Page 131 - Keys To Community College Success

get creative

ACTIVATE YOUR CREATIVE POWERS

Complete the following on paper or in digital format.
Think about your creativity over the past month.
1. First, describe three creative acts you performed—one in the process of studying course material, one in your personal
life, and one at work or in the classroom.
2. Now think of a problem or situation that is on your mind. Generate one new idea for how to deal with it.
3. Write down a second idea, but focus on the risk-taking aspect of creativity. What would be a risky way to handle the
situation? How do you hope it would pay off?
4. Finally, sit with the question. Write down one more idea only after you have been away from this exercise for at
least 24 hours.
Keep these ideas in mind. You may want to use one soon!

HOW CAN YOU IMPROVE YOUR
practical thinking skills?

You’ve analyzed a situation. You’ve come up with ideas. Now, with your practical
skill, you make things happen.
Practical thinking—also called common sense or street smarts—refers to how you
adapt to your environment (both people and circumstances), or shape or change your
environment to adapt to you, to pursue important goals. Let’s say your goal is to pass
freshman composition. You learn most successfully through visual presentations. To
achieve your goal, you can use the instructor’s PowerPoints or other visual media to
enhance your learning (adapt to your environment) or enroll in a heavily visual Inter-
net course (change your environment to adapt to you)—or both.

Why Practical Thinking Is Important

Real-world problems and decisions require you to add understanding of experiences
and social interactions to your analytical abilities. Your success in a sociology class,
for example, may depend almost as much on getting along with your instructor as on
your academic work. Similarly, the way you solve a personal money problem may
have more impact on your life than how you work through a problem in an account-
ing course.
Keep in mind, too, that in the workplace you need to use practical skills to apply
academic knowledge to problems and decisions. For example, while students working
toward an associate’s degree in elementary education may successfully quote child
development facts on an exam, their career success depends on their ability to evaluate
and address real children’s needs in the classroom. Successfully solving real-world
problems demands a practical approach.

Through Experience, You Build Emotional Intelligence

You gain much of your ability to think practically from personal experience, rather
than from formal training. What you learn from experience answers “how”
25
93