Where do good ideas come from? View this talk from Steven Johnson:
Discussion of Steven Johnson's talk
Forming Patterns
Patterns are everywhere: from stripes on a zebra to the swirls on your fingertips to the cadence of speech that forms your dialect. These are all naturally forming patterns. We often create out own patterns in order to better understand information or concepts. Have you ever used a pneumonic device to help you recall memorized information? Recognizing existing patters and then forming your own are important steps in problem solving.
Root-Bernstein & Root-Bernstein (2000) suggest that rather than having students memorize the periodic table of elements, they should be challenge to devise their own schema for representing elements. Similarly, they suggest geometry students be encouraged to invent their own ways of proving theorems. "Making patterns for oneself is a lot more fun than memorizing -- and a lot more valuable. Teasing apart one pattern and composing another requires real understanding of the basic elements of phenomena and processes" (Root-Bernstein & Root-Bernstein, 2000, p. 135).
Activity: You were previously asked to identify a problem a recognize a pattern to that problem. Now it's time to form a new pattern.
Discussion forum for Forming Patterns
Analogizing
Analogies and similarities are not the same thing. "Analogies recognize a correspondence of inner relationship or of function between two (or more) different phenomena or complex sets of phenomena. . . Similarities, on the other had, are resemblances between things based upon observed characteristics such as color or form" (Root-Bernstein & Root-Bernstein, 2000, p. 142).
The book Think Like a Genius explains how to develop an analogy: "Start with what you know or what the person you are teaching already knows, then find the functional analogy that bridges this known thing with the unknown one that needs to be understood" (Root-Bernstein & Root-Bernstein, 2000, p. 156). The Teacher Vision website offers a simple graphic organizer to use or have students use in building analogies: http://www.teachervision.fen.com/tv/printables/prodev/PAS_Analogy-Org.pdf
Discussion Forum for Analogizing Activity
Body Thinking
Body thinking has to do with physical movement; consider how aware you are of body movements when you are learning a new skill, yet, when those skills are mastered, you do it without awareness. Body thinking also has to do with how you feel viscerally and emotionally. Our feelings and moods take on physical expression. We have all experienced that "gut feeling" that something is not quite right, and we have all observed body language that reflect emotions. Body thinking is an important aspect of innovative and creative thinking. Watch the following lecture by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced MEE-hye CHEEK-sent-mÉ™-HYE
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on flow
Direct link to talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_on_flow.html
Activity: Try out this lesson on flow (with you or someone else as the student) to create flow experiences in your own work or life.
Discussion Forum for Body Thinking Activity
Empathizing
To empathize is to identify with and understand somebody else's feelings or difficulties. This skill is important to problem solving, as we must put ourselves in other's shoes to consider all aspects of a possible solution. Root-Bernstein & Root-Bernstein (2000) recommend Stanislavsky's techniques for improving empathizing skills:
- Practice "inner attention, which centers on things we see, hear, touch, and feel" in real and imaginary circumstances. This means observing your own responses to the world and also remembering physical and emotional memories of your responses. How does it feel to open a door? How is this related to the "script" by which the physicist describes the door opening? Actors in any field may exercise this inner attention by remembering and reenacting the feelings of their daily lives.
- Practice "external attention" to people and things outside yourself. Actors study other people and things closely. Stanislavsky made his students recall as many details as possible of objects seen once and then hidden. He himself learned to imitate exactly the physical habits he found interesting in others. This approach is beneficial whether one is describing or imitating the behavior of chimpanzees, clocks, or quarks. How would they respond to a particular situation or stimulus?
- Imagine what the object of your external attention is sensing and feeling: get close to it. Pretend that its world is your world, its sense organs or physical attributes yours. How would you feel, behave, respond if you were it? Find connections to sensations and emotions that exist in yourself. Even as this approach made Stanislavsky "feel akin to the character in the play and indeed made me one with him," so can it allow you to "feel" what the cell, the virus, or the carbon atom "wants to do." (p. 199)
Activity: Use the Five W's and an H method of problem solving to explore possible solutions to a challenge.
Discussion Forum for Empathizing: Five W's and an H Activity
Note: You're going to need to print to pdf in this activity. If you do not already have a solution for this on your computer, check out CutePDF at http://cutepdf.com.
Once you've come up with these great ideas, it's important to evaluate the feasibility of the ideas. Try this evaluation activity.