Teach: About Creativity, Creatively, For Creativity
Recently I have been teaching about creativity in education,
spreading the message from Buffalo to Saudi Arabia.
On the surface, these workshops might seem to have a straightforward goal: to
develop creative thinking abilities in students. That is, after all, the
primary narrative circulating these days, from the Newsweek article “The
Creativity Crisis,” to the book Creating Innovators, to name just two
examples.
There are, in fact, three legs on this particular stool. Three
components needed to make the concept stand up: understanding creativity,
choosing to teach creatively, and making creativity skills and behaviors a
content goal.
First, they learn about creativity.
An understanding of what creativity is forms the foundation for
the rest of the conversation. In the workshop, we do this cognitively and then
by discovery. To begin, everyone writes down their individual definition of
creativity. Then, they break into groups and build a paper structure that
represents their collective definition of creativity.
During the report-out that follows, I whiteboard the pieces of
their definitions, secretly categorizing them into four groups, which were
first identified my Mel Rhodes 50 years ago as components of creativity:
Person, Product, Process, and Press (pressures of the environment, climate, and
culture). Nearly always, nearly every answer fits the Process or Product
slots—how we create, and what we create—and rarely into Person or Press—who
creates, and in what environment conditions do we create.
The light of clarity shines in people’s eyes when the see what
they are missing in their understanding of creativity. It is these missing
parts that inform the rest of the conversation, about the other two legs of the
creativity-in-education stool.
Second, they see that I have been teaching creatively (and that
they can, too).
It is one thing to want students to learn creativity (behaviors,
process skills, etc.). It is another for teachers to be creative while
they do so. In these workshops, I modeled creative teaching methods, in at
least three different ways. First, I began with a question rather than a
statement. I could have said: here’s what creativity is. Instead, they
discovered the answer together. Second, I had them collaborate on a single
definition of creativity, because much creative work is done in teams. Third, I
had them use metaphor (an essential creativity skill) by building a paper
tower.
These are just three of many methods for teaching creatively.
What’s required is that it’s desired: a teacher must consciously choose to
apply their own creativity to their teaching methods and lesson plan
development.
Third, they learn how to integrate creativity into their
lessons.
There are at least three ways to teach creativity to students.
First, creativity can be taught directly, of course. Teachers can take it on
themselves to go outside the proscribed curriculum and add content on
creativity skills and behaviors. A single lesson on Creative Problem Solving,
for instance, goes a long way toward changing how students see problems and
frame questions.
A second way is for the teacher to model the behaviors and use
the skills. For instance, if the teacher were to always frame problems as questions
(that is, statements that begin with “How to…” and “How might…”), students will
learn to follow.
A third way is to sneak the creativity content into other
lessons, to embed it into the lesson plan. A simple example is the difference
between telling students how to measure the volume of an irregularly-shaped
object, and asking them to do it themselves, discovering in the process what
are the right questions to ask.
The bottom line: it’s a decision.
Without even trying out any of these recommendations, teachers
often say: I don’t have time for this. Which is, quite frankly, nonsense. It
doesn’t take any time to model a creative behavior. It doesn’t make lesson
planning longer, just slightly different. It might make a lesson take longer
than simply lecturing, but why would one want to lecture, anyway? Do teachers
even enjoy lecturing, or is it just easy?
Countless times, teachers have been told me: once he or she
begins teaching creatively and for creativity, teaching is easier, more
effective, and more rewarding. Now, those are three legs we can all agree
are worth standing on.
#creativity #creativityinteaching #teachingcreativity #teachcreativity #creativityineducation
