A metacognitive approach to developing creativity
Written by: Claire Badger and Jonathan Firth
5 min read
Dr Jonathan Firth, University of Strathclyde, UK
Dr Claire Badger, The Godolphin and Latymer School, UK
Background
Creativity is widely considered to be a vital skill in education. It sits at the pinnacle of the revised Bloom’s taxonomy of skills (Anderson et al., 2001) and has been recognised as important across all curriculum areas (van Broekhoven et al., 2020). It will impact students’ future in the workplace, as well as being embedded throughout the competences that all citizens need (European Commission, 2018). Well beyond their school days, our students will need to find creative solutions to problems.
While the importance of creativity is relatively uncontested, the best way to teach it is controversial. There is a recognition in cognitive psychology that developing transferrable skills is often difficult (e.g. Barnett and Ceci, 2002; Sala et al., 2019). Transfer of creative thinking from one situation to another appears to depend on how it integrates with domain knowl
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It is important to understand how metacognitive thinking and creativity go hand in hand. I thought it was interesting to consider how practical strategies can improve creativity such as planning activities that are challenging but not overwhelming or giving time restraints to a task. Some of theses strategies I will definitely consider using with my children.