Cultivating Creativity in Group Environments

Cultivating Creativity in Group Environments
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Cultivating Creativity in Group Environments
Introduction
Individualism in education and classroom settings is a concept that started in the 1960s under the constructivist theory, which sought to challenge the hitherto prevalent paradigm: behaviorism. While behaviorism posited collective laws of learning and viewed education as the process of transferring knowledge into the learner’s empty minds, the constructivist theory holds that people constructed their knowledge based on their previous sociological foundations and experiences. However, this is not to say that constructivists do not see any importance in collaborative learning as part of the broader process of restructuring learners’ understandings. Social constructivism is one subset of the constructivist theory that values collective learning: it theorizes that learning occurs first in the social domain before any internalization occurs in the intra-psychological domain. Social constructivists view knowledge as happening and developing in communities. Indeed, some educators have posited that collaboration is necessary for learning and creativity in the education environment.
Formats for Promoting Creativity in Group Environments
Creative collaboration in group environments can take various forms: face to face, in pairs, online, and large groups. Besides, not all collaborations occur informal learning settings: several educators have argued that teams profit from increased chances for informal interactions and communication. A systematic literature review of the subject reveals that creative collaboration can occur among learners of the same aptitude or widely disparate levels of expertise. It can also happen among students working on the same projects or helping each other in individual projects. Overall, current literature identifies five principles of promoting creative collaboration in group environments (Gillies, 2016). The first principle is positive interdependence, which refers to the scenario where group members believe that their results are positively interrelated: what profits one group member profits the entire group, and what challenges one group member also impedes the rest of the group.
This feeling of togetherness and shared outcomes encourages group members to set aside their individualities and work together towards achieving group objectives. In creative group environments, positive interdependence enables group members to relinquish their egos and those facets of individual autonomy that prevent the free flow of ideas and information critical to innovation. The second principle of creative collaboration in creative environments is individual accountability. Group members are cognizant of other members’ contributions and feel the need to do their fair share. This principle tackles the biggest challenge in creative collaboration: social loafing by one or several group members. However, because everyone has their unique set of skills, background, way of working, and information, it is impossible to expect everyone to make contributions of equal importance or amount (Zambrano et a...