Teaching Creativity

A recent report (Ready to Innovate/pdf) from The Conference Board and Americans for the Arts, in partnership with the American Association of School Administrators (AASA), reminds us that creativity, and integral part of innovation, is among the top five skills that will become more important over the next five years.  Yet, according to their survey, school superintendents and American business executives differ in some significant ways in what this means.

Which best demonstrates creativity?The table to the right (click to enlarge) compares the ranking that employers (business executives) and superintendents give to various aspects of creativity.  Yet it is not the ranking that concerns me the most.  It is the list.

Certainly this is a complex issue, provoking conversations that we have not had before — at lease during the thirty years that I have been an educator.  ..and there is value in analyzing and deconstructing something that we need to teach into component skills and observable behaviors.  It is our nature.  I do it all the time. 

However, it is also our tendency to teach a topic or skill by breaking it down and teaching its component elements.  Although this is useful, we often lose the overall message of the topic or intent and spirit of the skill by focusing in on its parts.  I hope that this does not happen as we start to pay explicit attention to student (and teacher) creativity.

One statement in the report resonated strongly with me.

Educators and employers both feel they have a responsibility for instilling creativity in the U.S. workforce (85% Superintendents, 61% employers). ((The Conference Board, Corporate Voices for Working Families, Partnership for 21st Century Skills, Society for Human Resource Management. Are They Really Ready to Work? Employers’ Perspectives on the Basic Knowledge and Applied Skills of New Entrants to the 21st Century U.S. Workforce. Research Report BED-06, 2006.))

It seems to me that one of the best ways that we can promote creativity in our learners is by demonstrating it as educators and as master learners.  Although there is value in lessons about problem identification and articulation and tolerance of ambiguity, I think that producing a generation of creative citizens will not come from lessons about creativity, but from a different kind of lesson that makes room for, invites, and values creativity.

2¢ Worth!

6 thoughts on “Teaching Creativity”

  1. Okay
    “I think that producing a generation of creative citizens will not come from lessons about creativity, but from a different kind of lesson that makes room for, invites, and values creativity.”

    I agree but it is mostly uncharted water and we need to be able to free to try new things and we need the whole community to discuss and share what works. In our school
    community (K-8)our #1 Student Learning Expectation (what a student should know and be able to do when they graduate) states that:

    “1. St Elisabeth students will apply creativity and innovation to the development of new perspectives as they interpret and remix previous knowledge and pursue new learning.”

    Our current challenge is to look at our assessments across the curriculum to see if we are measuring this. I have challenged the teachers in the last six weeks of school to work together to brainstorm at all grade levels what this looks like and to give the students multiple opportunities to show their mastery…BUT I do not know what that will look like. I will post more on my blog as this develops.

    Thank you for starting the conversation. I hope this draws more thoughts and comments. We need others to share in this task of designing new approaches.

  2. David, isn’t there some benefit in operationalizing ‘creativity?’ Not sterilizing it. Just giving it some shape or form. If we’re truly serious about creating school environments that foster creativity and innovation, I don’t think we can just say – as you do above – that ‘producing a generation of creative citizens will … come from [a] lesson … that makes room for, invites, and values creativity.’ Isn’t that a circular definition?

    It seems to me that we at least need to know what we’re looking for so we can recognize it when it’s there. Maybe the report’s components of creativity aren’t ones with which you agree, which of course is fine. But I don’t think it’s enough to just adopt Justice Potter Stewart’s definition of obscenity (‘I know it when I see it’). If we do, then we risk the same muddy, amorphous, undefined curricular mess that we see too often in K-12 education.

    Thoughts? Maybe I have a problem with K-12’s current ‘tolerance of ambiguity?’ =)

  3. Scott,

    I agree with what you’re saying, and it was part of my struggle as I’ve thought about and finally wrote this post. YOu make an excellent analogy with Stewart’s obscenity definition.

    I agree that there is value/necessity in operationalizing creativity. But I fear that we will seek to measure the skill by measuring its components, sacrificing true inventiveness. If we teach everyone the same creativity skills, is it still creativity? I confess, I don’t know.

    Thanks for continuing the conversation…

  4. In the chart, business/employers believe that IDENTIFYING a problem indicates creativity whereas school superintendents see SOLVING the problem as evidence of creativity. When I was responsible for a school district’s network, I found that when the network–or a portion of it–failed, that when I identified the problem, I had the solution.

    Perhaps the difference is the type of problems that are being solved. I found solving network problems to be quite different from solving teaching problems in the classroom.

    Jo

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *