Teaching with and for Creativity

What do these 3 things have in common with a museum display under construction?

Yesterday we visited a museum, my husband and I. When we entered a new room full of interesting displays with one corner blocked off, guess where he went first? Yep, straight for dividers and tarps to try to see what was being hidden. 

Creativity is something innate in humans which can be leveraged to engage students in learning; at the same time, it is something we can and must teach, practice, and develop to meet the challenges of the contemporary world. Creativity is also something I’ve been researching the last several months, and the more I learn about it, the more it pops up in places I wasn’t even looking for it—like museum visits.

Two books I read on creativity were Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World, a national bestseller by Tony Wagner, and Sparking Student Creativity, by Patti Drapeau. The first is broadly inspirational as well as itself using a creative format, integrating videos throughout. If you care about innovation in yourself or others as a teacher, parent, or mentor, this is a good book. But if you’re a teacher, you may want to then continue on to the next book for specific, concrete ideas (vocabulary, strategies, processes, exercises, rubrics) for talking about, teaching, practicing, giving feedback, and reflecting on creativity, innovation, and problem solving.

Wagner captures the stories of young STEM innovators (ch. 3) and social innovators (ch. 4), including interviews with parents, teachers, and mentors. I found the comparison of the 2 categories fascinating, as frequently STEM and humanities are set at odds, but the world needs innovation of both types to create the items as well as the policies and programs that will steward creation and advance justice. (And innovation in one field can inform and further it in another: Wagner introduces us to an engineering undergraduate school, Olin, that requires seniors to do 2 capstone projects—one in STEM and one in humanities!) The theme Wagner keeps surfacing is that play, passion, and purpose are the forces that form young innovators, and he drives us to ask how we can provide that for the next generation.

So what can I do about that on Monday in my already-full 45-minute period? That’s one of the questions Patti Drapeau sets out to answer in Sparking Student Creativity: Practical Ways to Promote Innovative Thinking and Problem Solving. She starts by naming the creative thinking skills: fluency (many ideas), flexibility (different ideas), originality (unlike anyone else's), elaboration (being able to build on and flesh them out). One example of an idea I could easily apply in a secondary English language arts class is to simply use more creative verbs in prompts. For example, ditch the dull "identify" and use “substitute” instead. I could ask students to substitute new nouns for all the nouns in a sentence (a little of Wagner’s play). Or substitute new items of decor to focus on in the description of Arthur Jarvis’s study in Cry, the Beloved Country—and how does that change the characterization? Drapeau gives 40 “Grab and Go” ideas divided among the 7 chapters, from sentence stems for a class working on each of the 4 creative thinking skills (#1) to a “Creativity Self-Reporting Form” (#40). She suggests ways to teach about creativity directly (analyze the process of famous creative people—maybe I should explore more about the creative process of the authors we read) to actually creating products.

Some of the ideas do seem a little over the top. Inventing a device to solve a problem for a character in a novel may work in an elementary classroom, integrating STEM into language arts. But if we’re talking about a secondary classroom with a limited number of minutes in a language arts period, activities like that steal time from my main objectives. However, I can legitimately have students create language arts artifacts—write a paragraph adding backstory to a character you want to know more about; or pick a paragraph, character, event, sentence, or chapter to leave out—how would that change the novel? 

The other night I was playing Bananagrams. I was stuck: there was no letter in a place I could build a new word off of, and I had 3 consonants I needed to use. I felt how stymied I was. I knew I needed to take apart some of those closely packed little words (flexibility) so that I could come up with a bunch of new words (fluency), and what I really needed was a long word (originality) to give me space to build off. It was hard to take the risk of disassembling part of my carefully constructed crossword. I had a moment of panic—What if I can’t think of anything else. And then I did. And it was fun. And I used all my letters. And I used my knowledge of how creativity works in solving problems. And I used it again while writing this post.

P.S. If you’re interested in the idea of creativity as something that can be broken into skills and strategies which can be taught and assessed, but you don’t have time right now for a whole book, try one of these articles. It’s where I started last spring.

• “Four Myths about Creativity”  (Mitch Resnick, Edutopia, 2017) Do you believe any of these 4 myths about creativity?  This is the shortest article. It summarizes a new book that argues that everyone can be creative—and that creativity can be taught.
• “Assessing Creativity” (Susan M. Brookhart, ASCD, 2013) We can assess creativity—and, in the process, help students become more creative. This is the longest and most technical article, but you might just want to scroll down to the rubric, see what you think, and work backward from that, if you find it intriguing. 
• “Cultivating Creativity in Standards-Based Classrooms” (Marilyn Price-Mitchell, Edutopia, 2015) Even in a highly-structured classroom environment, you can foster creativity with strategies like possibility thinking, divergent thinking, encouraging student interests, and collaborative learning.
• “The Science (and Practice) of Creativity” (Diane Catiergue, Edutopia, 2015) When schools nurture student creativity, they foster inquisitiveness, persistence, imagination, discipline, and collaboration, leading to improved classroom behavior, motivation, attendance, and academic attainment.