Creativity: What It Is and Isn't

Several weeks ago at our district's Flex Learning Saturday, I talked with teachers about the topic of creativity.  I addressed the need for teaching creativity and creative thinking so that our students will become out-of-the-box problem solvers in their lives and careers. The ensuing discussions alerted me to the notion that perhaps creativity is less easily understood than it should be, so I’ve compiled some lists of what creativity is and what creativity is not to help you further define this tricky concept:

Creativity is NOT going to Michaels and spending your paycheck on glitter, stickers, puff paint, felt, and stick-on googly eyeballs.

Creativity is NOT turning in a project that required a lot of time and effort to make pretty.

It is NOT coloring inside the lines or making sure that the ocean is blue and the grass is green. 

Creativity is NOT following a recipe you found on Pinterest to bake a cake you have never made before.

It’s NOT following a pattern to knit a stocking cap or going to a party at Painting With a Twist and following the teacher’s directions to paint a picture that looks like everyone else’s.

Creativity is NOT watching the teacher dress up like a historical figure and deliver a lecture.

Nor is it tweaking one or two phrases in a preexisting song to make the lyrics roughly match a concept being studied. 

Writing in a journal or diary, expressing individual thoughts or opinions, and “being yourself” may not be creative activities. 

Creativity is NOT the same thing as free time, playtime, game time, or recess.

In their 1999 report to the British government on creativity, culture, and education, the National Advisory Committee on Creative and Cultural Education defined creativity as “imaginative activity fashioned so as to produce outcomes that are both original and of value.”  Ken Robinson (whose TED Talk “How Schools Kill Creativity” should be required viewing on the subject) simplifies this only slightly, defining creativity as “the process of having original ideas that have value.”

Using these guidelines, we can begin to shape our thinking about what creativity looks like in our classrooms.

Creativity IS representing one’s learning in a unique way to teach someone what you know.

It’s coming up with a new way to solve a math problem.

It’s devising a new experiment to test a hypothesis.

Creativity IS doing something that doesn’t look like the teacher’s example.

It may involve many drafts, and it may get messy. 

Perhaps the creative thinking won’t even result in a finished product, but the thinking done may later be used in another unexpected situation or context. 

Creativity in the content area classroom shouldn’t be creativity for the sake of creativity; then it doesn’t have value, a component in the above definition.

Creativity IS using someone else’s idea as a springboard to make something entirely different; it’s applying what you’ve learned or discovered in a unique way. 

Creativity IS designing your own coloring book, inventing a new knitting pattern, painting your own picture to decorate your room, writing a monologue in the voice of an historical figure or literary character, applying what you’ve learned about suspense in short stories to write your own story that will cause the reader to lose sleep, making up a new game to pass the time on a rainy day, totally rewriting the words to a song or rap to teach someone about something, and using what’s available in your kitchen to make up a tasty new recipe…and then posting it on Pinterest for other people to make.  Or creating a new website that is different and better than Pinterest.

Creativity IS identifying a problem and then coming up with a solution that no one else thought of. 

 According to creativity guru Paul Torrance, creativity may involve fluency (coming up with numerous ideas), flexibility (solving a problem in many ways or coming up with a wide variety of ideas), originality (thinking up something no one else thought of) and elaboration (adding depth and detail to your thoughts.) 

Creativity may or may not be fun, but it’s a whole lot more exciting than sitting and copying words off a PowerPoint slide.      

As you equip your students with creative thinking skills, ask yourself if your idea passes the Ken Robinson test:  does it produce ideas that are (1) original and (2) have value?  If so, chances are you’re on the right track.

To read more about what Ken Robinson has said about creativity, I recommend this article.               

Are You Watching?

Have you ever taken a moment during a class to watch your students? I mean, really watch them? Kids don’t have great poker faces during school hours, and observing their faces and body language can provide you with plenty of feedback about how well your students are being hooked by your lesson.

It’s one thing to watch students while you are the one doing the talking. Depending on how charismatic an orator you are, you may see a dutiful few who are making eye contact and nodding along with you, a roomful of eager listeners waiting to be filled up with your brilliance, or a bunch of catatonic teens fighting off slumber (and, likely, some who have given up the fight and have succumbed to a nap at their desks). Regardless of how they look, if you’re the one doing the talking in your room, you’re also the one doing most or all of the thinking. That’s not the goal.

