Birth of s Salesman

Birth of a Salesman CEP 818

Created by: Jean-Claude Aura December 2010

The 13 Thinking Tools

Of the

World’s Most Creative People .

Objective: Students will describe a room in a way that should evoke all the senses in the reader.

1. Perceiving

=

1. Observing & 2. Imaging

2. Patterning

=

3. Identifying & 4. Forming

Patterns

3. Abstracting

=

5. Abstracting &

6. Analogizing

4. Embodied

Thinking

=

7. Body Thinking &

8. Empathizing

5. Modeling

=

9. Dimensional Thinking

& 10. Modeling

6. Playing

=

11. Playing &

12. Transforming

7. Synthesizing

=

13. All the tools



How do these 7 (or 13) thinking tools help improve students’ spatial description skills?

Before we start exploring these tools, let’s take a look at students’ traditional understanding

of spatial description. It’s very common for students (or anyone else for that matter) to go

about describing only the physical aspect of a room. In other words, students’ attention is

geared toward the appearance of the room and so they discard all other descriptive

features, such as sensation, atmosphere, pleasantness of the room (or otherwise), the key

elements in writing that awaken the reader’s senses and increase memory retention

through vivid imagery. These writing ingredients spice up a narration and bring it to life,

pretty much like a meal full of spices. Chicken is the same everywhere, but what sets one

chicken dish apart from the rest is that flavor, that smell, that pleasant sensation on the

tongue and mouth that make you drool. That’s right. If the description doesn’t entice the

reader, the impact will be insignificant, and the impression that has been formed in their

mind will soon wane.

So, how do all these thinking tools fit in? It’s pretty simple (you’ll agree with me later). Each

tool, dependent in a way on all the others, plays a key role in administering a healthy dose

of descriptive nutrients. When combined, these tools turn a dull description into a

masterpiece. If you’ve read The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allan Poe, you’ll catch the

hint. If you haven’t, then the example below should pave the way for the usefulness of

these tools.

Consider the 2 descriptions below of the same picture.

The first description is dry, void, and hardly appeals to the eye (and not at all to the other

senses). The second description, on the other hand, is multisensory; it is visual (white, neatly

laid, semi-glazed), kinesthetic (silky, handmade), and olfactory (oak). It’s easier to remember

the item in the second description because more than one sense is involved.

For students to start thinking in this multisensory direction, they need more than what

current school curricula have to offer. Not that schools have to change what they teach;

rather, they need to rethink how they teach what they teach. And that’s exactly what this

Description 1

There’s a white rug

under a brown

table.

Description 2

There’s a white silky

handmade rug neatly laid

under a semi-glazed solid

oak multi-purpose table.

http://www.literature.org/authors/poe-edgar-allan/amontillado.html

http://www.online-literature.com/poe/



paper intends to do – make explicit the role of each of these thinking tools so vital to

students’ creative growth.

If students are to produce sensational descriptions, they need to go through several mental

stages. Below is a brief representation of their mental activity scheme.

Said differently, students need to understand their topic (perceive), simplify it to its core

elements (abstract), notice anything unusual about it or give it a specific form (pattern),

identify with the reader through empathy (embodied thinking), scale the topic up or down

for a better global perspective (model), try out different representations of the topic (play),

and finally combine all these skills to produce a coherent task (synthesize).

The first thing students need to do is to perceive, or understand, the nature of the room.

When students are presented with the room, they need to identify its function (living room,

bedroom …), its nature (antique, modern), its size (small, spacious), all that by looking for

specific clues. They also need to ‘flip’ the room in their mind to see it from different angles.

For example, the picture below represents a bedroom. But is it only a bedroom? Can’t it be

a study room as well?

It’s pretty much like affirming that a toothpick is for removing food particles lodged between the

teeth, but is this the case in the pictures below?

1. Perceiving

2. Abstracting

3. Patterning

4. Embodied Thinking

5. Modeling

6. Playing

7. Synthesizing



The set on the right, on the other hand,

has no specific pattern and is hard to

remember.

