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Creativity in the classroom (in 5 minutes or less!) | Catherine Thimmesh | TEDxUniversityofStThomas

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"When the masses are both educated and creative, mass tragedy based on false fundamental beliefs systems is less likely to take hold. Classrooms that insist on total conformity without asking for independent ideas are likely to produce citizens who are best suited to cooperation with those who seek to control in order to subjugate them. When only a few are creative, they are able to impose too much control on those with learned helplessness." - Marvin Bartel, Ed.D.

his has been difficult, especially since funding for the arts and after school programs has been in decline for decades; with i cities suffering the worst, and Chicago and Philadelphia are just two major cities that in public education. have decreased funding for creativity programs

These budget cuts are unfortunate, but teachers can work around them. We've come up with a few ways that teachers can foster student creativity and enhance the classroom experience.
Source : Teach Thought
2. Passion Projects : Allotting a certain amount of class time for students to work on projects unrelated to the curriculum is important. Commonly called passion projects are implemented in the same manner as open-ended projects, only less frequent

3. Classroom Collaboration/Team Building: Classroom collaboration can spur creative thinking and encourage the exchange of ideas. Putting students in groups for certain in-class assignments enables them to experience different perspectives while working towards a common goal. Teachers can even add a digital element to these groups by integrating social media.

4. Implementing Creative Arts: Teachers can have students create graphs in order to solve math problems or summarize historical events in poetic verse. Introducing the arts into the classroom can breathe new life into banal subjects.

5. Journaling: To spark creativity, students can write down their thoughts in journals. They can use their journals to jot down ideas during the school day or short stories during Genius Hour. Teachers can even assign free writing exercises in the beginning of class.

8. Gamification: A study by Michigan State University recently found a correlation between students who play video games and higher levels of creativity. Implementing gamification in the classroom engages students in goal-oriented activities. There is no shortage of education-related video games from which teachers can choose.

9. Make Creativity a Grading Criteria: When grading student assignments, teachers should consider creativity. How original is the assignment? Did students express themselves, or were they just going through the motions? Teachers can take these questions into account to encourage more creativity from their students.

Source: Iste.Org

10. Encourage Risk-Taking: Students need to familiarize themselves with failure. They need to know not only that it is okay, but that failure is inevitable. Creativity takes courage and tenacity. Not every idea will work out or be a good one. But that's all part of the creative process. To teach this important lesson, teachers can have students act out their own plays, or make short films about an important concept.

11. Use More Colors: Colors are often limited to elementary schools, but encouraging students to think about about new ways to use color breeds creativity in all walks of life, not just education. Implementing conversations about colors and how they're used generates talk about moods and cultures as well as sciences and fine arts.

12. Hands-On Field Work: When the opportunity presents itself, teachers can get students out of the classroom and show students that the real world is the ultimate classroom. Field trips allow students to better visualize the concepts they learn in the classroom, and can foster creativity as they think about ways to apply course concepts to the world around them.

13. Involve Students in the Teaching: Teachers can have students come up with some of the questions on quizzes or create captivating lesson plans to further involve them in the education process. Pairing up struggling students with students who excel; for the students who do the teaching, the teaching fosters creativity as they develop new ways to present the material.

Source: Visually

15. Play Music: Music can be invigorating and inspirational. Why not bring it into the classroom? While research concerning the "Mozart Effect" is inconclusive, implementing music in the classroom can be a great way to inspire students, help them visualize using their mind's eye and encourage multi-sensory learning.

16. Virtual Reality: Virtual Reality is a great way to help students visualize environments and events they won't realistically be able to access. And while the cost of integrating virtual reality into the classroom can be expensive, Google is now offering its VR system to schools for.

19. Allow Freedom of Movement: Do away with the seating charts. Allow students to move freely throughout the classroom space. Provide quiet or sectioned-off areas for deep thinking, as well as spaces for students who want to collaborate. When students are free to flow within the classroom, their creativity will follow suit.

