Teacher Creativity and Idea Incubation
Creative people may be quick of wit and nimble of tongue; but, creative
people are patient people.
The reason that patience pays off for creative folks much better than the dimmer sparkle of their less novel family, friend and colleagues is that creative folks have mastered the art and science of idea incubation.
And the incubation process seems deceptively simple. After an intense, sometimes long-duration focus upon problem-solving; idea-creation-pondering, contemplating, grappling…the onslaught toward a solution is stopped, abandoned, shelved, put on hold.
Then, after a while, the image of the solution just "pops" into consciousness, the "aha-moment" strikes. This happens when rational defenses are preoccupied…when idle thoughts or mindless routines place the executive brain in "neutral."
Like Spinning Straw into Gold…as we Sleep
Creative people almost feel guilty that the ideas, solutions, innovations, inventions (that their inner-mind devises) didn't come from themselves…guilty that they didn't take part in the …work… of developing the creative expression that just revealed itself.
The often full-blown answer appears to just "pop in" to this universe from another dimension…from the unseen to the seen.
Of course, the work had been completed hours, days, weeks earlier. And the cause and effect connection between the solution and the earlier priming of the creative process is invisible and may never be discovered.
Transformation, but not Magic
Even the elves need straw before they can work their gold-generating magic. And, the inner mind, the incognito dynamo that powers the creative process, also needs raw materials.
Fortunately, those raw materials are the "stuff" that learning is made of; and, the more "idea raw materials," the better. The reason that "smarter" people seem to be more creative is that smarter people have more "idea-fuel" and "idea-fodder" to work with.
No Monopoly on Learning Channels and Multiple Intelligences
Creative thought and creative expression might seem to give an edge o the channels that construct knowledge, but creative ideas are as likely to cross learning modalities as they are to remain in the person's most-favored mode of thought.
This means that multi-sensory, Multiple Intelligences-type examinations of thought and ides should foster creative output. But, the process is less than predictable, and more dynamic.
Therefore, the best strategy for setting up, launching, then harvesting creative output is the "intent" to accomplish this "miracle thought processing" on a deadline, or to meet time requirements.
Voyage Destinations: Taking Creative Thought where No One has Gone Before
Some folks believe that creativity involves the evolution of ideas, or that creativity encompasses combinations of concepts that no-one has ever thought before. But empirical evidence suggests that truly new ideas seem to burst fourth around the globe at about the same time.
Amazing! Without collaboration! And each innovator believes that they were the first; believes that the others, thieves, stole their "original" idea.
Of course, this is narrow (anti-creative) thinking. Creativity is much like what happens when the Spring season awakens dormant blossoms. No blossom claims that they are the first to emerge from their seed-buds. Countless flowers bubble up, in the same way that heat on the bottom of a cooking pot brings fourth effervescent action. Neither blossoms nor bubbles stake their claim to being first, and self-aware creative people know that ideas just come to them like fleeting waves on a sandy beach.
Sidebar
But ideas cannot be owned by anyone. And, that is the reason that ideas are ineligible for copyright protection. But, the form that the ideas are expressed in are eligible for copyright.
The exact rendering of ideas in identical forms is unlikely. The reason: There are too many permutations and combinations of intelligences at play when the ideas are filtered into form and action.
So, rather than believing that you are in sole possession of a unique idea, beating everyone else to the finish line; just set the idea into form, knowing that, out of 100 others who "receive" the same ides, 97 or 98 will do nothing with it. You may not be able to claim "first-thought" for an idea, but you can certainly be the first to "take action."
