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Are you teaching creatively or teaching for creativity? How can you modify what you do to promote creativity? How can you build a creative classroom culture?

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Lessons from a creative classroom #Iatefl2017

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Collection of free Creative research journal articles

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Top-Cited Articles from | Explore Taylor & Francis Online

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Creativity Research Journal publishes high-quality, scholarly research capturing the full range of approaches to the study of creativity-behavioral, clinical, cognitive, crosscultural, developmental, educational, genetic, organizational, psychoanalytic, psychometrics, and social. Interdisciplinary research is also published, as is research within specific domains (e.g., art, science) and research on critical issues (e.g., aesthetics, genius, imagery, imagination, incubation, insight, intuition, metaphor, play, problem finding and solving).

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Creative thinking - how to get out of the box and generate ideas: Giovanni Corazza at TEDxRoma

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This video is filmed and edited by Università Telematica Internazionale UNINETTUNO www.uninettunouniversity.net. Corazza is a full-time professor at the Alma Mater Studiorum at the University of Bologna, a member of the Executive Council, and the founder of the Marconi Institute of Creativity. He teaches science and the applications of creative thinking.

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teaching for creativity or teaching creatively? Jeffery & Craft

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teaching for creativity or teaching creatively? Jeffery & Craft

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Teaching creatively and teaching for creativity distinctions and relationships

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Integrating creativity and critical thinking skills 

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Integrating creativity and critical thinking skills 

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Australian Curriculum

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The imparting of knowledge (content) and the development of thinking skills are accepted today as primary purposes of education. The explicit teaching and embedding of critical and creative thinking throughout the learning areas encourages students to engage in higher order thinking. By using logic and imagination, and by reflecting on how they best tackle issues, tasks and challenges, students are increasingly able to select from a range of thinking strategies and use them selectively and spontaneously in an increasing range of learning contexts.

Activities that foster critical and creative thinking should include both independent and collaborative tasks, and entail some sort of transition or tension between ways of thinking. They should be challenging and engaging, and contain approaches that are within the ability range of the learners, but also challenge them to think logically, reason, be open-minded, seek alternatives, tolerate ambiguity, inquire into possibilities, be innovative risk-takers and use their imagination.

Critical and creative thinking can be encouraged simultaneously through activities that integrate reason, logic, imagination and innovation; for example, focusing on a topic in a logical, analytical way for some time, sorting out conflicting claims, weighing evidence, thinking through possible solutions, and then, following reflection and perhaps a burst of creative energy, coming up with innovative and considered responses. Critical and creative thinking are communicative processes that develop flexibility and precision. Communication is integral to each of the thinking processes. By sharing thinking, visualisation and innovation, and by giving and receiving effective feedback, students learn to value the diversity of learning and communication styles.

The learning area or subject with the highest proportion of content descriptions tagged with Critical and Creative Thinking is placed first in the list.
F-6/7 Humanities and Social Sciences (HASS)
In the F-6/7 Australian Curriculum: Humanities and Social Sciences, students develop critical and creative thinking capability as they learn how to build discipline-specific knowledge about history, geography, civics and citizenship, and economics and business. Students learn and practise critical and creative thinking as they pose questions, research, analyse, evaluate and communicate information, concepts and ideas.

Students identify, explore and determine questions to clarify social issues and events, and apply reasoning, interpretation and analytical skills to data and information. Critical thinking is essential to the historical inquiry process because it requires the ability to question sources, interpret the past from incomplete documentation, assess reliability when selecting information from resources, and develop an argument using evidence. Students develop critical thinking through geographical investigations that help them think logically when evaluating and using evidence, testing explanations, analysing arguments and making decisions, and when thinking deeply about questions that do not have straightforward answers. Students learn to critically evaluate texts about people, places, events, processes and issues, including consumer and financial, for shades of meaning, feeling and opinion, by identifying subjective language, bias, fact and opinion, and how language and images can be used to manipulate meaning. They develop civic knowledge by considering multiple perspectives and alternatives, and reflecting on actions, values and attitudes, thus informing their decision-making and the strategies they choose to negotiate and resolve differences.

