With the gentle warning that educators must learn to operationalize a better, more flexible structure for implementing what is beginning to be known about the process of learning, Bea Bleedorn said that conferences such as this one on the future of education can help to dispell a sense of despair and show signs of hope for the future. To set the tone for her remarks on creative problem solving she reviewed a number of idealistic prOjections from the recent past. Included were: more emphasis on process than the delivery of facts; more experientially based education, with perhaps one half of students’ time spent outside schools; and more credence given to using the collective minds of children for group and individual ’stimulation and personalization. In addition, schooling was expected to begin earlier in a child’s life; active learning was to continue over the individual’s life time; and teachers, in their techniques for facilitating learning, would move away from an emphasis on the transmitting of information and toward the teaching of processes of thinking, especially that of creative problem solving.
Bleedorn then reviewed some of the research and contentions of Robert Ornstein on right and left brain hemisphere differences and of Paul Torrance on observing and measuring thinking traits as well as the characteristics of convergent and divergent thinking. She emphasized that, in the creative problem solving process, it is crucial to include the involvement of both hemispheres to fully integrate intuitive, right brain, and logical, left brain, thinking. Both are vital to develop novel ideas and to make these ideas fruitful products.
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Tags: 70s, Discovering Torrance