Creativity & Flow

You can't just turn up to a lesson and expect to be creative, you have to be fully immersed in your work. Commit time to extending your interest in your chosen subject matter. Read around the subject and immerse yourself in it's content.

When completing your work develop a rigid framework within which to work. Understand how to get from point A to point B. You will need to plan your workload, and adapt a range of metacognitive strategies to scaffold your process.

Before beginning a task you must fully understand the medium that you are working within. What is the theory behind the topic, what properties do materials have, what processes will you need to understand, how do things work? You cannot learn to control your medium without fully understanding it. The decisions you make here are important.

Once you have a deep understanding of your medium you must now learn how to control it. At this stage you must commit time to master the process. Practise the skills learned until you become confident in its application. The process must become second nature or automatic, we call this mastery learning.

Once you are able to fully control your medium and the process becomes second nature you should explore it further, look at the process in new ways, take risks, investigate the parameters of the task and do things differently, disrupt the normal way of doing things. Be prepared to fail and be prepared for negative outcomes. Accept failure as a positive experience i.e. in ruling out things that don't work well you get closer to finding new ways that do work well.

Prior to this point you should be working with your teacher in an instructional only method. Your teacher can show you ways to approach tasks or other areas to explore. After risk taking has occurred only now should criticism and judgement take place with time then provided to reflect. Doing this any sooner could crush your confidence and limit the expansion of your ideas.

Once you have received judgement you must respond to the feedback, making improvements to any work created so far. For any real increases to occur you must dedicate a large chunk of time to drafting and redrafting work, refining your outcomes and making marginal improvements with each amendment.

Within the creative process it is important that you find the area that really inspires you. If the task is mundane you won't dedicate the time needed to achieve success. Once you have found your element it can open up a tidal wave of creativity, this will lead to you working in ‘flow’ – this is the optimum learning zone where you feel invincible.

As well as getting the learning process right it is equally as important to get your learning environment correct. This space should allow you freedom to speculate, explore new themes, seek new horizons, make mistakes and be imaginative. The environment can also include factors like space to have conversation, take part in group work, peer assessment, reflection and wider independent reading. It doesn't just mean the decoration!

To be truly creative you must own the creative process and understand exactly where you are in this process at any given time. In order to make positive progress using timelines, mapping tasks, tick lists will help your recognition of each phase and allow you to visualise an end point. (Wider reading in to Meta-Cognition will support this theory).