So I will try to explain it with few examples, and in case you dont want to read everything here is the spoiler - Following set of instructions can kill Creativity
lets start with an examples
- If a professional chess player has an opening you would ask your students to use that right, and the same way if a professional chef turned over to 100 deg then you would do the same
There was an experiment conducted on science students, they were given a set of physics problems, and each have a conceptual shortcut to solve the problem in a easy way
Few people were asked to draw force diagrams, and few didnt get any instructions
- The first group drew diagram and drew more complete diagrams but it didnt help them solve the problem
- The 2nd group solved more problems than the first group
- And the the group 1 was not able to see the shortcut
WHY?
- The students really didnt connect solving the problem to drawing the diagram, they were told to draw a diagram so they kept on drawing to solve the problem, they didnt really know how drawing the diagram could help solve the problem
- the 2nd explanation comes from “scripts”, these are some automated things your brain tries to do involuntarily without thinking about it, like “brush your teeth” scrip is “plop brush spit rinse”, when you ask to draw the diagram the brains tries to automatically plugin the script for solving the problem which is “identify the right equations, plugin the numbers and calculate”, so basically you are performing the problem not actually solving it
So the students who didnt see the instruction tried different ways of solving the problem
But?
but if you dont have these intructions or diagrams sometimes you might fall outside and can never understand the problem
So you need to use these ways as tool to solve the problem instead like a routines or steps to solve the problem