If you are short of ideas and need some inspiration you should definitely visit Jamie Keddie's website. He no longer updates it but the website is still there, available to everyone and free:
http://lessonstream.org/
Coming back to creativity.
First things first; I start with some basic expressions like "coming up with ideas", " thinking outside the box", "having a light-bulb moment" ...
then we proceed to a short exercise called "How good are you at problem solving?" The exercise comes from "In Company" published by Macmillan in which students have to finish off expressions with missing nouns.
A short discussion may follow, to encourage students to reuse some of the expressions from the beginning of the lesson as well as the collocations from "In Company". Possible questions include: " when are you at your most creative?", "When do you normally come up
with ideas" etc.
As for reading comprehension, I have got two suggestions. The first one from "In Company" as well about solving problems in a creative, original way. The second one about 10 ways of beating the creative block - an article by Kerby Rosanes.
Here is the first exercise and the first text:
How
good are you at problem-solving? Where and when do you get your best ideas?
Complete the following phrases and tick those that are true for your:
meeting
: work: desk:
drinks: night: shower:
holiday: daydreaming:
course: morning: book:
bath: court: music
a)
first
think in the ______________
b)
in
the middle of the ______________
c)
travelling
to and from ________________
d)
on
_______________________
e)
at
my __________________
f)
lying
in a nice hot _________________
g)
while
I’m taking a ________________
h)
listening
to ____________________
i)
on
the golf ______________________
j)
on
the tennis _____________________
k)
after
a few ____________________
l)
relaxing
with a good __________________
m) in problem-solving
__________________
n)
while
I’m _________________________
HOW
TO SOLVE PROBLEMS
powerful
/ figure out / blaze a trail for / indicate/ lead /probably / leave/ /iron out
Change
your perspective
A lot of problems can be 1. solved
by simply looking at them in a different way.
Try problem reversal. Don’t ask how you
can sell more of your products. Ask how you could sell fewer and see where that
idea 2. takes you. Perhaps you could create a totally new market where
exclusivity was more important than volume. As marketing and communications specialist
Ros Jay 3.points out: ‘Many companies have done well out of problem
reversal. Businesses like Apple Computers have looked at the market and,
instead of saying “how can we compete with all these big players”, have asked
themselves “what can we do that all these other companies aren’t doing?” In the
late 90s the 4. mighty IBM’s slogan was ‘Think’, Apple’s was ‘Think
different’.
Be
playful
Must work always feel like work? John
Quelch, Dean of the London School of Business, asks, ‘How many times a day does
the average five-year-old laugh?
Answer: 150. How many times a
day does the average 45-year –old executive laugh? Answer; five. Who is having
more fun? Who is, therefore, 5. likely to be more productive? Need we
ask? At ?What if!, a London-based innovation consultancy, they’ve 6. worked
out that most people get their best ideas away from the office, so they’ve
made the office look like home, complete with armchairs, kitchen and even table
football. ?What if! Is now a 3 million pounds company whose clients
include Pepsi Co, ICI and British Airways, so they must be doing something
right.
Make
connections
In their bestseller, Funky Business, Jonas Ridderstrale and Kijell
Nordstrom discuss the idea that ‘as everything that ever will be invented has
been invented, the only way forward is to combine what is already there’. So we
get ‘e-mail’, ‘edu-tainment’, ‘TV dinners’, ‘distance-learning’ and ‘bio-tech’.
Sometimes the combinations are impossible. Yamaha, for example, hasn’t yet
worked out a way to combine motorbikes with musical instruments – perhaps it
will. But Jake Burton has more success when he 7. gave up his job on
Wall Street in 1977 to 8. pioneer a new sport. Bringing together two
quite separate things – snow and surfboard- he developed the modern snowboard.
Today, there are nearly 4 million snowboarders breaking their necks all over
the world in the name of fun!
After reading and a discussion, Jamie Keddie's idea comes into play; I give students different objects - pick-up sticks, a bit of aluminum foil, one dollar bill, dice, a ball of wool, and ask them to think of 5 ways of using these objects different than traditional ones.
Once they have presented their ideas, I show them a short movie by PES (they have made a few of them, so you can change and use different ones, if you are bored with showing the same thing over and over again)
Western Spaghetti
Then I give students a problem to solve, they have to work in groups and think of the most original solution to one of the following;
1. the problem of litter
2. how to encourage people to use stairs rather than lifts
3. how to make people wait at traffic lights
4. how to solve the problem of dog's poo
and here are the possbile solutions:
1. the world's deepest bin
2. piano stairs
3. dancing traffic lights
4. poo express
it can be a very interesting lesson, with lots of opportunities for students to speak, provided they are a little bit creative....
