What is your CQ?

It is indeed heartening to see that the local education system is now undergoing a paradigm shift of sorts, where the measure of excellence is not necessarily see from an academic perspective. What with the ideas of 'many peaks of excellence' being propounded by our own Prime Minister himself, it is good to see that the education system is now refocusing on its core business, i.e. educating.

But how then do we go from here? I read somewhere that tin any organization or system, when a performance ceiling has been reached, the only way for it to be breached is for one to look at creative and/or innovative means! I find it rather oxymoronic at times that whilst we are propounding out-of-the-box thinking, there is seemingly this sense of difficulty in really and actually moving out of 'this box'! What we have here are classic cases of a 'boxed-up yet out-of-the-box' approaches, and the thing about this is that it may work some of the time, but not necessarily at a scale significant enough to breach that 'ceiling'.


Which brings me back to the title of my entry for the day. Could we then teach CREATIVITY? I strongly believe we can, and in fact the general feeling that I share with some of my acquaintances is that it is in fact teachable. And in fact, I do personally and strongly believe that on top of cognitive and communication ability that our students are generally equipped right now, the third specific skill or quotient that they need to be equipped with is their CREATIVE QUOTIENT (CQ). But how do we then measure this? And how do we then have tests and assessments for this? Hmmm, so typical don't you think. But lest we forget that necessity is the mother of invention, coming out with a set of assessment or marking guidelines should be the least of our concerns at the moment. I mean it is only a matter of time before we have various assessment standards like SATs, GPAs, TOFEL and others just for measuring one's CQ! Give it time, and before you know it, we would definitely have one! :)

Which actually brings me back too to one of my previous posts, which is on DESIGN QUOTIENT (DQ). Wouldn't it be good to if we can develop something similar too? Any takers?


(picture source: http://sl.nmc.org/2007/08/13/why-creativity-matters/ )