Students develop creative thinking through the examination of social, political, legal, civic, environmental and economic issues, past and present, that that are contested, do not have obvious or straightforward answers, and that require problem-solving and innovative solutions. Creative thinking is important in developing creative questions, speculation and interpretations during inquiry. Students are encouraged to be curious and imaginative in investigations and fieldwork, and to explore relevant imaginative texts.

Critical and creative thinking is essential for imagining probable, possible and preferred futures in relation to social, environmental, economic and civic sustainability and issues. Students think creatively about appropriate courses of action and develop plans for personal and collective action. They develop enterprising behaviours and capabilities to imagine possibilities, consider alternatives, test hypotheses, and seek and create innovative solutions, and think creatively about the impact of issues on their own lives and the lives of others.
7-10 History
In the Australian Curriculum: History, critical thinking is essential to the historical inquiry process because it requires the ability to question sources, interpret the past from incomplete documentation, develop an argument using evidence, and assess reliability when selecting information from resources. Creative thinking is important in developing new interpretations to explain aspects of the past that are contested or not well understood.
7-10 Geography
In the Australian Curriculum: Geography, students develop critical and creative thinking as they investigate geographical information, concepts and ideas through inquiry-based learning. They develop and practise critical and creative thinking by using strategies that help them think logically when evaluating and using evidence, testing explanations, analysing arguments and making decisions, and when thinking deeply about questions that do not have straightforward answers. Students learn the value and process of developing creative questions and the importance of speculation. Students are encouraged to be curious and imaginative in investigations and fieldwork. The geography curriculum also stimulates students to think creatively about the ways that the places and spaces they use might be better designed, and about possible, probable and preferable futures.
7-10 Civics and Citizenship
In the Australian Curriculum: Civics and Citizenship, students develop critical thinking skills in their investigation of Australia's democratic system of government. They learn to apply decision-making processes and use strategies to negotiate and resolve differences. Students develop critical and creative thinking through the examination of political, legal and social issues that do not have obvious or straightforward answers and that require problem-solving and innovative solutions. Students consider multiple perspectives and alternatives, think creatively about appropriate courses of action and develop plans for action. The Australian Curriculum: Civics and Citizenship stimulates students to think creatively about the impact of civic issues on their own lives and the lives of others, and to consider how these issues might be addressed.
7-10 Economics and Business
In the Australian Curriculum: Economics and Business, students develop their critical and creative thinking as they identify, explore and determine questions to clarify economics and business issues and/or events and apply reasoning, interpretation and analytical skills to data and/or information. They develop enterprising behaviours and capabilities to imagine possibilities, consider alternatives, test hypotheses, and seek and create innovative solutions to economics and business issues and/or events.
The Arts
In the Australian Curriculum: The Arts, critical and creative thinking is integral to making and responding to artworks. In creating artworks, students draw on their curiosity, imagination and thinking skills to pose questions and explore ideas, spaces, materials and technologies. They consider possibilities and make choices that assist them to take risks and express their ideas, concepts, thoughts and feelings creatively. They consider and analyse the motivations, intentions and possible influencing factors and biases that may be evident in artworks they make to which they respond. They offer and receive effective feedback about past and present artworks and performances, and communicate and share their thinking, visualisation and innovations to a variety of audiences.
Technologies
In the Australian Curriculum: Technologies, students develop capability in critical and creative thinking as they imagine, generate, develop and critically evaluate ideas. They develop reasoning and the capacity for abstraction through challenging problems that do not have straightforward solutions. Students analyse problems, refine concepts and reflect on the decision-making process by engaging in systems, design and computational thinking. They identify, explore and clarify technologies information and use that knowledge in a range of situations.

Students think critically and creatively about possible, probable and preferred futures. They consider how data, information, systems, materials, tools and equipment (past and present) impact on our lives, and how these elements might be better designed and managed. Experimenting, drawing, modelling, designing and working with digital tools, equipment and software helps students to build their visual and spatial thinking and to create solutions, products, services and environments.
Health and Physical Education
In the Australian Curriculum: Health and Physical Education (HPE), students develop their ability to think logically, critically and creatively in response to a range of health and physical education issues, ideas and challenges. They learn how to critically evaluate evidence related to the learning area and the broad range of associated media and other messages to creatively generate and explore original alternatives and possibilities. In the HPE curriculum, students' critical and creative thinking skills are developed through learning experiences that encourage them to pose questions and seek solutions to health issues by exploring and designing appropriate strategies to promote and advocate personal, social and community health and wellbeing. Students also use critical thinking to examine their own beliefs and challenge societal factors that negatively influence their own and others' identity, health and wellbeing.

