How can you teach creativity?

The accepted definition of creativity is production of something original and useful... There is never one right answer. To be creative requires divergent thinking (generating many unique ideas) and then convergent thinking (combining those ideas into the best result).

(WPR program: Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman.)
Instead of answering a child's question ask, "Why do you think it was? What reasons do you think...?" Asking them to come up with different explanations and then to pick the best one. And that right there is a microcosm of the creative process. It's thinking divergently, coming up with as many different ideas and approaches to a problem as you can; and then the convergent step: picking the best thing and then proceeding with it. If you track that, that applies for whether you're going to start a business, write a novel, come up with a new public policy.

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Center for Creative Learning

On Organization

At the end of the day Graves came and stood in my doorway with his coat on, smiling.
"What are you smiling about?" I asked.
"I'm smiling at you," he said. "You know what makes you such a good writing teacher?"
Oh God, I thought. Here it comes: validation from one of the world's most famous writing teachers. In a split second I flipped through the best possibilities. Was he going to remark on the piercing intelligence of my conferences? My commitment to the kids? My sensitivity to written language?
"What?" I asked.
He answered, "You're so damned organized."

Nancie Atwell, In The Middle

I have finally realized that the most creative environments in our society are not the kaleidoscopic environments in which everything is always changing and complex.
They are, instead, the predictable and consistent ones: the scholar's library, the researcher's laboratory, the artist's studio. Each of these environments is deliberately kept predictable and simple because because the work are so unpredictable and complex.

Lucy Calkins, The Art of Teaching Writing

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A Castle of Words

What ever value there is in studying literature, cultural or practical, comes from the total body of our reading, the castle of words we've built, and keep adding new wings to all the time.

Northrup Frye

In order to foster an awareness of the patterns shared even by widely different works of literature, we need to provide children with diverse experiences of literature--with the simple and the complex, the old and the new, the foreign and the domestic, the tragic and the funny, even the good and the bad as we define them for ourselves.

Quote

Nurture your sense of what's possible. We cannot create what we cannot imagine.

Lucille Clifton

Stages of an Avid Reader

Carlson (1974)

A Metaphor

"Vowels were something else. He didn't like them, and they didn't like him. There were only five of them, but they seemed to be everywhere. Why, you could go through twenty words without bumping into some of the shyer consonants, but it seemed as if you couldn't tiptoe past a syllable without waking up a vowel. Consonants, you knew pretty much where they stood, but you could never trust a vowel. To the old pitcher, they were like his best knuckleball come back to haunt him. In, out, up, down -- not even the pitcher, much less the batter, knew which way it would break. He kept swinging and missing."

from Chapter 27, Maniac Magee