I don’t think I’ve said enough about creativity.

I think this is going to be a special focus for me this year.  It’s something that I would include in the “classroom I would want to learn in” model that I’ve been trying to formulate (more about that later).  Creativity is something that I value, and something that I think my classroom has not always encouraged enough.  It’s also one of the “four C’s” of 21st century learning – outlined in depth in a publication from NEA here.  It’s also a difficult, inchoate, and unpredictable quality that is hard to learn and harder to teach.

I should also point out that I like the graphic above – there are a lot of graphics of these 4 C’s, but few show Creativity as the product of the others.  I think that gets at the point I want to make.

I’ve heard a few different things about how we as teachers can help our students be creative.  I’m going to try to make a list of a few, then maybe come back and add more as I think of more.

So, here are some ways that teachers can help their students be creative:

1. LET THEM MAKE THINGS – This seems obvious, doesn’t it?  But we sometimes forget that they have to CREATE to be creative.  (It seems like the word DESIGN is popular right now, but I really think that BUILDING is equally important, whenever possible.  That makes our creations less abstract, and helps more kids – kids who struggle with abstract thinking or who might be too young to manage it – get involved in the process.)  This also means that we need to be open-minded about what they make.  If we expect them to make something exactly as we would, or exactly following specific, exhaustive list of instructions, we’re not asking for creativity.  We’re asking them to follow a recipe.  (That’s not my insight – I forget where I got it from.)
2. THINK CAREFULLY ABOUT RESTRICTIONS – This is hard.  We might be tempted, as teachers, to invite students to “make anything you want.”  That kind of freedom, though, can be too much.  Most of my students would give me a blank stare if I said, “make something!”  We want a balance between constraint and freedom.  Length constraints are a good example.  If you force kids to make something really short – like a haiku or a 55-word story – that removes the “having enough to say” challenge, and changes it to “what should I say in so little space”?  Requiring the use of a specific word or words, using a specific material, or finishing in a certain amount of time can also engage creativity (although time limits might be unfair for some kids – sometimes that feeds into traditional faster-is-better value systems that don’t translate well into the workplace or “reality”).
3. ENCOURAGE ASSOCIATIONS AND CONNECTIONS – This is the hardest part, I think.  It’s easy to juxtapose things – talk about music and science, math and art – but hard to get kids making creative connections.  I’ve taught analogies or metaphors in almost every class – reading/writing, social studies, science – but associative thinking isn’t creative if you’re copying someone else’s connections.  Creativity means making your own association.  (Or, that’s one way of describing it.)  This also means that kids need to be able to connect with people they’re comfortable with – but they also need to work with people they aren’t comfortable with.  That’s where new ideas come from.  That’s why so many innovative places are designing workspaces around the idea of serendipitous encounters.  The random idea that we get from a short conversation with Bob from Accounting might be the seed that creates the next iPhone or Huckleberry Finn.
4. EXPECT AND ENCOURAGE FAILURE AND ITERATION – I like the idea of “beta testing.”  A test drive of a program or service, deliberately searching for mistakes, assumes that there will be mistakes and that changes will need to be made.  No beta tester – or designer who asks a beta tester for help – assumes that there won’t be mistakes.  It’s expected and normal.  The same must be true for creative environments.  We want crazy ideas, new connections, and different directions.  Some of them will just be crazy and different.  That needs to be okay, and there needs to be a way to try things out without fear of punishment.  People need to be able to do things their own way, too.  Kids need to be able to talk to each other, or themselves, or ask for help, or go get something.  They need an element of freedom.
5. HAVE FUN, LAUGH, AND PLAY – Humor is such a powerful tool.  It’s also frequently creative, productive, and energizing.  As long as we’re not mocking each other, there is so much to gain from humor.  I’ve never seen a more effective tool in the middle school classroom (except perhaps relationship-building, though humor might be a big part of that), and I’ve seen research that shows that even fake laughs and fake smiles have positive physiological effects.  When a teacher or leader makes this an explicit goal, it forces him/her to be more creative and positive, which helps the whole environment.  Sometimes we need to set limits on the humor – since there are lots of things that we might not want to hear about – but I don’t think most students struggle with this, really.

I feel like I have a lot more to say about this.  I’ll probably be arguing with myself in a few minutes.  But I think this is a good start.