The Australian Curriculum: Health and Physical Education also provides learning opportunities that support creative thinking through dance making, games creation and technique refinement. Students develop understanding of the processes associated with creating movement and reflect on their body's responses and their feelings about these movement experiences. Including a critical inquiry approach is one of the five propositions that have shaped the HPE curriculum.
English
Critical and creative thinking are essential to developing analytical and evaluative skills and understandings in the Australian Curriculum: English. Students use critical and creative thinking through listening to, reading, viewing, creating and presenting texts, interacting with others, and when they recreate and experiment with literature, and discuss the aesthetic or social value of texts. Through close analysis of text and through reading, viewing and listening, students critically analyse the opinions, points of view and unstated assumptions embedded in texts. In discussion, students develop critical thinking as they share personal responses and express preferences for specific texts, state and justify their points of view and respond to the views of others.

In creating their own written, visual and multimodal texts, students also explore the influence or impact of subjective language, feeling and opinion on the interpretation of text. Students also use and develop their creative thinking capability when they consider the innovations made by authors, imagine possibilities, plan, explore and create ideas for imaginative texts based on real or imagined events. Students explore the creative possibilities of the English language to represent novel ideas.
Languages
Learning in the Australian Curriculum: Languages enables students to interact with people and ideas from diverse backgrounds and perspectives, which enhances critical thinking and reflection, and encourages creative, divergent and imaginative thinking. By learning to notice, connect, compare and analyse aspects of the target language, students develop critical, analytical and problem-solving skills.
Mathematics
In the Australian Curriculum: Mathematics, students develop critical and creative thinking as they learn to generate and evaluate knowledge, ideas and possibilities, and use them when seeking solutions. Engaging students in reasoning and thinking about solutions to problems and the strategies needed to find these solutions are core parts of the Australian Curriculum: Mathematics.

Students are encouraged to be critical thinkers when justifying their choice of a calculation strategy or identifying relevant questions during a statistical investigation. They are encouraged to look for alternative ways to approach mathematical problems; for example, identifying when a problem is similar to a previous one, drawing diagrams or simplifying a problem to control some variables.
Science
In the Australian Curriculum: Science, students develop capability in critical and creative thinking as they learn to generate and evaluate knowledge, ideas and possibilities, and use them when seeking new pathways or solutions. In the science learning area, critical and creative thinking are embedded in the skills of posing questions, making predictions, speculating, solving problems through investigation, making evidence-based decisions, and analysing and evaluating evidence. Students develop understandings of concepts through active inquiry that involves planning and selecting appropriate information, evaluating sources of information to formulate conclusions and to critically reflect on their own and the collective process.

Creative thinking enables the development of ideas that are new to the individual, and this is intrinsic to the development of scientific understanding. Scientific inquiry promotes critical and creative thinking by encouraging flexibility and open-mindedness as students speculate about their observations of the world and the ability to use and design new processes to achieve this. Students' conceptual understanding becomes more sophisticated as they actively acquire an increasingly scientific view of their world and the ability to examine it from new perspectives.
Work Studies
In the Australian Curriculum: Work Studies, Years 9-10, students develop an ability to think logically, critically and creatively in relation to concepts of work and workplaces contexts. These capabilities are developed through an emphasis on critical thinking processes that encourage students to question assumptions and empower them to create their own understanding of work and personal and workplace learning.

Students' creative thinking skills are developed and practised through learning opportunities that encourage innovative, entrepreneurial and project-based activities, supporting creative responses to workplace, professional and industrial problems. Students also learn to respond to strategic and problem-based challenges using creative thinking. For example, a student could evaluate possible job scenarios based on local labour market data and personal capabilities.

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Donald J. Treffinger

Teachers can help students become 21st-century problem solvers by introducing them to a broad range of thinking tools.

If you doubt that we live in a world of accelerating change, just consider the everyday life experiences of millions of children and teenagers today:

They can view live images from every corner of the world and talk with or exchange video images with other young people who live many time zones away.

They have more technology in their classrooms (and in many cases, in their backpacks) than existed in the workplaces of their parents 20 years ago.

