Here are some ideas on teaching kids to be creative. The main idea seems to be to focus on values rather than rules. The article talks about risk taking, but the way I would put this is, encourage them to think about the “why” of good behavior and let them figure out the “what” for themselves. I’m not sure I see the risk in that, other than the risk of not going with the crowd.

There are a few paragraphs on brainstorming research.

…there a few things that happen that make brainstorming groups less than the sum of their parts.

One is called production blocking, and it’s the basic idea that we can’t all talk at once. And as a result, some ideas and some students just don’t get heard. Two, there’s ego threat, where kids are nervous about looking stupid or foolish, so they hold back on their most original ideas. And then, three is conformity. One or two ideas get raised that are popular. Everyone wants to jump on the majority bandwagon, as opposed to bringing in some radical, different ways of thinking.

You put kids in separate rooms, what you get is all of the ideas on the table, and then you can bring the group together for what the group does best, which is the wisdom of crowds. The evaluating. The idea selecting. The figuring out which of these ideas really has potential to be, not only novel, but also useful.