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   CREATIVITY

Because almost anything that can be formulated as rules will be done well by computers, rewards will go to creators – those who have constructed a box but can think outside it. The creating mind breaks new ground. It puts forth new ideas, poses unfamiliar questions, conjures up fresh ways of thinking, and arrives at unexpected answers.

Young children before the age of formal schooling are inherently creative. Given even a modestly supportive environment, youngsters are not only intrigued by a wide range of phenomena, experiences, topics, and questions; they persist in exploring, even in the absence of encouragement, let alone material rewards. Their playfulness, curiosity, and imaginative powers are palpable. The mind of the five-year-old represents the height of creative powers. The challenge to the educator is to keep alive the mind and sensibility of the young child.

Howard Gardner, Five Minds for the Future. Harvard Business Press, 2008

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The crucial factor is creativity and innovation. This capacity for out-of-the-box and breakthrough thinking will be decisive for individuals as well as organizations, for not just a few, but the vast majority ¬– and therefore for the nation.

To be creative is not to do one more time what has been done countless times before but rather to combine things – some new and some old – in new ways, hopefully in useful ways. Seeing new patterns and possibilities is the essence of creativity. Acting on them – turning these new patterns and possibilities into products and services – is the essence of innovation.

Creativity requires both deep knowledge and technical expertise with one area and very broad knowledge of many apparently unrelated areas. It depends on being able to combine disparate elements in new ways that are appropriate for the task or challenge at hand. Thus, it relies heavily on synthesis, the ability to see patterns where others see only chaos. It will happen only in circumstances in which the creator is allowed to fail many times in order to succeed only once. Those who are most successful respond very poorly to extrinsic motivation. They are turned on by the chase for the new conception, the new idea, the uniquely valuable solution. They march to their own drummer, choosing the unconventional over the conventional. This is not surprising, because their aim is to produce the unexpected, the wholly new, the unconventional.

Instruction in too many of our schools emphasizes memory and analytical abilities and therefore many not benefit creative students. That is not least because many of our accountability tests ask students to identify the one right answer from a list of possible answers to the test question. That is, literally, the answer in the box. But what we need is the out-of-the-box answer, the one that did not occur to the framer of the test. In addition, our curricula and pedagogy heavily emphasize analysis over synthesis, the distinguishing feature of the creative impulse. We categorize and dissect and compare and contrast. But we do not often ask our students to create something new. The quintessential act of creating something new is the act of design.

National Center on Education and the Economy, Tough Choices or Tough Times: The Report of the New
Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, Revised and Expanded. Jossey-Bass, 2008

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As skillful educators have found, teaching students to be creative is a deliberate process, much like teaching students to be literate or to be able to solve mathematics problems. It takes more than simply handing out materials. Expert teachers break down the creative process to enable students to identify the problem, gather relevant information, try out solutions, and validate those that are effective.

Learning in a Visual Age: The Critical Importance of Visual Arts Education.
National Art Education Association, 2009

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A Conversation with Sr. Ken Robinson

Both creativity and critical thinking have been flagged as essential 21st century skills, yet some people think of them as being as separate as oil and water. What's your take?

It's interesting that people see creativity and critical thinking as being opposed. It's partly because people associate creativity with being totally free and unstructured. But what we really have to get hold of is the idea that you can't be creative if you don't do something. Creativity is a process of having original ideas that have value. A big part of being creative is looking for new ways of doing things within whatever activity you're involved in.

A creative process may begin with a flash of a new idea or with a hunch. It may just start as noodling around with a problem, getting some fresh ideas along the way. It's a process, not a single event, and genuine creative processes involve critical thinking as well as imaginative insights and fresh ideas. But creativity isn't just about coming up with new ideas; some ideas might be completely crazy and impractical. So an essential bit of every creative process is evaluation.

What's the biggest misconception people have about creativity?

One is that it's about special people – that only a few people are really creative. Everybody has tremendous creative capacities.

The second misconception is that creativity is about special activities. People associate creativity with the arts only. I'm a great advocate of the arts, but creativity is really a function of everything we do. So education for creativity is about the whole curriculum, not just part of it.

The third misconception is that creativity is just about letting yourself go, kind of running around the room and going a bit crazy. Really, creativity is a disciplined process that requires skill, knowledge, and control. Obviously, it also requires imagination and inspiration.

People often associate creativity with the individual. But is there a social dimension to creativity that's particularly relevant in the 21st century?

Absolutely. Most original thinking comes through collaboration and through the stimulation of other people's ideas. Nobody lives in a vacuum. Even people who live on their own – like the solitary poets or solo inventors in their garages – draw from the cultures they're a part of, from the influence of other people's minds and achievements. In practical terms, most creative processes benefit enormously from collaboration. The great scientific breakthroughs have almost always come through some form of fierce collaboration among people with common interests but with very different ways of thinking.

This is one of the great skills we have to promote and teach – collaborating and benefiting from diversity rather than promoting homogeneity. We have a big problem at the moment – education is becoming so dominated by this culture of standardized testing, by a particular view of intelligence and a narrow curriculum and education system that we're flattening and stifling some of the basic skills and processes that creative achievement depends on. So there's no doubt in my mind that collaboration, diversity, the exchange of ideas, and building on other people's achievements are at the heart of the creative process.

Can you teach creativity?