They will study subjects that were unknown when their teachers and parents were students, and they may well enter careers that do not exist today.

In contrast with most of their parents, more of today's young people will routinely come into contact with other people of diverse backgrounds and experiences. They will grow up to interact, collaborate, and compete with others around the globe.

Once upon a time, educators might have said to their students, "If you'll pay close attention to what I'm going to teach you, you'll learn everything you need to know for a successful life." It's doubtful that this message was ever entirely true, but it's certainly not true today. We don't know all the information that today's students will need or all the answers to the questions they will face. Indeed, increasingly, we don't even know the questions.

These realities mean that we must empower students to become creative thinkers, critical thinkers, and problem solvers-people who are continually learning and who can apply their new knowledge to complex, novel, open-ended challenges; people who will proceed confidently and competently into the new horizons of life and work.

In education, we routinely teach students how to use various sets of cognitive tools to make academic work easier, more efficient, or more productive: for example, research methods, note-taking strategies, or ways to remember and organize information. In teaching thinking, we need to give students cognitive tools and teach them to use these tools systematically to solve real-life problems and to manage change. These tools apply to two essential categories: creative thinking and critical thinking.

Creative Thinking, Critical Thinking

What is creative thinking? What is critical thinking? We often view these terms as opposites that are poles apart and incompatible. We stereotype the creative thinker as wild and zany, thriving on off-the-wall, impractical ideas; in contrast, we envision the critical thinker as serious, deep, analytical, and impersonal. Consider instead a different view-that these two ways of thinking are complementary and equally important. They need to work together in harmony to address perceived dilemmas, paradoxes, opportunities, challenges, or concerns (Treffinger, Isaksen, & Stead-Dorval, 2006).

Creative thinking involves searching for meaningful new connections by generating many unusual, original, and varied possibilities, as well as details that expand or enrich possibilities. Critical thinking, on the other hand, involves examining possibilities carefully, fairly, and constructively-focusing your thoughts and actions by organizing and analyzing possibilities, refining and developing the most promising possibilities, ranking or prioritizing options, and choosing certain options.

Generating many possibilities is not enough by itself to help you solve a problem. Similarly, if you rely on focusing alone, you may have too few possibilities from which to choose. Effective problem solvers must think both creatively and critically, generating options and focusing their thinking.

Both generating and focusing involve learning and applying certain guidelines (attitudes and habits of mind that support effective thinking) and tools. Let's first look at the guidelines for generating and focusing, and then consider a number of specific tools.

Habits of the Mind for Generating Ideas

Individuals or groups use generating tools to produce many, varied, or unusual possibilities; to develop new and interesting combinations of possibilities; or to add detail to new possibilities. When using these tools, it is important to follow four broad guidelines, or ground rules (Treffinger, Isaksen, & Stead-Dorval, 2006):

Defer judgment. When generating options, productive thinkers separate generating from judging. They direct their effort and energy to producing possibilities that can be judged later.

Seek quantity. The more options a person or group generates, the greater the likelihood that at least some of those possibilities will be intriguing and potentially useful.

Encourage all possibilities. Even possibilities that seem wild or silly might serve as a springboard for someone to make an original and powerful new connection.

Look for combinations. It is often possible to increase the quantity and quality of options by building on the thinking of others or by seeing new combinations that may be stronger than any of their parts.

Brainstorming is probably the most widely known generating tool (but often the most misunderstood and misused tool, too). Many people use the term brainstorming as a synonym for a general conversation, discussion, or exchange of views. It is more accurate, however, to view brainstorming as a specific tool in which a person or a group follows the four guidelines described above to search for many possible responses to an open-ended task or question. As illustrated in Figure 1, there are also several other tools for generating options (Treffinger, Nassab, et al., 2006).

Habits of the Mind for Focusing Ideas

Focusing tools help individuals or groups analyze, organize, refine, develop, prioritize, evaluate, or select options from the set of possibilities they have at hand. When using these tools, problem solvers should again follow four broad guidelines or ground rules (Treffinger, Isaksen, & Stead-Dorval, 2006):

Use affirmative judgment. When focusing their thinking, productive thinkers examine options carefully but constructively, placing more emphasis on screening, supporting, or selecting options than on criticizing them.

