by TeachThought Staff
According to a study published in the Thinking Skills and Creativity journal, students who regularly engage in creative tasks show statistically significant gains in problem-solving and reflective judgment (Beghetto & Kaufman, 2014).
In other words, fostering creativity is not just about making school more fun—it cultivates the very thinking habits that support students as they grow.
How Creativity Works
Creativity arises from the dynamic interplay of multiple brain networks.
The default mode network (DMN), active during introspective activities like daydreaming, facilitates spontaneous idea generation. The executive control network (ECN) governs focused attention and critical evaluation of ideas, while the salience network acts as a switch, toggling between the DMN and ECN to balance free-flowing thought with goal-directed focus.
Regions such as the prefrontal cortex, responsible for planning and decision-making, and the hippocampus, are necessary for memory retrieval, play significant roles in creative thinking. The coordinated activity among these areas enables the generation of novel and valuable ideas.
It’s Not Simply A ‘Decision’
Creativity isn’t a light switch. It’s not something you either have or don’t, nor is it a magical state that descends when the conditions are just right. Creativity is movement. Curiosity, made visible. A pattern of seeing, connecting, and remaking. It’s something you practice more than possess.
So if we’re going to talk about how to be more creative, let’s first admit that creativity isn’t one thing–and if it is, it’s not creativity.
Ways To Be More Creative
1. Start by noticing more.
You can’t be creative with what you don’t notice. Creativity depends on awareness—the kind that sees not just what’s there but what isn’t. Noticing is more than observation; it’s tuned attention. Patterns. Anomalies. Gaps. Possibility. Most of us are too distracted to notice much of anything.
Practice noticing. Not for the sake of trivia or novelty, but for the raw materials of creative thought. Take mental (or literal) notes: That metaphor in the podcast. The way the morning light cut through the trees. The way a student solved a problem in a completely sideways way that somehow worked.
2. Ask better questions.
Most of what we call creativity begins with a question. Not “What should I do?” but “What if I didn’t?” Not “What’s the right answer?” but “Why is this the question?” Questions reframe. They loosen the boundaries of a problem so something new can happen.
Try this: Instead of brainstorming answers, brainstorm questions. In meetings, with students, with yourself. Make the questions more abstract or more grounded—whatever the moment needs. If creativity is a kind of cognitive movement, then questions are the friction that gets it going.
3. Change your inputs.
You can’t keep feeding yourself the same things–the same ideas, forms, and perspectives–and expect to come up with something new. If you read the same blogs, scroll the same feeds, talk to the same people, and follow the same workflows, you’re going to keep making the same kinds of things.
Seek new inputs. Travel is good, but so is listening to someone you usually ignore. Read something that disagrees with you. Try a new tool, even if it slows you down. Especially if it slows you down. Your creative output is downstream of your inputs, so make them strange and wide and sometimes uncomfortable.
4. Trust the mess.
Creativity rarely shows up in clean lines and bullet points. It’s a bit feral. The early stages of creative work often look like chaos—and that’s because they are. But chaos is data. It tells you what could happen, and that’s far more valuable than what should.
The problem is that we’ve been taught to mistake messiness for failure. We edit before we explore. We seek clarity before we have content. But creative work is recursive. You move forward by looping back. You clarify by making. You refine by ruining. So trust the mess, and keep going.
5. Make space for boredom.
Boredom is the compost of creativity. It clears out the noise so your mind can start making something of its own. But in a hyperconnected world, boredom’s an endangered species. We fill every blank moment with scrolling and checking and refreshing, which means we rarely sit long enough with a thought for it to become anything useful.
Be bored on purpose. Take a walk without your phone. Let yourself be unentertained. Not because it’s virtuous, but because boredom creates cognitive slack—mental room for ideas to collide, grow, mutate, and spark.
See also The Benefits Of Creativity In The Classroom
6. Create before you consume.
This one’s simple but brutal. Before you check email, write. Before you scroll, sketch. Before you go looking for ideas, try to come up with one. Even if it’s bad. Especially if it’s bad. Creativity depends on momentum, and consumption stalls that momentum before it starts.
Making something—even something tiny—first thing each day sends a signal to your brain: This is who I am. This is what I do. Over time, that signal gets stronger. Eventually, you stop waiting for permission to create and start seeing every moment as a place it could happen.
7. Remember: Creativity is a posture, not a product.
You’re not creative because of what you make. You’re creative because of how you think. Because you’re willing to be wrong. Because you chase things that might not work. Because you see the world not just as it is, but as it could be.
See also The Best Quotes About Creativity
Being more creative, then, isn’t just a matter of strategy. It’s a way of being in the world—a willingness to disrupt your own thinking, to remix old truths, to stay uncomfortable long enough for something original to emerge.
8. Collaborate with people who think differently.
Creativity doesn’t thrive in echo chambers. It feeds on friction—on competing ideas, odd pairings, and conversations that don’t resolve too easily. When you work only with people who see the world the way you do, you end up reinforcing what you already believe. That might feel good, but it rarely leads anywhere new.
Seek out people who ask different questions than you do. Who value different things. Who annoy you a little bit, but in the best way. Not because disagreement is the goal, but because contrast clarifies. It helps you see the edges of your own thinking—and that’s often where the best creative work begins.
Creativity In The Classroom
Creativity is also associated with innovation, which relies upon a balance of reasoning skills and imagination – what many people refer to with the cliché ‘thinking outside of the box.’
This synergy is especially clear in project-based learning, design thinking, or inquiry-based classrooms. For instance, when students design a solution to a community problem, they must brainstorm (creative thinking), analyze constraints and data (critical thinking), and iterate based on feedback (both). Creativity fuels the Lateral, Divergent, And Convergent Thinking that generates options, while critical thinking brings convergence—helping students decide what’s most viable, ethical, or effective.
According to a study published in the Thinking Skills and Creativity journal, students who regularly engage in creative tasks show statistically significant gains in problem-solving and reflective judgment (Beghetto & Kaufman, 2014). In other words, fostering creativity is not just about making school more fun—it cultivates the very thinking habits that prepare students for complex, real-world challenges.
The good news for students is that you don’t have to take a specific course that requires creativity. You can practice developing this skill on your own, beginning right now. Here are two additional strategies you can use to tap into your creative potential.
1. Know When to Work and When to Stop
Jonah Lehrer, author of Imagine: How Creativity Works, shared his perspective for development of creativity as a skill in his article, How To Be Creative. To access our natural creative ability we need to learn to rely upon our intuition, which researchers call our “feelings of knowing.” Two types of problems require creativity: moment-of-insight and nose-to-the-grindstone situations.
If you are working on a project and have a feeling (your intuition) that you are close to getting an answer or solution, that’s the time to keep working through it (nose-to-the-grindstone). However, if you feel stuck and need new insight, that’s the time to take a break (moment-of-insight). When you feel the need for a break, you either need an alternate perspective or additional information. And research shows you will likely get the insight or “aha” moment once you step away from the project or problem.
2. Develop a Mindset for Creativity
This is probably the one barrier that prevents students from learning to develop their creative capacity, a limiting self-belief. “I’m not a creative person” can limit your possibilities. You can train yourself to be creative simply by allowing time to use your imagination. It does not have to be a complicated process either.
The next time you are given a project that requires you to develop a new outcome, solution, or alternative perspective, take a few minutes to allow your mind to wander. Some students refer to this as brainstorming or free-writing. Let the ideas flow first and then process it through logic, reasoning, and feelings. The best answer may not always be the ‘right’ answer, and that’s how you learn to become creative.