20. Create a Flexible Classroom: Having flexible classroom layout breeds physical and mental wiggle room, when your body can move, so does your mind. Digital classrooms and flipped classrooms provide students access to internet-based learning within an educational environment. Teachers can use solutions like LiveTiles Mosaic, which is offered free to grades K-12, to further involve their students and have them play a part in the digital classroom design.

Mosaic is an intuitive no-code solution that allows users to simply drag and drop respective tiles into place in order to create an education space. As the screen shot below illustrates, the tiles vary in function, from social media tiles to calendar tiles to video and image tiles. Involving students in the creation of their digital classroom encourages creativity as they decide ways to make the learning process more engaging.

When faced with the pressure of standardized tests and college entrance exams, students often feel like their creativity is stifled. When faced with cuts to important creativity programs, teachers often feel like they can't fully engage their students. It doesn't have to be this way. Teachers can take advantage of digital technology to teach creativity in the classroom and make learning fun and exciting for their students.

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20 Clever Ways to Teach Creativity in the Classroom

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"When the masses are both educated and creative, mass tragedy based on false fundamental beliefs systems is less likely to take hold. Classrooms that insist on total conformity without asking for independent ideas are likely to produce citizens who are best suited to cooperation with those who seek to control in order to subjugate them.

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Although educators claim to value creativity, they don't always prioritize it.

Teachers often have biases against creative students, fearing that creativity in the classroom will be disruptive. They devalue creative personality attributes such as risk taking, impulsivity and independence. They inhibit creativity by focusing on the reproduction of knowledge and obedience in class.

Why the disconnect between educators' official stance toward creativity, and what actually happens in school?

How can teachers nurture creativity in the classroom in an era of rapid technological change, when human innovation is needed more than ever and children are more distracted and hyper-stimulated?

These are some of the questions we ask in my research lab at the Okanagan campus of the University of British Columbia. We study the creative process, as well as how ideas evolve over time and across societies. I've written almost 200 scholarly papers and book chapters on creativity, and lectured on it worldwide. My research involves both computational models and studies with human participants. I also write fiction, compose music for the piano and do freestyle dance.

What is creativity?

Although creativity is often defined in terms of new and useful products, I believe it makes more sense to define it in terms of processes. Specifically, creativity involves cognitive processes that transform one's understanding of, or relationship to, the world.

(Unsplash/Chris Barbalis), CC BY

There may be adaptive value to the seemingly mixed messages that teachers send about creativity. Creativity is the novelty-generating component of cultural evolution. As in any kind of evolutionary process, novelty must be balanced by preservation.

In biological evolution, the novelty-generating components are genetic mutation and recombination, and the novelty-preserving components include the survival and reproduction of "fit" individuals. In cultural evolution, the novelty-generating component is creativity, and the novelty-preserving components include imitation and other forms of social learning.

It isn't actually necessary for everyone to be creative for the benefits of creativity to be felt by all. We can reap the rewards of the creative person's ideas by copying them, buying from them or simply admiring them. Few of us can build a computer or write a symphony, but they are ours to use and enjoy nevertheless.

Inventor or imitator?

There are also drawbacks to creativity. Sure, creative people solve problems, crack jokes, invent stuff; they make the world pretty and interesting and fun. But generating creative ideas is time-consuming. A creative solution to one problem often generates other problems, or has unexpected negative side effects.

Creativity is correlated with rule bending, law breaking, social unrest, aggression, group conflict and dishonesty. Creative people often direct their nurturing energy towards ideas rather than relationships, and may be viewed as aloof, arrogant, competitive, hostile, independent or unfriendly.

(Shutterstock)

Also, if I'm wrapped up in my own creative reverie, I may fail to notice that someone else has already solved the problem I'm working on. In an agent-based computational model of cultural evolution, in which artificial neural network-based agents invent and imitate ideas, the society's ideas evolve most quickly when there is a good mix of creative "inventors" and conforming "imitators." Too many creative agents and the collective suffers. They are like holes in the fabric of society, fixated on their own (potentially inferior) ideas, rather than propagating proven effective ideas.

