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in Schools and Education by Win Wenger, Ph.D.
EVERY ONE of the hundreds of different methods for creativity and for
ingeniously solving problems, now successfully in professional use around the world, can also serve as an amazingly effective method for learning. Any creativity professionals and consultants who find this out and are willing to test it, can immediately become super-quick studies. Mostly unbeknownst to themselves as yet, they can command in depth, with rich creative understanding, almost any of the topics or fields of study they
find themselves needing to bone up on and understand in pursuit of their
work. This also opens a huge window of opportunity for the entire
creativity field vis-a-vis schools and education - but first let's relate a
few brief facts:
In your work with creativity, you've been told that the key principle is suspension of judgement. Maybe, with a few possible arguments back and forth, that is indeed the key or a key principle. However, you may have noticed several other things about most creativity-related training and processing
Classical Socratic Method did make a practice of drawing forth such understandings from its students and participants, with such extraordinarily high results that "education" itself was named after that concept of drawing forth (transl. educare). A major shortcoming of classical Socratic Method, however, was that it was expensive. While the instructor or facilitator was drawing forth one or two students, the other forty-seven would become restless. In both its heydayslate classical Greece and again in Renaissance Europe, both eras resulting in a huge record flowering of world-class geniusonly a few elite could afford having Socratic
education. Without really realizing what it really has and what you really
have, the worldwide creativity movement in the past sixty years solved that problem, devising ways to divide into small, actively creative groups, keeping them in focus, keeping them productively on task, keeping themselves and each other fully engaged. You will find an abstraction of some of your various CPS-related methods, pulled together into an easy set of "house rules," in What you have not realized until now is that this aspect of your methods
makes the best-demonstrated "superlearning" method on Earth, for 2400 years
affordable only to a favored few elite, in improved modern form so
affordable it costs much less even than the conventional methods now in classroom useand, as it happens, in many regards even more effective than was the classical form of Socratic Method.
Here are a few incidental considerations:
Various CPS programs have been trying for sixty years to get creativity
practices into schoolroom use. You've been offering creativity to schools
and teachers because creativity per se is so worthwhile in itself, and because we want our youth and future citizens and scientists to be good at solving problems. School authorities have not been "buying" this: they see "creativity" competing for scarce resources and time in the
already-overstretched curriculum. But every one of the successful creativity and CPS techniques you know of and are already practiced in, you can use to profoundly improve and accelerate learning. The methods you
offer to schools can MAKE space in the curriculum and not TAKE space there!
Key point: there are now hundreds of different methods for creatively and
ingeniously solving problems which are successfully in professional use
around the planet. (Some of them originated with Project Renaissance.) EVERY ONE of these can also serve as a profoundly accelerative learning technique!
Free details on how to convert each CPS or creativity-related method into a great learning method, if you ask for that by email Enjoy.
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