Now that students have identified the type of room to describe, they should weed out the

superfluous details to reduce the room to its core elements. This strategy, called

abstracting, is particularly helpful in underlying the main function and appearance of the

room, a very useful point at the beginning of the narration. At this point, students need not

dwell on details. What matters is the overall aspect of the room. It really doesn’t matter at

this point what color the TV is, or whether the plant is a fern or a fountain plant.

After students have visualized the room and identified its main components, they need to find out if

the room presents any particular patterns. Patterns are appealing because they’re easy to

remember. Consider the 2 card arrangements below. Which would you remember more easily?

These 2 sets of cards on the left have a

pattern and can be easily remembered.

Real room Abstraction of room



Just as important as card arrangement is for a card player, describing a room according to a specific

pattern helps the reader retain as much of the description as possible. Students can also compose a

poem that reflects the arrangement of the furniture. Compare the room with its patterned poem.

The poem describes the room both verbally and visually. With the verses positioned to reflect the

furniture arrangement, the poem informs the reader of the visual aspect of the room. This, in turn,

supports memory retention.

Now that students have formed a mental image of the room and associated a certain easy-

to-remember pattern to it, it’s time to move from the physical to the emotional. This can be

achieved through embodied thinking, a technique in which students put themselves in their

readers’ shoes and experience the room from their perspective. It’s time to spice up the

description with those hidden, yet very much alive, pleasure-inducing words that give the

room a new dimension. It’s pretty much like personifying the room, giving it animate

attributes. A white sofa is less alive than a white leather sofa, which in turn is less vibrant

than a sturdy white leather sofa. Each descriptive word adds to the sensation that the sofa

provides. To achieve such a creative breadth, students can’t rely simply on visual input. They

must make use of kinesthesia and other sense mediators to create a sense of being in the

room.

While visualizing, abstracting, patterning and embodying are all great tools, they’re not quite

sufficient to build that innovative description. What’s still missing is modeling, a technique in

which students either scale up or scale down the object of study to place it in one visible

spot. In this case, students will have to come up with a reduced model of the room to see

how each part blends with the other and how each piece of furniture fits in with the rest.

Describing the living room and dining separately is one thing, and explaining how the two

sections interact to create a multi-purpose room is another.



The real room below could be scaled down and modeled to get a better overall picture.

The stage before last is playing. Deep play, as opposed to leisurely or superficial play, yields

totally unpredictable results and ranks at the top of the creativity process. Students explore

the different ways in which the furniture can be arranged, thus creating a variety of designs

that in turn give birth to a number of interesting patterns. Students have at their disposal a

set of ready-made clay furniture as well as unmolded clay to design further pieces of

furniture to their liking.

Intermingling the 2 sections of the room creates

a feeling of wholeness, making the room more

spacious and multi-purpose. This is possible only

through scaling down the room to fit it all in one

visible spot.

coffee table dining room plant

real room modeled room



This can be compared to a card player trying out different starts to inspect his opponent’s

reaction. If all players played by the rules and conformed to standards, their moves would

be predictable and playing would turn into a boring activity. Winners rarely abide by

standards. They are almost always innovating new moves to surprise their opponent. In the

same way, giving students the chance to fiddle with the different pieces of furniture to

come up with designs of their own adds fun and the element of surprise to the activity.

So, what’s next? Well, what’s left is to use all these techniques simultaneously to create a

coherent task. This last mental stage is called synthesizing. It’s the act of putting together all

these tools to achieve the intended task, writing a descriptive essay of a room. Put in

another way, students have to visualize the room and flip it around in their mind, abstract it

to get its main features, find a particular pattern to make it easy to remember, embody it to

get a feel of it, model it to blend the different parts, play around for surprising results, and

finally undertake the writing task.

If you look closely at all the world’s inventors, you’ll notice that all of them enjoyed these

powerful thinking tools. Somewhere along the line, schools stifled this natural human

phenomenon and traded it with a more rigorous, scholarly approach. As a result, learning

has become less interdisciplinary and more modular. It’s time we restored those good old

habits. Besides, You won’t know how effective these tools are until you’ve tried them out.

As the old saying goes, ‘The proof of the pudding is in the eating’. It’s your turn to unleash

the long-buried creative spirit in your students. After all, they deserve this chance.

sofas speaker TV unit

Birth of s Salesman

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