In an ideal classroom, we limit teacher talk and shift the cognitive load to our students. Asking students to talk about the content definitely increases student engagement, but it still offers educators plenty of opportunity to look at their students to assess the degree of engagement. Sometimes, students who are supposed to be engaged in partner or small-group classroom conversation actually look like this: 

Staring blankly at the paper in front of them. Slack-jawed. Ignoring one another entirely. Yawning. Expressionless faces. Flat, lifeless conversation.

The mere act of giving students something to talk about doesn’t mean they will eagerly talk about it. I’m guilty—and perhaps you are, too—of providing students something to talk about without giving them a reason to talk about it. Talking about a worksheet doesn’t remove the fact that there’s a worksheet in front of them. Pair-sharing an answer to a dull question only makes it slightly less dull.

When I give students a conversational task, I want to see faces like these:

Smiling. Maybe laughing, Bright-eyed. Animated. Showing visible signs of thinking. Leaning forward. Lively conversation.   

When we give students something provocative, worthwhile, challenging, and intriguing to think about, we pique their curiosity, ignite their interests, and spark their inquiry. If your students don’t appear joyful about their learning, why not? I hope it bothers you and spurs you to think: What can I do to change that?

Here are a few questions to consider if you want to ramp up the engagement level of the student talk in your classroom:

• Am I asking students to talk about something they care about?
• If the topic is not intrinsically interesting, what can I do to build their curiosity?
• Did I tap into their need to express opinions, connect to their experiences, and have fun?
• Does the task have an element of playfulness, or is it a drudgery?
• Did I provide an accessible entry point for students to begin the conversation or learning, or have I provided insufficient scaffolding to allow them to approach the learning without intimidation?
• Is the task clear? Do they know what they are supposed to be doing?
• Is the task complex and open-ended rather than simplistic? In other words, does the activity warrant conversation and exploration, or is it a one-and-done, quickly answerable question?
• Did I do everything I can do sell the learning to my students so they have maximum buy-in?
• If the assignment is not one I designed myself, did I take ownership of the assignment or introduce it as something “they” want my students to do?
• Are you asking your students to talk about concepts at a level that is above their maturity or interest level?
• Are the students going to do something worthwhile and interesting with what they discuss?
• Do my students see the benefit of talking about this topic, believing that they get smarter through interaction with others?  

A good gauge for judging your students’ engagement in your observations is to compare what you observe when your students are interacting socially with friends to what you see when you ask them to talk in your classroom. The difference could look like this:

“Friend talk” is lively, joyful, playful, noisy, animated, casual, comfortable, and pleasurable. Sadly, some “school talk” is silent, dour, filled with pauses, lifeless, drab, uninspired, mechanical, and tedious.

“School talk” with probably never look exactly like “friend talk.” And it probably shouldn’t. It it does, your students probably aren’t really talking about what you’ve asked them to. They’ve abandoned the conversation topic and are now chatting about what they did last weekend. I’m not satisfied, however, with students in academic conversations looking like they are attending a funeral and are struggling to find something to say about the deceased. I want school talk to look more like friend talk than that. I can usually accomplish that by carefully considering what I have my learners talk about and what I ask them to do in their pairs, triads, or quads.

Not coincidentally,  different levels of engagement produce a perceptible noise-level shift, too. Disengaged classroom talk is very quiet. Engaged classroom talk is somewhat louder. Social talk rises to a significantly louder volume level. By simply listening, it’s easy to tell when students are “done” discussing.  

If you haven’t stopped teaching to look—really look—at your students lately, I invite you to quit working so hard, step back, and observe. If you like what you see, keep doing it. If the students’ “school talk” faces look like they’d rather be anywhere else but in your classroom, maybe you can tweak what you’re doing so that your students clamor to talk with one another about the exciting things they’re learning.     

The Power of a Nudge

A little nudge can make a big difference. When Sonic sends me a text message informing me that “for today only” grilled cheese sandwiches are on sale for 50 cents each, I’m more likely to make a poor nutritional choice for lunch.  When the grocery store checker asks me if I’d like to make a $1 donation to help fight local hunger, I’m more likely to be philanthropic.  And when my 99-year-old grandma says that I’m getting a little tummy and pokes my belly when I see her at Christmas, I’m more likely to decide to jump back on the exercise bandwagon and forego that bargain grilled cheese from Sonic.

