How can we teach our students to act on their ideas?

Four ways to act on an idea have been cited by Harvard psychologist Stephen Kosslyn. They are:

Generation: come up with the idea in the first place

Retention: Hold onto the idea

Inspection: study and make inferences about an idea

Transformation: alter it in some way to suit your purpose

One good way to help the Art student come up with and use ideas is by having them keep a journal or sketchbook. They can play around with ideas this way before deciding on ones they want to use. They also can hold onto these ideas by recording them in a book they can keep. A new idea can come from different ideas and these fragmented ideas can be referred to later also. They can further explore an idea with sketches and construction plans. The actual piece may not work completely as planned or may not look exactly as the student had envisioned so they should always be flexible to make changes or corrections when actually completing it.