Be deliberate. Effective focusing takes into consideration the purpose of focusing. Is it to select a single solution, to rank order or prioritize several options, to examine ideas carefully with very detailed criteria, to refine or strengthen options, or to create a sequence of steps or actions? Each of these purposes might be best served by a specific focusing tool.

Consider novelty. If the stated goal is to find a novel or original solution or response, then it is important to focus deliberately on that dimension when evaluating possible solutions, and not simply to fall back on the easiest or most familiar options within a list.

Stay on course. When focusing, it is important to keep the goals and purposes of the task clearly in sight and to ensure that you evaluate the options in relation to their relevance and importance for the goal.

The Problem Solver's Basic Toolbox

At the Center for Creative Learning, we have developed a Creative Problem Solver's Basic Toolbox of generating and focusing tools (see fig. 1 for the toolbox and links to examples of each tool).

Tools for Generating Possibilities (Creative Thinking)

Tools for Focusing Possibilities (Critical Thinking)

Teachers can incorporate instruction in creative and critical thinking into the curriculum in a number of ways, either singly or in combination. I recommend that teachers follow several guidelines.

Introduce the tools directly, using engaging, open-ended questions from everyday life. Be clear that the purpose of such out-of-context work is to gain confidence and skill in using the tool, so everyone will be successful when using it in context.

Next, provide opportunities to apply the tools in lessons or activities related to specific content areas. Any of the generating and focusing tools can be used to help students master a variety of specific content standards in many areas (see Treffinger, 2007; Treffinger et al., 2004a, 2004b, 2004c).

Kopcak (2007), for example, describes using the Brainstorming, Hits and Hot Spots, and Paired Comparison Analysis tools with high school seniors as they worked on the Virginia learning standard "The student will write documented research papers." The students began with a stack of blank sticky notes on which they wrote possible topics (one per sticky note). After covering a chalkboard with sticky notes, the class paused to discuss the characteristics of a good research topic. The students used the Hits and Hot Spots focusing tool to select promising topics and organize them into categories based on theme or overarching topic; they used the Paired Comparison Analysis focusing tool to narrow down the most appealing options.

Other examples of applications of the tools in content areas include

Attribute Listing. Understanding the important elements or parts of a topic being studied (for example, the major attributes of a country or civilization in social studies, the major elements of a story, or the characteristics of the main characters in a novel).

Brainstorming. Identifying varied or unusual ways to make people aware of the importance of voting. Generating many possible math problems that could be constructed from a given set of data, events, or circumstances. Listing many ways to promote recycling or conservation.

Evaluation Matrix. Evaluating choices or possible courses of action faced by people or groups in literature or social studies units (for example, in a film the students have viewed or a story they have read). Judging and choosing one of several possible themes, plots, or endings for a story or dramatic scene.

Sequencing: SML. Investigating career preparation (for instance, "If you want to become a ____, the steps or stages in your preparation should include ..."). Understanding and ordering the stages or chronology in an event or process (for example, the steps in an experiment or the sequence of certain measurements to be taken on a set of data).

Be deliberate about applying the basic tools in several different content areas, to help students learn how to transfer their learning about the tools across contexts. As you work with the tools, be explicit about metacognitive skills. Ask, "What is the tool? How did you use it? When and why would you use it in other situations?"

Beware of presenting too much newness at once. When you are working with new content, start with familiar tools. When you are introducing new tools, start with familiar content. Don't try to teach all the tools at once.

When students are comfortable with the basic generating and focusing tools, teachers may guide them in applying these tools through the Creative Problem Solving framework, a model for attaining clarity about tasks, defining problems in a constructive way, generating possible solutions, preparing for action and successful implementation of solutions, and dealing with change. For more information about the Creative Problem Solving framework, see the resources at the Center for Creative Learning.

It is also important to engage students in finding and solving real-life problems or challenges within the classroom, the school, or the community. Two widely known enrichment programs can provide engaging opportunities for students to apply creative problem solving.

Preparing Students for a Changing World

By helping students learn and apply the attitudes and practical tools of effective problem solvers, teachers can enhance student learning in powerful ways that extend beyond memorization and recall. Even when teachers are compelled to place great emphasis on basic learning and doing well on standardized tests-indeed, particularly at such times-it remains important to balance the emphasis between process and content in teaching and learning. Students who are competent in not only the basics of content areas but also the basics of productive and creative thinking will be lifelong learners, knowledge creators, and problem solvers who can live and work effectively in a world of constant change.