There are actually two ways of thinking about teaching creativity. First of all, we can teach generic skills of creative thinking, just in the way we can teach people to read, write, and do math. Some basic skills can free up the way people approach problems – skills of divergent thinking, for example, which encourage creativity through the use of analogies, metaphors, and visual thinking.

You can teach people particular skills to free up their own thinking, of valuing diversity of opinion in a room. But in addition to teaching those skills, there's also personal creativity. People often achieve their own best work at a personal level when they connect with a particular medium or set of materials or processes that excites them. If you combine a personal aptitude with a passion for that same thing, then you go into a different place creatively.

I make a distinction between teaching creatively and teaching for creativity. Teaching creatively means that teachers use their own creative skills to make ideas and content more interesting. Some of the great teachers we know are the most creative teachers because they find a way of connecting what they're teaching to student interests.

But you can also talk about teaching for creativity, where the pedagogy is designed to encourage other people to think creatively. You encourage kids to experiment, to innovate, not giving them all the answers, but giving them the tools they need to find out what the answers might be or to explore new avenues.

Culture can nurture and encourage or hinder and discourage creative behaviors and endeavors. Despite the widespread acknowledgement that creativity is important in a global knowledge economy, there are continued concerns that educational systems today are not producing graduates who are "creative."

Amy M. Azzam, "Why Creativity Now? A Conversation with Sir Ken Robinson."
ASCD Educational Leadership: Teaching for the 21st Century, September 2009

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The central component of creative thinking is the ability to combine existing elements of knowledge or understanding in new ways. Creativity arises through the confluence of the following three components:
• Knowledge – all the relevant understanding an individual brings to bear on a creative effort
• Creative thinking – how people approach problems and depends on personality and thinking/working style
• Motivation – generally accepted as key to creative production, and the most important motivators are intrinsic passion and interest in the work itself

Knowledge
Teresa Amabile describes knowledge as all the relevant information that an individual brings to bear on a problem. Howard Gardner goes deeper and explains that there are two types of knowledge that may be required for creativity. On one hand, in-depth experience and long-term focus in one specific area allows people to build the technical expertise that can serve as a foundation, or playground for creativity within a domain. At the same time, creativity rests on the ability to combine previously disparate elements in new ways, which implies a need for a broader focus and varied interests. Thus, perhaps the best profile for creativity is the T-shaped mind, with a breath of understanding across multiple disciplines and one or two areas of in-depth expertise.

In his book, The Medici Effect, Frans Johansson contends “we must strike a balance between depth and breadth of knowledge in order to maximize our creative potential.” He suggests that one way to improve breadth is to team up with people with different knowledge bases. The educational implications of this recommendation are perhaps in the realm of greater focus on interdisciplinary study and having students collaborate on group projects with team members of varied interests.

Creative Thinking
Amabile suggests that key aspects of creative thinking are:
• comfort in disagreeing with others and trying solutions that depart from the status quo
• combining knowledge from previously disparate fields
• ability to persevere through difficult problems and dry spells
• ability to step away from an effort and return later with a fresh perspective

Robert Sternberg’s article, Creativity and Intelligence, asserts that there are three main aspects of intelligence that are key for creativity – synthetic, analytical, and practical:
• Synthetic (creative) – the ability to generate ideas that are novel, high quality, and task appropriate
• Analytical – critical/analytical thinking is involved in creativity as the ability to judge the value of one’s own ideas, to evaluate their strengths and weaknesses, and suggest ways to improve them
• Practical – ability to apply intellectual skills in everyday contexts and to “sell” creative ideas

Motivation
Motivation may be the most important component of creativity. Nakamura and Csikzentmihaly report, “Even more than particular cognitive abilities, a set of motivational attributes – childlike curiosity, intrinsic interest, perseverance bordering on obsession – seem to set individuals who change the culture apart from the rest of humankind.”

This principle is illustrated by Amabile’s maze analogy. The extrinsically motivated person will take the shortest, most obvious path to get to the reward at the finish line. The intrinsically motivated person will explore various pathways and alternatives, taking his/her time and enjoying the process along the way. This exploration will lead to novel, alternative solutions, some of which will turn out to be more appropriate and successful than the original, obvious path.

In the context of education, the impact of grades or praise as reward for schoolwork should be reviewed in light of their impact on creativity. If assessment is necessary, using it as informational – as a tool for improvement, rather than as a judgment – may reduce the feeling of external control. Schools should provide greater focus on helping students identify areas of interest and passion – areas where they can achieve a state of flow that leads to growth of skill and confidence.

Help students find their passion and shield them from the potentially damaging impacts of rewards, extrinsic motivators, and experiences of failure. The effort to help students develop passion should also involve the promotion of confidence, persistence, and risk taking. Where appropriate, allow students to define their own problems and conduct a self-assessment of their efforts and outcomes, rather than always having work both defined and evaluated by teachers. It is too often that students' curiosity, motivation, and creativity are stifled by the educational environment.

Karlyn Adams, The Sources of Innovation and Creativity. National Center on Education and the Economy, 2005

I wonder if the following 32 traits of creative people might not make an interesting framework for a report card.
Call it the report of the future, or Report Card 2.0.

 

 

 

Imagine the curriculum that would have to be created to generate evidence of the student's proficiency of these 32 traits. Imagine the learning opportunities that students would need to be afforded to measure their proficiency in these traits. It could completely change education in some very important and fundamental ways.

Robert Alan Black, Report Card 2.0: 32 Traits of Creative People. 2009

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