Of course, a computational model of this sort is highly artificial. The results of such simulations must be taken with a grain of salt. However, they suggest an adaptive value to the mixed signals teachers send about creativity. A society thrives when some individuals create and others preserve their best ideas.

This also makes sense given how creative people encode and process information. Creative people tend to encode episodes of experience in much more detail than is actually needed. This has drawbacks: Each episode takes up more memory space and has a richer network of associations. Some of these associations will be spurious. On the bright side, some may lead to new ideas that are useful or aesthetically pleasing.

So, there's a trade-off to peppering the world with creative minds. They may fail to see the forest for the trees but they may produce the next Mona Lisa.

Innovation might keep us afloat

So will society naturally self-organize into creators and conformers? Should we avoid trying to enhance creativity in the classroom?

The answer is: No! The pace of cultural change is accelerating more quickly than ever before. In some biological systems, when the environment is changing quickly, the mutation rate goes up. Similarly, in times of change we need to bump up creativity levels - to generate the innovative ideas that will keep us afloat.

This is particularly important now. In our high-stimulation environment, children spend so much time processing new stimuli that there is less time to "go deep" with the stimuli they've already encountered. There is less time for thinking about ideas and situations from different perspectives, such that their ideas become more interconnected and their mental models of understanding become more integrated.

This "going deep" process has been modeled computationally using a program called Deep Dream, a variation on the machine learning technique "Deep Learning" and used to generate images such as the ones in the figure below.

Author provided (No reuse)

The images show how an input is subjected to different kinds of processing at different levels, in the same way that our minds gain a deeper understanding of something by looking at it from different perspectives. It is this kind of deep processing and the resulting integrated webs of understanding that make the crucial connections that lead to important advances and innovations.

Cultivating creativity in the classroom

So the obvious next question is: How can creativity be cultivated in the classroom? It turns out there are lots of ways! Here are three key ways in which teachers can begin:

1. Focus less on the reproduction of information and more on critical thinking and problem solving.

2. Curate activities that transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries, such as by painting murals that depict biological food chains, or acting out plays about historical events, or writing poems about the cosmos. After all, the world doesn't come carved up into different subject areas. Our culture tells us these disciplinary boundaries are real and our thinking becomes trapped in them.

3. Pose questions and challenges, and follow up with opportunities for solitude and reflection. This provides time and space to foster the forging of new connections that is so vital to creativity.

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What creativity really is - and why schools need it

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Although educators claim to value creativity, they don't always prioritize it. Teachers often have biases against creative students, fearing that creativity in the classroom will be disruptive. They devalue creative personality attributes such as risk taking, impulsivity and independence. They inhibit creativity by focusing on the reproduction of knowledge and obedience in class.

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*Especially point #4

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As a dad of 11-year-old twin boys, I like to consider the latest thinking on the topic of parenting by reviewing current research and blogs of other parents. A key topic for me is social skills lessons. One of the best things about the explosion of millions of people posting content on the Internet is that you can easily find fresh ideas or approaches for a problem.

Helping my children with social skills lessons is a constant area of focus for my wife and me. I'm sharing with you approaches that have worked for us. We believe that understanding and following the rules at home is the first step to our twins' success at school and in other social situations.

Here is my list of 7 steps to take to help your child learn to follow the rules.

1. Create the rules together with your child. According to Lacie Rader, teacher, author and mom, you should involve your child in the setting of rules. Sit down with a paper and pen and talk to your child about setting rules. Rader believes that your child will find ownership, especially if she or he is able to suggest and help create the rules. Rader says,

"Rather than the rules coming from Mommy, minute by minute throughout the day... this is a list, it's consistent and best of all, the enemy is the list (not you)!"

2. Have both consequences and rewards in place. In our family we mean what say and we say what we mean. Six months ago, one of our twins belched at dinner and didn't say excuse me, his consequence was no desert. He was mad and protested but my wife and I still kept to our rule. He hasn't forgot to say excuse me again since. When our twins follow the rules they are rewarded in multiple ways usually verbally and sometimes with a preferred activity.

