Recent years have seen increased interest and emphasis in creative education in various countries around the world (Craft, 2006, Lin, 2011, Shaheen, 2010 and Smears et al., 2011) as educators recognized the importance of nurturing students’ creativity (Craft, 2006 and Laius and Rannikmäe, 2011). Some have even suggested creativity as a survival skill required for the 21st century (Craft, 2006). Indeed, being creative is beneficial to individuals as well as to society as a whole. At the individual level, people need to be creative in order to solve problems encountered at work and in everyday life (Sternberg & Lubart, 1996). As Sir Ken Robinson explained in an interview (Azzam, 2009), the world has become more unpredictable than ever with many pressing problems to be solved. For a person to cope with uncertainty and to meet the demands of the constantly changing and increasingly complex world, the utilization of one's creativity is required (Gardner, 1999, Shaheen, 2010 and Smears et al., 2011). To the society at large, creativity also brings numerous benefits in the forms of “new scientific findings, new movements in art, new inventions, and new social programs” (Sternberg & Lubart, 1996, p. 678). Moreover, being creative as a society can lead to economic achievement and help the society stay competitive (Shaheen, 2010). Given the many advantages of being creative, it comes as no surprise that practitioners have become interested in promoting creative thinking in education.
The problem, however, is that despite recognizing the need for creative education, teachers may not know how to incorporate creative education into their classrooms while still making sure they have enough time to prepare students for tests and assessments (Longo, 2010). This paper hopes to help these practitioners who have limited time but still want to help promote creative thinking in their students. In this paper, the design and implementation of a three-hour creative thinking workshop for senior secondary students is described. The workshop used the SCAMPER creative thinking techniques, which represents a group of nine techniques: substitute, combine, adapt, modify, magnify, put to other uses, eliminate or minify, reverse, and rearrange (Michalko, 1991). While the SCAMPER techniques were taught in this workshop, it is believed that the choice of creative thinking techniques does not matter; the presentation of creative thinking techniques plays more crucial roles in the learning of creative thinking skills. Thus, factors known to facilitate creative thinking, which were incorporated into the workshop, are also discussed in this paper. Finally, student comments about the workshop were analyzed to identify areas of improvement. Given the scarce amount of literature describing the design and implementation of short creativity programs, it is hoped that this workshop will shed light on how creative workshops can be run in limited time with few resources and encourage practitioners to promote creative thinking even in face of limitations.
Before details of the workshop are discussed, it is worthy to mention to practitioners that creativity can be taught. Most educators and psychologists think that all individuals possess some degree of creativeness, and their creative potential can be enhanced. Everyone is born with a natural creative ability (Esquivel, 1995, Guilford, 1950 and Lin, 2011). Actually, children are “naturally creative, open to experience, and tend to be attracted by novel things” (Lin, 2011, p. 151). However, if the environment around them is unsupportive of creative expression, their creative tendency may reduce over time (Lin, 2011). This environmental influence is one of the reasons why the degree of creativeness and frequency of creative acts among individuals vary (Guilford, 1950). Still, there is hope for everyone to reach their creative potential. Because the process of creative thinking involves ordinary cognitive processes, every person has the ability to learn to be creative (Simonton, 2000).