Creativity — a necessary prerequisite for success, or an over-rated concept that cannot be learnt? The debate rages on. However, in my work as an academic and in community-building, I have been fortunate enough to work with students and community activists who are truly gifted in terms of creativity.
So, what characteristics do they have that make them stand out from the rest of the population? From my observations (although I have not tested these assertions), there are five key characteristics of creative people that they use to plan, construct, implement, and maintain whatever it is that they have chosen to do. These characteristics are outlined below.
Flexibility
This is a key characteristic because it involves a mindset that suggests that there may be more than a single answer or solution to any particular issue or problem. Flexible thinkers are not hemmed in by being overly-focused on one way of doing things and tend to be open to innovation. They also have the capacity to understand when something is not working and then to change to an alternative solution/approach.
(image: blogs.psychcentral.com)
A sense of intense curiosity
Creative thinkers are fascinated with the world around them. They ask lots of questions, and tend to develop a very intense focus that takes them into almost a reverie as they try to discover how something works, or the detail of a beautiful structure, or anything else they set their mind on.
(image: bigquestionsonline.com)
Positive attitude
A positive attitude is essential for thinking creatively as it is this positivity that spurs the mind on to seek detail, wonder, and, indeed, solutions. This is linked strongly to my previous point about intense curiosity. A person who thinks negatively tends to block out possibilities, and not look at the world around them with such detailed wonder.
(image: readersareleadersngn.net)
Strong motivation and determination
This is where the hard work of the creative comes in. So, we can all have creative thoughts — but what use is creativity if it doesn’t actually show itself to the world in an act of construction or creation? From creating software solutions for major problems, through to creating social capital through community building, or painting a work of art, creativity requires the follow-through that can only come from strong motivation and determination. Without this, creative ideas will only reside within the mind of the individual without having the opportunity to influence society and/or the community.
(image: commonswikimedia.org)
Fearlessness
This is an interesting characteristic because highly creative people tend to believe in the VALUE of the ideas they come up with. Remember, they are also flexible, so they are willing to change; however, they do not seem to be worried about whether their idea is right or wrong because they believe that their idea brings value to the field in which it resides, even if it may later be debunked.
Whether you work in the realm of the arts, or in business, or in community capacity building, it is important to recognise the creative people in your team, but also to cultivate these characteristics, because creativity can be learned.
Method,analyse,conversely. These words are more useful than you think.
These and other “academic” words are used in writing and speech at school and other educational settings without being specific to any discipline. They can be used, among other things, to describe research (method, analyse) and to structure speech and writing (conversely).
What’s more, knowing them can predict performance at primary school, secondary school and university. In other words, how well students know academic words may affect how well they do at school. But although students are surrounded by academic words, they are not typically taught them at school – so learning them can be challenging.
Challenging vocabulary
International university students in Hong Kong and New Zealand have reported difficulty with learning and understanding English academic vocabulary.
Monolingual native speakers of English also face problems with academic words, including frequently used vocabulary such assummariseandcontribute. Despite the common view that native speakers have well-developed vocabulary knowledge, research suggests that a low socio-economic background can hinder language development, including vocabulary, at bothprimaryandsecondary school.
Some academic words occur in everyday language too, so they may go unnoticed. A student can easily fail to realise that reliable means “of consistent quality” in a scientific journal article if they already know that in everyday language it often means “dependable”. Research suggests that people find it hard to correctly guess new meanings for words they encounter in a reading passage, because they stick with the meanings they already know.
With extra meanings come other things students need to learn about a word. For example, when random appears before sample or sampling, it means that “all the people or things being involved have an equal chance of being chosen”.
As with all word learning, academic word learning isn’t just about understanding what a word looks and sounds like and a definition of its meaning. It also includes understanding which other words tend to appear close to it whenever it has a certain meaning.
