Get your students thinking like innovators
This article is part of our series on how to help students use critical and creative thinking to break down problems, devise & evaluate solutions, and inform their interactions with others. To learn more about how we teach critical & creative thinking, see here.
Have you ever been a bit underwhelmed by the ideas your students came up with when they were solving a real-world problem?
We all know that feeling. You get students immersed in the problem of ocean plastic waste, maybe by exploring its impact on ocean ecosystems. You set them the challenge of solving the problem and all they come up with is the idea of plastic straws. It’s a fine idea but it’s just that – fine. Not the inspiring flashes of creativity you’d hoped for.
But you might also have had the opposite experience, where students have created the most ingenious and impressive ideas. When this happens, you get the ‘Wow!’ moment which validates why you became a teacher. So how do we get this feeling more often?
Of course, we don’t just want students developing better ideas for our benefit. It helps them navigate a real-world unit and prevents the stagnation and loss of motivation that results when they can’t think of an idea, or when the idea they do think of doesn’t work. And if we’re championing greater student voice and agency, students need the skills to exhibit this – and this involves developing ideas for how to solve problems and demonstrate what they’ve learned in a real-world context.
To develop better ideas, students need two separate skills spanning both divergent thought and convergent thought:
Creating more (and better) initial ideas
Improving their evaluation of those ideas to select the best one
In this article, we’ll just touch on the first skill – creating more and better ideas. We’ll explore the second skill in the next edition of the Curations newsletter.
Creating more (and better) ideas
Students might think that creative ideas emerge through flashes of inspiration. But the reality is that even the most creative people – the Leonardo Da Vincis and Steve Jobs of the world – use a series of structures and techniques to bring forth novel ideas.
In our Creativity Toolkit, students have a series of techniques to help them develop better ideas. We’ll give a brief overview of some of them below.
Worst possible idea
It seems extremely counter-intuitive that an ideation process would start with students trying to think of the worst ideas they possibly could. Isn’t that the opposite of what they should be doing!? Actually, it is a powerful technique that can yield some of the best ideas of all!
As the name suggests, the worst possible idea technique encourages students to think of the worst solutions to their problems. There are two main reasons why this approach is so powerful:
It relaxes people and encourages suggestions being put forward. Coming with solution ideas is difficult and, therefore, stressful for some people. This is heightened when they are fearful that their ideas will be judged and laughed at. The stress blocks creative thought and the fear of judgement means people stay silent, suppress their ideas, and don’t volunteer them to the group. Instead, starting the ideation process with the worst possible idea technique completely flips these stressors and fears
Within every bad idea are the seeds of a good idea. Bad ideas can actually be a gateway to unearthing insights or creative breakthroughs. What this task does is make very clear to students the parameters or characteristics of ideas that will be unsuccessful. What students can then do is think of the exact opposite of these ideas – or think of ideas with the opposite characteristics – to begin forming a picture of what a good idea looks like
To run this task, there are some key steps which students should work through:
Use the team’s How might we? question as their starting place. Come up with as many bad ideas as they possibly can.
Deconstruct & list all the properties of the bad ideas. What about them means they are bad?
Consider the bad ideas – is there anything of interest or value which could be used to inspire a good idea? For example, if we were trying to solve carbon emissions from businesses, allowing them to pollute as much as they want seems like a terrible. But an emissions trading scheme, which permits pollution up to a limit based on the quota you pay for, isn’t so different from the ‘worst’ idea. This is an example of a bad idea possessing the seeds of a potential solution
Identify the opposite of these bad properties. What properties would suggest that an idea might be a good one?
Using the properties of good ideas, generate potential solutions
Re-framing the problem
Sometimes, the way we define a problem can be limiting. It can narrow our thinking and prevent us from thinking laterally about solutions that might solve the problem in a different way to how we have defined it. This is where re-framing the problem comes in.
A problem frame is a single way of looking at a problem. For example, let’s imagine that you work in an office building. The elevators in the building are very slow, so people have long waits to catch one to their floor. This is particularly frustrating while people are going on and returning from their lunch breaks, which they look forward to and don’t want to waste waiting for lifts.
It is easy to define a problem – the lifts being too slow – which then becomes our problem frame.
Let’s assume that, as a result, we create the How might we? question: How might we increase the speed of the lifts? All our focus when thinking of how to solve this solution would centre around how to make the lifts move faster.
However, there are other ways of looking at this problem. For example:
Are there other ways of getting people to their floors quickly, besides a lift?
If the lift ride was fun and enjoyable, would people mind that it was slow?
If people could have fun or be productive while waiting for the lift, would they mind the wait?
Each of these questions is a different frame for looking at the problem through. If we apply one of these frames, we are reframing the problem; we are now thinking about it in a completely different way. Instead of trying to solve the speed of the lifts, perhaps now our solution is a way to make the lift ride fun and enjoyable. This gives us an entirely different set of solutions we can consider, broadening the scope of what is possible.
How to reframe a problem
There are some simple strategies we can use to reframe a problem. They are:
Use different words. How can we re-word the problem so that our HMW question means the same thing but prompts new ideas and insights through putting a new spin on it?
Amp up the good. Are there any positive or desirable aspects of the problem situation that we can emphasise?
Remove the bad. Is there a way we can remove the undesirable impact or outcome of the problem without changing anything else?
Explore the opposite. Can we turn the negative result into a positive?
Question an assumption. Are we assuming something about the way things are or need to be? What if things didn’t occur this way – what would it look like?
Extending ideas
The best ideas are the ones that go through multiple iterations. Often the idea we end up with is unrecognisable from the initial idea. But through these iterations, the idea becomes stronger and better adapted to solving the problem.
We want students to do the same thing. By extending their ideas - playing with them, manipulating them, and tweaking them – students can evolve and develop them further.
A simple structure for extending existing ideas is the SCAMPER method, which is an acronym for seven different frames or lenses which can be applied to think differently about an idea.
Substitute. Could this solution be replaced with another which would have the same effect? Is there a better, simpler, cheaper, or more impactful alternative?
Combine. Could two (or more) ideas be combined to create a single, more powerful solution? Could any solutions be joined together?
Adapt. Which solutions could be adapted further? What could be added? How could it be changed to better solve the problem
Modify. How could this specific solution be modified? Could it be made bigger or smaller? Should the colour, wording, or shape change?
Put to another use. How else could this solution be used? How would it be used by different people? Could it solve the problem in a different way that we aren’t realising?
Eliminate. What can be removed from this solution? What would happen if a feature or part of it was taken away? How can it be simplified?
Reverse (or rearrange). What if this idea worked in the opposite way or order?
We’re confident that if you use one or more of these techniques, students will find it easier to develop more solution ideas. And the more they create, the greater their chances of finding an original, exciting idea that they can extend and turn into something remarkable!
The final part of this process is for students to switch to convergent thought and evaluate their preferred ideas. Will they really work? Are they overlooking something?
We’ll explore this more in next month’s Curations newsletter. Stay tuned!
Do you know an educator who wants to improve their students’ creativity? If so, please share this article with them!
If you are passionate about teaching creative thinking and want to learn more, get in touch with us at hello@curaeducation.com.