The power of suggestion exerts a mighty influence on us. Nobel Prize-winning behavioral economist Richard H. Thaler, whose book Misbehaving was a captivating read about a field I knew nothing about, examined the ways people are steered by others to make smart decisions that they themselves view as smart decisions after making them. As Thaler and his onetime research partner Cass Sunstein said it, their goal was to “influence choices in a way that will make choosers better off, as judged by themselves.” Thaler addressed the power of such persuasion, saying, “People can be nudged to save for retirement, to get more exercise, and to pay their taxes on time, but they can also be nudged to take out a second mortgage on their home and use the money on a spending binge.” In other words, people can be nudged to make good choices or to make poor choices.

Although the work of Thaler and Sunstein focused on the realm of economics, teachers and other adults in an educational setting have the opportunity to employ the power of the nudge in their interactions with students. In fact, a nudge from a teacher might be the kick-start that sends a student on the path to college.

We have reached the time of the year during which schools start asking students and parents to make decisions about their course selections for next year. Teachers often find themselves in the position to recommend classes to their students and offer advice, sometimes in a official capacity (as in a list submitted to counselors of students who should enroll in specific courses—whether at an advanced or remedial level—or a signature of recommendation on a student’s schedule card) and sometimes in a less formal way (such as giving advice to a student who asks your opinion about what class to take).

Sometimes data comes into play when recommendations are made. Teachers mine student data and identify cutoff points to see which students hit the magic number that makes them eligible for honors courses. Data can be dangerous, though, when it’s the only measure we use to measure student potential.

As I see it, test scores and other data are best used to identify potential in students who might not self-identify into rigorous courses or who might otherwise escape notice of those who are recommending. For instance, a student who didn’t grow up speaking English or who doesn’t come from a language-rich household might score lower on a standardized measure that is linguistically based, but that student’s high score on a nonverbal test of thinking skills (such as the nonverbal portion of the COGAT) indicates overall cognitive ability that might be developed over time in language-related areas. In that case, the student’s standardized data might be a flag to a teacher looking to nudge a student to consider taking a more challenging class.

The danger of standardized scores is that they are often used to justify gatekeeping, the practice of only admitting the top students into classes and excluding those who don’t fit a preconceived profile. I hear teachers speak of students as not being “honors (or AP) material.” Gatekeeping thrives on fixed mindsets like this, and doors of possibility remain closed to students. What teachers may not consider when discouraging a student from taking an advanced class is the long-term impact of not taking that class. Closing an academic door early on makes future doors harder to open.

The students who most need the nudge from teachers are the ones who don’t see the possibilities within themselves or who might not believe that honors and AP courses are for kids like them. Teachers should remain on the lookout for indicators of potential in their students and should let students know what they spot. Curiosity, a highly developed sense of humor, persistence, problem solving abilities, leadership skills, critical thinking, and organization are among the traits teachers should point out to students who possess them. Those students might not see those traits in themselves and may have never considered that those traits could indicate potential for success in challenging coursework.

I always notice the mentions of teachers in the award acceptance speeches that occur this time of year. “I’d like to thank my seventh grade teacher, Mrs. So-and-So, who saw in me something I couldn’t see and encouraged me to try out for the school play, launching my acting career.” “If it weren’t for Mr. Such-and-Such in tenth grade, I wouldn’t have believe that I could become a writer.”  Successful adults can often look back and identify that one adult who identified their potential, pointed it out to them, and gave them a nudge in the right direction. A nudge says, “I believe in you.” A nudge can say, “You can do it.” A nudge can say, “Here’s something you do well that will help you succeed.”

A nudge can also say, “This isn’t for you.”

I don’t want to be the adult who makes that decision on behalf of a young person. I don’t want to be the educator who relies on data to such an extent that I fail to see the human behind the numbers. I want to nudge for good rather than evil, for growth rather than discouragement, and for opportunity rather than oppression.

I want to be thanked someday in an award acceptance speech. I know it’s statistically unlikely to happen, but I figure my odds go up each time I nudge another kid to consider a previously-unconsidered possibility.