Another reason why it is difficult to learn academic words is that some can also be jargon – a word with a special meaning in a particular context. For example, the noun function is used with various shared meanings across scholarly disciplines but it has a specialised meaning in mathematics, and a more recent one in computer science.
Perhaps a more important reason for the difficulty students face with learning academic words is how they are exposed to them. Unsurprisingly, words are learned faster when they are taught than when they are not. Unlike scientific jargon, academic words are not, typically, taught at school or university.
Ways forward
Academic vocabulary instruction has been trialled at primary and secondary schools. Most of these studies have taken place in the US. They show that teaching academic vocabulary can lead to increased knowledge of academic words.
It is important to note that not any kind of instruction will do. Contrary to common practice in vocabulary teaching, these studies went beyond teaching a word’s spelling and pronunciation together with its most frequent meaning. For example, in one study students encountered the same word in different contexts, were taught more than one meaning for each word, and did activities such as meaning guessing and breaking words into meaningful parts.
Research on what makes some academic words harder to learn than others for students with specific characteristics – age, English proficiency level – can help make educated guesses about which words and which aspects of these words should be taught to different students.
For example, my research suggests that bilingual university students are more likely to recognise an English academic word the more frequent it is, but they tend to recognise cognate words (words similar in form and meaning, such as English university and Spanish universidad) even when they are infrequent.
Academic vocabulary instruction should be tailored to individual students’ needs.PHENPHAYOM/ Shutterstock
However, not all bilingual students recognise a cognate word when they see or hear one. Teachers can raise bilingual students’ awareness of cognates by pointing out equivalent word parts between English and the students’ other language. They can also encourage them to use their knowledge of cognates while reading or listening in English.
As with any word, knowing many things about an academic word is more likely to help students understand it correctly in reading and listening and use it appropriately while speaking and writing.
However, classroom time is precious. Not all academic words can be taught in such depth. The teaching of these words will be more efficient if it is tailored to individual students’ needs.
This post is part of TED’s “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from people in the TED community; browse through all the posts here.
Listening may not be the most exciting part of conversation, but it’s essential if you want to have a meaningful exchange with another person.
Think about a time you felt misunderstood by somebody. Did you defend yourself? Correct them? Or simply disengage? Regardless of your response, you likely didn’t feel comfortable with them.
Now think of how it feels to be understood — you can relax, you want to open up, you feel more trusting. When you listen in a way that makes the other person feel heard, they are more likely to share information with you. And when you are actively listening, you are also more likely to take it in.
In my training as a psychologist, I spent a lot of time learning how to actively listen. I can tell you from years of experience that having a productive dialogue is not possible without active listening.
The 1st active listening skill is nonverbal attending
Nonverbal attending means giving someone your full attention without speaking. Here are some of the basics:
Keep your body open to the other person. Try to be relaxed but attentive. If you’re sitting, lean forward a bit rather than slouching back.
Maintain moderate levels of eye contact. Look at the speaker but not like you’re in a staring contest with them.
Use simple gestures to communicate to the other person that you’re listening and encouraging them to continue. Head nods are one way — just don’t do it continuously. Occasionally say “Mm-hmm” to communicate encouragement.
The final key to nonverbal attending is staying silent. But remember: You can’t listen very well if you’re talking. In fact, if you rearrange the letters of the word “listen,” it spells “silent.” I can’t believe it took me 20 years of teaching to discover this, but it’s a useful reminder!
Offering somebody uninterrupted time to talk, even a few minutes, is a generous gift that we seldom give each other. It doesn’t mean you have to keep your mouth shut for hours and hours, but I encourage you to see how long you can simply listen to somebody without wanting to interrupt.
Some people find the most difficult part of listening is not talking. There’s a deep humility in listening, because your focus is on understanding the other person rather than on saying everything that comes into your mind. Your aim is to understand and help the speaker feel understood, and reserve your speech for what moves you closer to either of these goals.
The 2nd active listening skill is reflecting
Reflecting means repeating or rephrasing key content or meaning from the other person.
