Creativity-International

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.

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