3. Use a gentle and sensitive tone to explain the rules to your child. Your home is not a boot camp and you are not a drill sergeant. The Family Share website reminds us that using orders, forcing or threats may drive your child in the wrong direction. They will be act out of fear. By being sensitive when reminding and reinforcing the rules, your child learns to make the choice to follow the rule for the right reasons.

4. Every child must follow the same rules. If you have more than one child, like us, you probably find that the sanest approach-for you and your kids-is to apply the same rules equally. There's plenty of time when they grow up to discover that the world isn't (really) a fair place. Let's cross that bridge when we come to it.

5. Hold practice sessions about following the rules in the safe environment of home. Explain to your child how to follow the rules at school when he is interacting in groups with other kids. For example, explain to your child how to approach a group of kids playing together. Explain to your child in detail, the steps to follow when he wants to join a group of kids playing together. Role-play with your child. First, explain each step:

1) Wait for a good time to join the game. Like when there's a break or the ball rolls away.
2) Smile at the kids and make eye contact.
3) Say something positive: you guys look like you're having fun!
4) Then ask-while still smiling-may I join you?
5) Last, discuss what to do next if the kids say "no".

6. Consistently on teach table manners. This one may or may not help them improve their social skills deficits with other kids but it's still a big one. Work to reinforce the basics: Not jumping to eat before others are served, placing the napkin in their lap and using forks and knives correctly.

7. Discourage food-criticizing behavior. This is a key social skill learning they'll need as adults! The blog at Today's Parent has a great suggestion they quoted from parenting coach Lisa Bunnage:

"The other thing kids this age have in common is complaining about the meal they're served. "I suggest parents say, 'OK, start cooking for yourself. But the rules are that your meal has to be healthy and you have to leave the kitchen spotless,'" says Bunnage. "Either they'll try it once and decide mom's food tastes great, or they end up loving to cook and clean and become the family chef."

If you have other suggestions for helping your child follow the rules, please let us know below in the comments. We'd also like to hear what doesn't work when teaching your child social skills.

If you're looking to help your child learn social skills, our online engaging animated program may benefit your child. Parents tell us that kids love the Hollywood style animation and characters and actually ask to use The Social Express!

To see how The Social Express works, click here.
If you'd like to try our 10-day, no risk trial, click here.

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Social Skills Lessons: How Do I Get My Child to Follow the Rules? - The Social Express

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As a dad of 11-year-old twin boys, I like to consider the latest thinking on the topic of parenting by reviewing current research and blogs of other parents. A key topic for me is social skills lessons.

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It might always be impossible to teach creativity but the least we can do for our students is make education a safe place for imagination.

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Industry and educators are agreed: the world needs creativity. There is interest in the field, lots of urging but remarkably little action. Everyone is a bit scared of what to do next. On the question of creativity and imagination, they are mostly uncreative and unimaginative.

Some of the paralysis arises because you can't easily define creativity. It resists the measurement and strategies that we're familiar with. Indisposed by the simultaneous vagueness and sublimity of creative processes, educators seek artificial ways to channel imaginative activity into templates that end up compromising the very creativity they celebrate.

For example, creativity is often reduced to problem-solving. To be sure, you need imagination to solve many curly problems and creativity is arguably part of what it takes. But problem-solving is far from the whole of creativity; and if you focus creative thinking uniquely on problems and solutions, you encourage a mechanistic view - all about scoping and then pin-pointing the best fit among options.

It might be satisfying to create models for such analytical processes but they distort the natural, wayward flux of imaginative thinking. Often, it is not about solving a problem but seeing a problem that no one else has identified. Often, the point of departure is a personal wish for something to be true or worth arguing or capable of making a poetic splash, whereupon the mind goes into imaginative overdrive to develop a robust theory that has never been proposed before.

