Think back to a time you were truly engaged in school; when time stopped for you and you were totally immersed in learning. Chances are you were “doing something” or extending your thinking about something. For me, it was debating a hot topic with fellow students or putting Macbeth on trial. These were experiences where I had to deeply understand what I was talking about, and they also provided a great outlet for creativity and extending my thinking.
I’m still haunted by a few lines from a Newsweek cover story I read back in July. Maybe you saw the issue – “Creativity in America.” The authors recount a 50-year study of creativity in American children begun by researcher Paul Torrance that is still underway, using a series of performance tasks that Torrance and his colleagues refined over decades.
Here’s the paragraph I can’t get out of my mind:
American creativity scores are falling. Kyung Hee Kim at the College of William & Mary discovered this in May, after analyzing almost 300,000 Torrance scores of children and adults. Kim found creativity scores had been steadily rising, just like IQ scores, until 1990. Since then, creativity scores have consistently inched downward. “It’s very clear, and the decrease is very significant,” Kim says. It is the scores of younger children in America—from kindergarten through sixth grade—for whom the decline is “most serious.”
I think that our extreme focus on the basics over the past decade, while very important, has narrowed the instructional focus in many public schools, and created some anxiety about whether there’s enough time to employ project and problem-based learning strategies as part of good instruction. Of course, these are just the kinds of teaching techniques that really encourage our students to develop their creative potential.
Some schools leaders are also concerned that teachers aren’t necessarily well prepared to teach this way. But we have to ask ourselves whether the best long-term approach is to avoid these more complex teaching techniques out of fear they’ll be misapplied — or to really commit ourselves to the professional development teachers need to blend these creativity-inducing strategies into their instruction.
An important piece of that PD, of course, will be learning how to build classroom assessments good enough to monitor and fine-tune these more complex teaching methods. That’s already happening in places like Talladega County, where teachers at Winterboro School are rethinking their whole curriculum around important, real-world student activities and products, and building the rubrics they need to gauge student progress on standards.
The Newsweek article notes that the potential consequences of a decline in American creativity are “sweeping,” a fact not lost on the business community. The article spotlights an IBM survey of 1500 American CEOs who identified creativity as the No. 1 “leadership competency” of the future. The authors also describe how other leading nations are abandoning 20th century assumptions that creativity is “born, not made” in favor of deliberate strategies that capitalize on current brain research about the creative process and seek to nurture the creativity of ALL children.
The core message of the Newsweek piece is not “The End Is Near” but rather “Here’s what we could be doing.” The authors share a wonderful example of a middle school in Akron, Ohio where educators are finding ways to meet state standards and also fully engage students in projects that require the “divergent and convergent thinking” processes that experts say can maximize the creative potential in every child.
[T]hink of it like basketball. Being tall does help to be a pro basketball player, but the rest of us can still get quite good at the sport through practice…. University of New Mexico neuroscientist Rex Jung has concluded that those who diligently practice creative activities learn to recruit their brains’ creative networks quicker and better.At ABPC, we’d love to hear stories of what Alabama schools and districts are doing to build creativity and problem-solving skills into the daily curriculum.