A reflection communicates that you heard what the other person said. Rather than saying, “I hear you,” you show you’ve heard them by sharing back what they said. It also confirms that you have an accurate understanding of their thoughts.
If you’re a little off target, it gives them an opportunity to correct you. This can be useful if you didn’t quite understand what they were saying.
For example, let’s say a friend tells you, “I just came from a PTA meeting, and I’m so frustrated with charter schools! They’re draining money from the school system which is already stretched, so we don’t have the funds to support students and teachers. Plus, they’re weakening the teachers’ union. I wish the charter school parents would put all that energy into supporting existing schools instead of creating new ones.”
If you said, “You think charter schools are ruining the educational system,” your friend could clarify, “Well, not exactly ruining it as much as creating challenges for the existing schools.”
Now you may be wondering, “Won’t that be weird to just repeat back what they’re saying?” Or you may think, “They just said it. How can it be helpful for me to say it back?”
Reflecting typically feels more awkward for the person doing it — i.e., you — than for the person hearing it. What I know, and what’s supported by considerable research, is that people like having their thoughts and feelings reflected back to them.
Just don’t repeat them back word for word. Use fewer words and summarize rather than transcribe. I call this “nuggetizing.” Get at the nugget of what they’re saying, and say it briefly so you don’t interrupt the flow. Focus on something that seems meaningful to the other person; pull out an idea that gets to the heart of what they’re saying. You could preface your reflection with one of these: “I hear that you’re saying,” “It sounds as though,” “So….”
The crucial role of reflection is to help people feel heard, and to make sure you understand them. It’s more important for you to simply be present than to be brilliant.
The 3rd active listening skill is asking open-ended questions
As you listen, questions will pop into your head, and you’ll want answers. While asking questions is very appealing, they have the potential to interrupt the other person’s thinking, shift the focus to your agenda, interfere with connection and derail a conversation.
To use questions effectively, keep a few things in mind:
Always attend and reflect before you ask a question. Understanding the other person and helping them feel understood provides a strong foundation. If you haven’t communicated that you heard someone, they may not be inclined to open up to your question.
You might feel like asking questions is how you best communicate your interest. That may be true but if you attend and reflect first, a question says, “I’m interested in what you just said” rather than “I’m interested in your response to what I want to hear about.”
When you do ask a question to promote dialogue, it’s most effective to use questions that are open-ended and cannot be answered simply with a “yes” or “no”. For example, rather than asking “Do you think public charter schools should receive the same level of funding as other public schools?” which can be answered “yes” or “no,” you might ask, “How do you think public charter schools should be funded?” Open-ended questions promote elaboration and exploration.
Just as in reflecting, you want to keep your questions simple. Resist the urge to try to guide or impress the other person with your exceptionally astute question.
One of my favorite and most concise ways to ask questions is simply to repeat back a key word with an upward intonation. For example, if somebody says, “I just feel like the world is so dangerous,” you can say “Dangerous?” By using the upward intonation, the word becomes a question. It says, “Tell me more about how the world is dangerous.”
It’s important to stay neutral in both tone and content. Judgment and opinion can come across loud and clear in your tone. Saying “Is that where you’re going on vacation?” is more contentious than “Tell me how you decided to go there for vacation” (which is a statement that’s really a question).
It’s also important to think about when to ask your question. Don’t interrupt the other person just to ask something.
The final thing to keep in mind about attending, reflecting and open-ended questions is that these tools are intended to help promote understanding by developing greater connection. Connection is the most important thing.
So if the tools aren’t working in a situation or if you’re able to have connection without these tools, don’t force them. That said, don’t underestimate them either. They’re backed by research and experience, and they can help you to navigate the unpredictable, challenging waters of dialogue with others.