For teaching purposes, problems are an anxious place to cultivate creativity. If you think of anyone coming up with an idea - a new song, a witty way of denouncing a politician, a dance step, a joke - it isn't necessarily about a problem but rather a blissful opportunity for the mind to exercise its autonomy, that magical power to concatenate images freely and to see within them a bristling expression of something intelligent.

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That's the motive behind what scholars now call "Big C Creativity": i.e. your Bach or Darwin or Freud who comes up with a major original contribution to culture or science. But the same is true of everyday "small C creativity" that isn't specifically problem-based.

Read more: Creativity is a human quality that exists in every single one of us

Relishing the independence of the mind is the basis for naturally imaginative activity, like humour, repartee, a gestural impulse or theatrical intuition, a satire that extrapolates someone's behaviour or produces a poignant character insight.

A dull taming

Our way of democratising creativity is not to see it in inherently imaginative spontaneity but to identify it with instrumental strategising. We tame creativity by making it dull. Our way of honing the faculty is by making it goal-oriented and compliant to a purpose that can be managed and assessed.

Alas, when we make creativity artificially responsible to a goal, we collapse it with prudent decision-making, whereupon it no longer transcends familiar frameworks toward an unknown fertility.

We pin creativity to logical intelligence as opposed to fantasy, that somewhat messy generation of figments out of whose chaos the mind can see a brilliant rhyme, a metaphor, a hilarious skip or roll of the shoulders, an outrageous pun, a thought about why peacocks have such a long tail, a reason why bread goes stale or an astonishing pattern in numbers arising from a formula.

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Because creativity in essence is somewhat irresponsible, it isn't easy to locate in syllabus and impossible to teach in a culture of learning outcomes. Learning outcomes are statements of what the student will gain from the subject or unit that you're teaching. Internationally and across the tertiary system, they take the form of: "On successful completion of this subject, you will be able to ..." Everything that is taught should then support the outcomes and all assessment should allow the students to demonstrate that they have met them.

After a lengthy historical study, I have concluded that our contemporary education systematically trashes creativity and unwittingly punishes students for exercising their imagination. The structural basis for this passive hostility to the imagination is the grid of learning outcomes in alignment with delivery and assessment.

It might always be impossible to teach creativity but the least we can do for our students is make education a safe place for imagination. Our academies are a long way from that haven and I see little encouraging in the apologias for creativity that the literature now spawns.

My contention is that learning outcomes are only good for uncreative study. For education to cultivate creativity and imagination, we need to stop asking students anxiously to follow demonstrable proofs of learning for which imagination is a liability.

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Why it is (almost) impossible to teach creativity

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Industry and educators are agreed: the world needs creativity. There is interest in the field, lots of urging but remarkably little action. Everyone is a bit scared of what to do next. On the question of creativity and imagination, they are mostly uncreative and unimaginative.

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One of the most consistent findings in educational studies of creativity has been that teachers dislike personality traits associated with creativity. Research has indicated that teachers prefer traits that seem to run counter to creativity, such as conformity and unquestioning acceptance of authority (e.g., Bachtold, 1974; Cropley, 1992; Dettmer, 1981; Getzels & Jackson, 1962; Torrance, 1963). The reason for teachers' preferences is quite clear creative people tend to have traits that some have referred to as obnoxious (Torrance, 1963). Torrance (1963) described creative people as not having the time to be courteous, as refusing to take no for an answer, and as being negativistic and critical of others. Other characteristics, although not deserving the label obnoxious, nonetheless may not be those most highly valued in the classroom.

....Research has suggested that traits associated with creativity may not only be neglected, but actively punished (Myers & Torrance, 1961; Stone, 1980). Stone (1980) found that second graders who scored highest on tests of creativity were also those identified by their peers as engaging in the most misbehavior (e.g., "getting in trouble the most"). Given that research and theory (e.g., Harrington, Block, & Block, 1987) suggest that a supportive environment is important to the fostering of creativity, it is quite possible that teachers are (perhaps unwittingly) extinguishing creative behaviors.

