Nurturing creative thinking

An agricultural example shows that helping people flourish is an organic and unpredictable process. Like a farmer sowing seeds, someone creates conditions for children to grow as creative and critical thinkers. Creativity cannot be taught ‘directly’, but educational practice can provide the means, opportunities and a fertile environment for the creative mind to flourish. However, fostering creativity in schools is a challenging task, especially for teachers as they have to follow innovative teaching practices and play the new roles of mentor, facilitator and orchestrator of learning. This booklet focuses on eight key principles that primary and secondary teachers can follow in order to cultivate creative thinking in students. These principles are mainly inspired from a review of evidence-based research on creativity and innovation in educational contexts, as well as from authors’ own experiences as educators and life-long learners. The eight leading principles, which can easily be followed by teachers worldwide, are the following: promote creative thinking through all school subjects; influence creative thinking through well-designed learning spaces; increase the use of open questions; engage learners in meaningful and authentic activities; enhance creativity through collaboration; make efficient use of educational technologies; allow for mistakes and sensible risk-taking; and, last but not least, learn how to assess and reward creativity. These manifold principles aim at triggering teachers’ reflection on their everyday practices and encourage them to arrange creative thinking activities that offer authentic, interdisciplinary, open, and pleasant learning experiences to all students throughout the entire curriculum.JRC.J.3-Information Societ