References

Kopcak, T. (2007). Applying thinking tools to high school seniors' research papers. Creative Learning Today, 15(3), 3.

Treffinger, D. J. (2007). Applying CPS tools in school: Thinking in action. Creative Learning Today, 15(3), 2.

Treffinger, D. J., Isaksen, S. G., & Stead-Dorval, K. B. (2006). Creative problem solving: An introduction (4th ed.). Waco, TX: Prufrock Press.

Treffinger, D. J., & Nassab, C. A. (2005). Thinking tool guides (Rev. ed.). Sarasota, FL: Center for Creative Learning.

Treffinger, D. J., Nassab, C. A., Schoonover, P. F., Selby, E. C., Shepardson, C. A., Wittig, C. V., & Young, G. C. (2004a). Thinking with standards: Preparing for the future (Elementary ed.). Waco, TX: Prufrock Press.

Treffinger, D. J., Nassab, C. A., Schoonover, P. F., Selby, E. C., Shepardson, C. A., Wittig, C. V., & Young, G. C. (2004b). Thinking with standards: Preparing for the future (Middle ed.). Waco, TX: Prufrock Press.

Treffinger, D. J., Nassab, C. A., Schoonover, P. F., Selby, E. C., Shepardson, C. A., Wittig, C. V., & Young, G. C. (2004c). Thinking with standards: Preparing for the future (Secondary ed.). Waco, TX: Prufrock Press.

Treffinger, D. J., Nassab, C. A., Schoonover, P. F., Selby, E. C., Shepardson, C. A., Wittig, C. V., & Young, G. C. (2006). The CPS Kit. Waco, TX: Prufrock Press.

Brainstorming Return to Figure 1 Force-Fitting Return to Figure 1 Attribute Listing

Visual Display. Make larger, use a trifold out of cardboard, use bright colors, use computer to make written parts and drawings, add some charts and graphs, use some pictures or cartoons to get attention, include something that moves, use an overhead projector, add lights, add something people can touch or use.

Oral Presentation. Use music in background, use sound effects, use Power Point, dress up in a lab coat, wear a necktie, use props.

Written Report. Put in notebook, make colorful cover, do it on the computer, add some more graphs and charts, include some photographs, use color and highlight parts, use more labels, use more variety in the words, add a glossary of terms.

Return to Figure 1 SCAMPER

S - Substitute

C - Combine

A - Adapt

M - Magnify or Minify

P - Put to other uses

E - Eliminate

R - Reverse or Rearrange

Return to Figure 1 Morphological Matrix
Most college students are preparing to enter business fields and want to find peace within their lives.

When high school students exhibit good citizenship they will not encounter conflict in the mall.
Return to Figure 1 Hits and Hot Spots Return to Figure 1 ALoU: Refining and Developing Advantages

Easy to manage and do within our time limits

Fun for everyone

People would actually be learning sign language a little at a time

Seeing and using sign language would become more accepted in school

No cost involved

Very visible

How to ensure that it would get used?

1. Let teachers know the words ahead of time so they can include ways to use them in daily/weekly plans.

2. Make it a contest, like a spelling bee each month.

How to get participants to take it seriously?

1. Do a "hush day" to help people get a firsthand understanding of the need for all to communicate.

2. Bring in or create a school presentation using words and sign language to demonstrate the importance of diversity.

Unique Features

Our deaf population might be able to communicate with all others in the school without the need for an interpreter.

Sign language might be seen as a language just like other foreign languages and be taught as a subject.

Return to Figure 1 PCA: Paired Comparison Analysis Return to Figure 1 Sequencing: SML

In the short term (and before they contacted any other agencies or the student body), the students needed to understand community service better themselves. They listed questions to ask representatives from one or more community agencies.
Next, they researched agencies in their community that needed volunteers and would be receptive to middle school students as well as interesting to the students.

As a medium-range step, the group prepared and rehearsed the kind of interview they would do with representatives from the agencies, contacted one agency, conducted their interviews, and began doing some volunteer work themselves.

The students' long-term steps involved creating an appealing presentation that incorporated information from their interviews and personal experiences to inform other students and to stimulate their involvement.