Sometimes I'll meet someone who mentions having written a book, and who then adds, "... well, an academic book, anyway," as if that didn't really count. True, academic books don't tend to debut at the heights of the bestseller lists amid all the eating, praying, and loving, but sometimes lightning strikes; sometimes the subject of the author's research happens to align with what the public believes they need to know. Other times, academic books succeed at a slower burn, and it takes readers generations to come around to the insights contained in them — a less favorable royalty situation for the long-dead writer, but at least they can take some satisfaction in the possibility. History has shown, in any case, that academic books can become influential. "After a list of the top 20 academic books was pulled togetherby expert academic booksellers, librarians and publishers to mark the inauguralAcademic Book Week," writesThe Guardian's Alison Flood, "the public was asked to vote on what they believed to be the most influential." The shortlist of these most important academic books of all time runs as follows (and you can read many of them free by following the links from our meta list of Free eBooks):
The top spot went to Darwin's On the Origin of Species, which Flood quotes the University of Glasgow's Andrew Prescott as calling "the supreme demonstration of why academic books matter," one that "changed the way we think about everything – not only the natural world, but religion, history and society. Every researcher, no matter whether they are writing books, creating digital products or producing artworks, aspires to produce something as significant in the history of thought as Origin of Species.”
Kant's Critique of Pure Reasonplaced a still impressive fifth, given its status, in the words of philosopher Roger Scruton, as "one of the most difficult works of philosophy ever written," — but one which aims to "show the limits of human reasoning, and at the same time to justify the use of our intellectual powers within those limits. The resulting vision, of self-conscious beings enfolded within a one-sided boundary, but always pressing against it, hungry for the inaccessible beyond, has haunted me, as it has haunted many others since Kant first expressed it."
How should you take notes in class? Like so many students who came before me and would come after, I had little idea in college and even less in high school. The inherently ambiguous nature of the note-taking task has inspired a variety of methods and systems, few of them as respected as Cornell Notes. Invented in the 1940s by Cornell University education professor Walter Pauk, author of How to Study in College, Cornell Notes involves dividing each page up into three sections: one to paraphrase the lecture's main ideas, one to summarize those ideas, and one to write questions. After writing down those main ideas during class, immediately summarize and add questions about the content. Then, while studying later, try to answer those questions without looking at the main body of notes.
You'll find a complete and concise explanation of how to take Cornell Notes at Cornell's web site, which includes information on the "Reflect" stage (in which you ask yourself broader questions like “What’s the significance of these facts?" and "What principle are they based on?") and the "Review" stage (in which you "spend at least ten minutes every week reviewing all your previous notes" to aid retention). For a more detailed visual explanation, have a look at teacher Jennifer DesRochers' instructions for how to take Cornell Notes in the video above, which now approaches one million views on Youtube. Her own version encourages taking down main-idea summaries in drawings as well as text, and including things like "key points" and "important people or ideas" in the question column.
That DesRochers' video now approaches one million views suggests students still find the Cornell Notes system effective, as much as or even more so than they did when Pauk first published it. Over time, of course, its users have also augmented it: take Doug Neill's video "Improving Cornell Notes With Sketchnoting Techniques" above, which combines standard Cornell Notes with his system of "sketchnoting," also known as "visual note-taking and graphic recording." He provides examples of what such Cornell-formatted sketchnoting might look like, explaining that "having the option of doing something more visual in your mind triggers a different type of processing power, so that you're more active in the way that you're responding to the ideas. You're not just passively taking in information." The nature of school, as students in every era have known, can often induce a state of passivity; systems like Cornell Notes and its many variations remind us of how much more we can learn if we have a way to break out of it. Related Content:
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
In the playlist above, Gregory Sadler presents a 24-lecture course on "Critical Thinking" - something the world could always use more of. Presented at Fayetteville State University, the course features lectures on topics like Deductive and Inductive Arguments, Fallacies, Rhetorical Devices, Appeals to Authority and much more. The textbook used (and referenced) in the course was Moore and Parker's Critical Thinking. The individual lectures are as follows:
