Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

296 The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology
At the end of my undergraduate program, I took a drama course in which the majority of the
time was spent doing dramatic improvisations. Through our weekly exercises I found myself
inducted into a new way of being. In the dramatic improvisations, a person had only one task:
pursue one’s assigned objective—for example, sell brushes—as resourcefully as possible. To be
resourceful, one had to make sense of what everyone else in the improvisation was trying to do.
If straightforward attempts at pursuing your objective were not successful, it was expected that
your strategies might become more and more bizarre. We were all Mr Beans in the making. The
experience in this class made me a more hopeful person. I finally realized that in any challenging
situation in life, I had only to assign myself an objective and pursue it resourcefully. I also
realized that I could complicate my objective to ensure acceptable consequences or conditions—
for example, “I want to sell brushes, but in a way that doesn’t involve annoying people and doesn’t
require too much of my time.”
In my teacher education program I took a course on gifted education and then became involved
as a researcher working with the classes of gifted grade 4 and 5 students who were using
creative problem solving as an enrichment approach. The teachers used the Covington Crutchfield
Productive Thinking Program for language arts and thereby introduced students to a broad range
of strategies and meta-cognitive skills for creative problem solving. The program was based on a
story about two children who were set problems by their uncle who was a detective. They learned
to use strategies to explore all possibilities in order to eliminate all possible hypotheses except for
the one right answer in “whodunit” fashion. Each week, a fellow graduate student and I visited the
classes and invited the students to use group creative problem solving approaches with playful,
everyday life problems. In this way, we endeavored to support their work with developing creative
products or plans with open-ended problems as opposed to only “one right answer” problems.
During my doctoral work with creative problem solving in the early 1980s, I read a broad range
of literature about creativity and creative problem solving. I learned that creativity was understood
as an important aspect of mental health and had consequences for physical health as one aged.
This is not surprising given its association with characteristics such as flexibility, tolerance for
ambiguity, being able to delay closure, openness to inner and outer experience, humor, being
nonjudgmental, playfulness, intuitiveness, optimism, being self-accepting, and being willing to
take risks.
Through reading research on the processes used by adults who were recognized as being
creative problem solvers in their work, I learned that they had an awareness of process and could
monitor their own steps to ensure the opportunity to develop creative solutions. The literature
was also replete with stories about how people access the rhythm of creative thinking when
needed in their everyday lives. A key dynamic seemed to be preparation and then incubation.
Preparation typically involved gathering all the information and related ideas pertaining to the
problem and clarifying the attributes of a solution that would satisfy. It was important to refrain
from attempting to develop solutions until preparation was completed.
Once preparation was completed, one had to know how to enable and access one’s incubation
processes. Incubation usually involves some form of relaxation, becoming quiet, and refraining
from trying to solve the problem consciously. We have all heard stories about the ideas that come
when one is in the bathtub, in bed, or driving. Even the 10-year-old children in my doctoral study
were able to tell me about the process. As one boy said, “I think and I think as hard as I can. And
then if I can’t think of anything I just wait for the idea to come.” Many of the children specifically
mentioned breathing and relaxation and having a special place where they sit quietly and relax
while they wait for their ideas.
When ideas start to come, it’s very important to refrain from considering the ideas with
skepticism. It’s as though there’s a little man in the back of your head who has figured it all out
while you’ve been sleeping. He has made an answer, is trying to offer it, but will freeze up or run