Return to Figure 1 Evaluation Matrix

Which dog can Grandma best afford?

Which dog will be the most quiet?

Which dog will be the easiest for Grandma to care for by herself (walk, bathe, groom, and so on)?

Which dog will be protective when needed?

Which dog will be the friendliest companion to grandma?

Options for Breeds

Fits Gram's budget

Most quiet

Ease of care

Protectiveness

Friendliness

Total

Return to Figure 1

Future Problem Solving Program Destination ImagiNation Return to Article

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Preparing Creative and Critical Thinkers

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Donald J. Treffinger Teachers can help students become 21st-century problem solvers by introducing them to a broad range of thinking tools. If you doubt that we live in a world of accelerating change, just consider the everyday life experiences of millions of children and teenagers today: They can view live images from every corner of the world and talk with or exchange video images with other young people who live many time zones away.

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Critical and Creative Thinking: The Joy of Learning!

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Step-by-step critical and creative thinking strategies are discussed in this article.

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New link for BC TE publication through slideshare

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New link for BC TE publication through slideshare

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Boats and boating--Equipment and supplies

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Creativity in the English language classroom Edited by Alan Maley and Nik Peachey www.teachingenglish.org.uk ©MatWright

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Creativity in teaching and learning: what, why, how?

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Watch this highly practical, interactive seminar to discover small changes that can make a big difference to creativity in the classroom. Two speaker sessions provide interesting activities and real-life examples to inspire creative teaching and learning. This is followed by a panel Q and A session with Alan Maley, Marisa Constantinides, Phuong Lee, Nik Peachey and Malu Sciamarelli.

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February 2013 | Volume 70 | Number 5
Creativity Now! Pages 10-15

Ronald A. Beghetto and James C. Kaufman

The first question educators should address is, What is creativity? People commonly think of creativity as the ability to think outside the box, be imaginative, or come up with original ideas. These are aspects of creativity, but they tell only half the story.

Scholars generally agree that creativity involves the combination of originality and task appropriateness (Kaufman & Sternberg, 2007; Plucker, Beghetto, & Dow, 2004). This combination may seem contradictory. How can something be original and at the same time conform to a set of task requirements? And isn't originality sufficient for something to be judged creative? Why must it also be task appropriate?

A quick example (adapted from Beghetto & Plucker, 2006) may help. Consider a teacher who wants students to express creativity in their science fair projects. Before assigning students to create their own projects, the teacher discusses the scientific conventions and requirements of the project. (For example, each project must pose a hypothesis, gather evidence to test the hypothesis, and explain whether the hypothesis has been supported.) Students are then invited to work within these conventions to create their own original, personally meaningful science fair projects.

One student's final project simply reproduces a class lab experiment in which students guessed how much acid various brands of soft drinks contained and then measured the degree of acidity in each. Although this project is task appropriate, it is not creative because it does not contain the student's original ideas. At the other extreme, one student performs an interpretive dance illustrating the biological phenomenon of mitosis; this project is highly original, but it is not creative because it does not fulfill the academic requirements of this particular task. For a student's project to be considered creative, it would need to incorporate the student's own ideas while staying within established academic guidelines and the conventions of scientific inquiry.

Teachers who understand that creativity combines both originality and task appropriateness are in a better position to integrate student creativity into the everyday curriculum in ways that complement, rather than compete with, academic learning. For example, during a lesson on ancient Rome, students might create a diary for a person living during this time, with period-accurate details. A biology class might have students brainstorming about the conditions under which a plant might grow best. Or a math teacher might have students explore how many different ways they can solve an algebraic proof.

2. There Are Different Levels of Creativity

Some instances of creativity occur every day (for example, a 4th grader coming up with an idea for a short story). Other instances of creativity redefine the way things are done (for example, smartphones) or even transform history (the computer chip, the Declaration of Independence, the scientific method, electricity, or Billie Holiday's powerful performance of the anti-racist song "Strange Fruit").

Researchers have drawn a distinction between these two levels of creativity: the contributions made by everyday people ( little-c creativity) and the lasting, transformational contributions made by mavericks within a domain ( Big-C creativity). In an effort to broaden the concept, we developed a more nuanced, developmental model, which we call the Four C Model of Creativity (Kaufman & Beghetto, 2009). This model describes the following levels of creative expression:

mini-c, or interpretive, creativity (such as a 2nd grade student's new insight about how to solve a math problem).

little-c, or everyday, creativity (such as a 10th grade social studies class developing an original project that combines learning about a key historical event with gathering local histories from community elders).