From Creativity: Asset or Burden in the Classroom?, a good review paper. What the paper shows is that the characteristics that teachers use to describe their favorite student correlate negatively with the characteristics associated with creativity. In addition, although teachers say that they like creative students, teachers also say creative students are "sincere, responsible, good-natured and reliable." In other words, the teachers don't know what creative students are actually like. (FYI, the research design would have been stronger if the researchers had actually tested the students for creativity.) As a result, schooling has a negative effect on creativity.

My experience as a parent is consistent with the idea that teachers don't like creative students but I try not to blame the teachers too much. Creative people, for better and worse, ignore social conventions. Thus, it can be hard for teachers to deal with creative students in a classroom setting where they must guide 20-30 students en masse. As Jonah Lehrer puts it:

Would you really want a little Picasso in your class? How about a baby Gertrude Stein? Or a teenage Eminem? The point is that the classroom isn't designed for impulsive expression - that's called talking out of turn. Instead, it's all about obeying group dynamics and exerting focused attention. Those are important life skills, of course, but decades of psychological research suggest that such skills have little to do with creativity.

One hope I have for personalized learning, ala the Khan Academy, is that teachers will not feel the need to suppress creative students when classroom dynamics do not require that all the students follow all the rules all the time .

Hat Tip: Erik Barker.

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Teachers Don't Like Creative Students - Marginal REVOLUTION

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One of the most consistent findings in educational studies of creativity has been that teachers dislike personality traits associated with creativity. Research has indicated that teachers prefer traits that seem to run counter to creativity, such as conformity and unquestioning acceptance of authority (e.g., Bachtold, 1974; Cropley, 1992; Dettmer, 1981; Getzels & Jackson, 1962; Torrance, ...

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As impossible as it may sound, creativity isn't always a good thing. Psychology has traditionally adopted the "think outside the box" mindset as far more preferable to sticking within the straight and narrow. Decades of research has linked creativity is linked to a myriad of positive outcomes, with "flow" (the feeling of being internally motivated) seen as the key to happiness.

Historically, the creative geniuses of such luminaries as Michelangelo, Mozart, and Picasso are lauded for their brilliant and lasting contributions to the arts. The Thomas Edison's, Henry Ford's, Albert Einstein's, and Marie Curie's of science permanently changed the way the world operates, with accomplishments that could only have been produced by the most creative of minds. The psychological analysis of people endowed with creativity with a capital "C" (the eminently creative) contrast their gifts with those whose creativity takes the "lower case" form of living a creative life.

Against this compelling backdrop, we may therefore wonder why anyone would propose that creativity can have a dark side. The examples of creativity we tend to remember are those that brought improvements to the world, if not our own daily lives. We put in a different category the creative geniuses whose powers were put to harmful use.

The question of whether than can be a dark side to creativity led University of Nebraska psychologists Daniel Harris and Roni Reiter-Palmon (2015) to explore David Cropley's concept of malevolent creativity, or the use of creativity to achieve a harmful goal. Creativity can be harmful without being malevolent, according to this view. A creative individual may make a scientific or cultural contribution that has unintended negative consequences.

For example, 3-D plastic printing can be used to create artificial limbs that help people navigate their world more adaptively or handguns that escape metal detectors. Facebook can be used to promote social interaction and maintain long-distance bonds, or it can be put to the harmful goal of cyberbullying. In both cases, the original product was a true innovation, but it's up to users to determine whether its effects help to enhance life or to take it away. In malevolent creativity, the original intent is to cause harm.

Malevolent creativity is aimed toward destructive consequences only. From committing acts of criminal activity or serial murder to terrorism, the malevolently creative seek to attack targets, invoke fear, and assert their power. In addition, just as creativity can be eminent (with a capital "C"), so malevolent creativity can also take an everyday form in which it's practiced in ordinary circumstances. The malevolently creative attempt to manipulate others to their own ends, create mischief just for the sake of creating mischief, and try to deceive the people closest to them.

Harris and Reiter-Palmon decided to tackle the roots of malevolent creativity in personality- specifically, by investigating the role of aggression. They were particularly interested in implicit aggression, or the tendency to rationalize an aggressive course of action in a given situation. People who are prone to aggression tend to act out, as you might guess, without giving it much thought. However, if they consider the future consequences of their actions, they are able to manage and even control their aggressive impulses. It's only when they are triggered to act quickly that the truly aggressive set aside their ethical decision-making and justify their harmful behaviors.

The tendency toward malevolent creativity, then, may reflect a combination of factors from the individual (aggressiveness) and the situation that triggers the response. As the researchers obviously couldn't use real-life situations to test their theory, they created scenarios intended to invoke malevolent creativity that cued participants to experience the negative emotions of hostility, anger, injustice and a desire for revenge. The "benevolent" creativity scenarios were intended to stimulate the desire to cooperate, help, and use thought rather than action to gain a positive outcome.

A sample of 138 undergraduates (31% male, average age 25 years old) completed a series of questionnaires intended to assess implicit aggression, tendency toward premeditation, and divergent creativity (the ability to think of multiple solutions to a problem). The key question was whether the tendency toward implicit aggression would interact with premeditation to influence the number of creative ideas that flowed in response to the malevolently creative problem (the one that elicited feelings of rage and a desire for revenge).

As predicted, when the researchers presented them with the problem that triggered malevolent creativity, participants high in implicit aggression and low in premeditation expressed the largest number of malevolently-themed solutions. When presented with the more benign problem that triggered prosocial motives of helping others and cooperating, those high in implicit aggression, even if they were high in impulsiveness, were far less destructive in their imagined solutions.

The study's findings led the authors to conclude that it was premeditation more than implicit aggression that controlled an individual's expression of malevolent creativity. Being able to hold off on their impulses, in other words, can make even those primed to be aggressive less harmful when provoked.

There are important implications of this laboratory investigation of malevolent creativity for everyday life. As Harris and Reiter-Palmon point out, toxic work conditions in which bosses place their employees under stress, promote competition, and in general are abusive and hostile are more likely to produce employees who actively try to harm, outdo, and manipulate each other. Believing that it's okay, if not desirable, to act aggressively, they'll be more likely to come up with aggressive solutions in maintaining their competitive edge. When they perceive that they've been wronged, they'll dream up ways of getting back at their coworkers that, short of being overtly aggressive, harm them in emotionally abusive ways. Similarly, we might argue that in the home, malevolent creativity can also inadvertently be fostered among siblings when their parents reinforce aggression and themselves are abusive.

With the idea of malevolent creativity, we may be better able to understand- and control- a person's urge to dream up imaginative ways to harm others and instead put on the ethical brakes. Creativity can help everyone lead a more fulfilling life, especially when we recognize its potential dark side.
Follow me on Twitter @swhitbo for daily updates on psychology, health, and aging. Feel free to join my Facebook group, "Fulfillment at Any Age," to discuss today's blog, or to ask further questions about this posting.
Copyright Susan Krauss Whitbourne 2015

Reference:

Harris, D. J., & Reiter-Palmon, R. (2015). Fast and furious: The influence of implicit aggression, premeditation, and provoking situations on malevolent creativity. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, And the Arts, 9(1), 54-64. doi:10.1037/a0038499

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As impossible as it may sound, creativity isn't always a good thing. Psychology has traditionally adopted the "think outside the box" mindset as far more preferable to sticking within the straight and narrow. Decades of research has linked creativity is linked to a myriad of positive outcomes, with "flow" (the feeling of being internally motivated) seen as the key to happiness.

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UoI don't always lend themselves to creativity, so after finishing a unit, the 'creativity' can stop, as you move on. - AM

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Unlocking Creativity: Teaching Across the Curriculum by Robert Fisher & Mary Williams

This book talks about how creativity can be taught/incorporated in all subject areas (maths, science, tech.).