Creativity

Creativity is designed to empower students to embody the FCPS Portrait of a Graduateattribute of a Critical and Creative Thinker. Mrs. McKinnon utilizes advanced academic strategies to ensure every student learns to generate innovative solutions, explore possibilities, and assess ideas effectively.

• Creative and Critical Thinker- generating novel solutions, analyzing problems from multiple perspectives, and synthesizing information using explicit thinking strategies.
• Communicator- expressing original ideas clearly through structured formats (mindmapping, encapsulation) and various media
• Collaborator- working together to build upon and refine ideas (flexibility and elaboration) using constructive feedback
• Goal-directed and resilient- using metacognition (questioning) to reflect on problem-solving processes and showing perseverance when faced with creative challenges.

The curriculum is structured around the nine Critical and Creative Thinking Strategiesused in FCPS’s elementary Advanced Academic Programs (Access to Rigor). The weekly focus will primarily utilize the strategies related to creative ideation and divergent thinking, then apply critical thinking strategies to refine the generated ideas.

Creative Thinking Focus (Divergent Thinking):

1. Fluency, Flexibility, Originality, Elaboration (FFOE):The foundational block of creative thinking. Students practice generating Fluency(many ideas), Flexibility(different types of ideas), Originality(unique ideas), and Elaboration(adding detail).
2. Mind Mapping:A visual note-taking and brainstorming technique used to organize ideas, see connections, and generate new content from a central concept.
3. Visualization:Encouraging students to use all five senses to create mental images, aiding in comprehension, prediction, and problem-solving.
4. Analogies:Making comparisons between concepts or objects to see relationships and similarities, which unlocks new perspectives and creative leaps.
5. Plus, Minus, Interesting (PMI):A de Bono strategy to evaluate an idea systematically by examining its Positivepoints, Negativepoints, and Interestingimplications, moving beyond simple "good/bad" judgments.

Critical Thinking Application (Convergent Thinking):

6. Questioning:Developing higher-order questions (Why? How?) to promote Metacognition(thinking about thinking) and deepen understanding of a topic.
7. Point of View:Examining a concept or issue from multiple perspectives (e.g., using the RAFTmodel: Role, Audience, Format, Topic) to broaden empathy and challenge assumptions.
8. Decisions & Outcomes:A strategy for analyzing cause-and-effect relationships and predicting the short- and long-term consequences of choices or solutions.
9. Encapsulation:Requiring students to synthesize large amounts of information and capture the essence of a concept or solution using concise communication (e.g., a single phrase, image, or hashtag).