Enhancing Creativity of Elementary Science Teachers

Asia-Pacific Forum on Science Learning and Teaching, Volume 2, Issue 2, Article 4 (Dec., 2001)
Vivian Mo Yin CHENG
Enhancing Creativity of Elementary Science Teachers - a preliminary study

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Strategies
In this program, ten hands-on activities are conducted in an inquiry learning approach. Teachers are divided into groups. They are asked to design practical experiments with everyday materials and then try them out on the spot. The activities are arranged with increasing degree of openness and challenges.
The activities are purposely designed to break the perceptual set and the cognitive set (i.e., the functional fixedness) of teachers. To perceive creatively, one needs to see things differently from the way most people see them, and able to take advantage of serendipity by recognizing the importance of new information (Amabile, 1996). For example, in breaking the perceptual set, teachers are enabled to see a balloon as an apparatus of science experiments, and not only a simple toy. On the other hand, in breaking cognitive set, an old set of unsuccessful problem-solving strategies is abandoned and the search for solution moves off in a new direction, which may lead to creative solutions in a problem-solving process (Amabile, 1996). For example, when teachers find that they lack the science apparatus for the experimental designs suggested in the textbooks, in the past, they either try to buy them or to avoid doing the experiments. In breaking the cognitive set, teachers are able to solve the problem in a new direction --- search for materials in daily-life to substitute the apparatus, or to redesign the experiments in a simpler way.
Based on some existing theories, the program has adopted several structural strategies for facilitating divergent thinking in designing its activities. Unlike conventional activities in teacher training, most activities in this program request multiple answers to foster divergent thinking and flexibility of teachers. For example, "design 20 experiments using these three sheets". A lot of group and individual brainstorming exercises are implemented. The cardinal rules of Osborn's (1953) brainstorming program are adopted. The steps in sequential order are---- criticism is ruled out, freewheeling is welcomed, quantity is wanted, combination and improvement are sought. Special attention is paid to suspension of judgment. Participants are encouraged to keep response options open as long as possible, so as to develop their ability to avoid foreclosure of alternatives. All ideas are accepted in brainstorming. Even crazy or seemingly impossible experimental designs are also taken into account in the first stage of discussion. Besides brainstorming, morphological synthesis, attribute listing and checklist method are also implemented in the program. They are introduced in the following paragraphs.
Sometimes, free association of experimental design is difficult because there are too many possible cognitive paths. In attribute listing (Crawford, 1954), a problem is divided into its key attributes, which would be addressed separately. For example, in designing heat expansion experiments, teachers first analyze what the key attributes of such an experiment would have, and then consider how each attribute can be altered or combined to form new experimental designs. In morphological synthesis (Starko, 2001), forced combination of two sets of attributes (e.g. everyday items and science topics) in a matrix form (see Table 1) would produce large number of inventions (e.g. new experimental designs). The matrix form allows all possible interactions between the two diverse sets of attributes. The forced association between each pair of attributes (e.g. balloon and sound-emission) helps to narrow down the number of possibilities, focus our attention on fewer things and offer clues to solve the problem at hand. In checklist method, a set of idea-spurring queries is used to stimulate people to generate new ideas. Eberle (1977) developed an easy-to-remember checklist, namely SCAMPER. The Table 3 in the next section describes the idea-spurring queries of SCAMPER, and illustrates how it can be used to facilitate divergent thinking in science teaching.
Modeling effects are induced in the program, through the sharing of ideas with peers and lecturers, and that in the books. According to Feldman's theory, seeing creative products of others would induce a desire to be creative and a belief that alternatives exist and creative outcomes are possible. Throughout the program, brainstorming, sharing and hands-on try-out are arranged successively and repeatedly. In most cases, after obtaining stimulation in the sharing and try-out process, participants are encouraged to brainstorm more innovative ideas. At the end of some activities, some books or articles on science hands-on activities (e.g. "100 science experiments with paper") are showed. This arrangement is to reinforce the belief that everyday materials can be extremely useful. In the program, teachers are encouraged to continue their creative thinking after the lessons, and also in real-life teaching. The conductor used to say, "There are infinite possibilities. How exciting your teaching is, depends on how creative you are!".
Besides these structural activities, special attentions are also put on the questioning techniques. Through some thought-provoking questioning, two objectives are expected to achieve. First, conductor encourages fluent, flexible, original and elaborative thinking (i.e. divergent thinking) of participants through her comments and questions. Questions like "there exist more than 30 ways (exaggerated), try to think of as many ideas as you can in using this item" are used to encourage fluency. Questions like "what are some different kinds of ideas", "so far, all our ideas involve light, try to think of experiments on other topics" are used to encourage flexibility. Comments such as "try to think of something no one else will think of " are used to elicit originality. Comments such as "how can we build on this idea", "describe your experiments in more details" encourages elaboration. (Starko, 2001)
Another set of questions is used to facilitate teachers to get involve in the inquiry process. The conductor used to ask questions like "He suggests that the water droplet on the transparency can be used as a magnifying glass. How this can be done? ¡K. Compare the images created by a small and a big droplet, which gives a bigger image?¡K. How to produce a bigger image with the same water-droplet? Try to find the answer with your own water magnifying glass."
Besides questioning, the conductor also put special effort in cultivating a playful and happy environment. She uses instructions like "today we play with¡K..". To reduce the pressure of external evaluation and competition, she used to say, "groups which loose the game, would need to sing". The conductor always keeps smiling and adopts a humorous mode of interaction. The learning environment nourishes a feeling --- doing science experiments are just "playing" with some everyday objects.