it is accessible.

We can also gradually increase the level of variation and challenge of the tasks, so that students are stretched and pushed out of their comfort zone, rather than just repeating well-practised skills.

A while ago, I wrote a blog post with 5 tips for coming up with creative ideas. You can find it below:

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Levelling up your creativity by making new connections (Medium, free to access).

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Hope you enjoy. Creative thinking is very relevant to your teaching. Designing new lessons and courses is a highly creative process!

All the best for the coming week,

Jonathan

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Please note that my slides and similar materials are used under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license. This means you can use or adapt them with attribution for non-commercial purposes. If you wish to use my materials for other purposes, feel free to get in touch.

Image from Pixabay here.