Pro-C, or expert, creativity (for example, the idea of the flipped classroom pioneered by teachers Aaron Sams and Jonathan Bergmann).

Big-C, or legendary, creativity (for example, Maria Montessori's new approach to early childhood education).

The Four C Model provides a framework for including creativity in the curriculum and helping students develop their creativity to higher levels.

Consider two elementary students who each write a short story and submit it to a schoolwide literary contest. One student writes a science fiction story that is based on his own ideas and is personally meaningful to him; although the literary contest judges rate it as ordinary, the story meets the standard criteria of being task appropriate and original as judged by the student himself. Therefore, the story can be considered creative at the mini-c level. Another student writes a science fiction story that the judges rate as highly creative, to which they award first prize. Although this story is not of high enough quality to be published in a science fiction magazine, it displays an unusually high level of originality and quality for an elementary student and may be considered creative at the little-c level.

The first student's teacher could help him develop his mini-c ideas about science fiction stories into little-c creative contributions by encouraging his interest and helping him develop greater understanding and mastery of storytelling. Similarly, a teacher could work with the second student to help her develop her understanding of the science fiction genre and the domain expertise necessary to move from little-c science fiction stories into published, Pro-C science fiction. This achievement should be understood as a long-term goal: Moving from little-c to Pro-C takes years of deliberate practice (Ericsson, 2006). Few children will reach the Pro-C level of creativity, which is reserved for expert-level authors.

The fourth level of creativity, Big-C, is reserved in science fiction writing for legends like H. G. Wells, Ray Bradbury, or Mary Shelley. This doesn't mean that Big-C creativity plays no role in the classroom, however. Teachers can include biographies of Big-C creators across various subject areas to illustrate the work, setbacks, and supports involved in becoming a legendary creator. The lives of Marie Curie, Mark Twain, Martin Luther King Jr., and Claude Monet, among others, include stories of persistence and resilience, traits associated with creativity at all levels. Exploring such biographies can capture students' imagination, raise important questions, and even dispel misconceptions about creativity in particular fields of study. Learning about C. S. Lewis's struggles with writer's block, for example, may help a young student realize that such challenges are universal.

3. Context Matters

Some education thinkers have expressed concerns that U.S. schools are stifling student creativity, or causing a "creativity crisis" (Bronson & Merryman, 2010). Although a narrow focus on convergent teaching and learning can suppress creative thinking, the good news is that where there is life, there is creativity. Research has demonstrated that creativity is a robust human trait; students can be protected and bounce back from creativity-stifling school and classroom practices (Beghetto, 2010).

Certain contexts can curtail and suppress creativity, however. In particular, the school and classroom environment often send subtle messages that play an important role in determining whether students will share their mini-c creative insights and have the opportunity to develop their creative competence.

For instance, research shows that creativity can suffer when people are promised rewards for creative work, when learning conditions stress competition and social comparisons, or when individuals are highly aware of being monitored and evaluated by others. Conversely, creativity generally thrives in environments that support personal interest, involvement, enjoyment, and engagement with challenging tasks (Hennessey & Amabile, 2010).

The key insight from this research is that teachers should do their best to minimize features of the environment that can impede creativity (social comparisons, contingent rewards, and so on). Instead, teachers should help students focus on the more intrinsically motivating and personally meaningful aspects of the work by discussing how students might incorporate their personal interests into the tasks and by acknowledging their creativity.

For example, instead of having students choose from a limited set of topics for their science experiments, a teacher might encourage them to plan experiments that examine their specific interests (such as autism, nutrition, or social media). Language arts students might have the option of writing a new scene for an assigned novel instead of writing a compare-and-contrast essay. Such alternate assignments would be equally rigorous but would encourage students to be more invested in the outcome.

4. Creativity Comes at a Cost

Creativity is often associated with fun, fluff, and frills. A quick Google image search on creativity yields a vast array of playful images, including laughing faces, smiling light bulbs, colorful arrays of crayons, and explosive bursts of paint. These images belie the more serious aspects of creativity. Creativity can have benefits that transcend temporary enjoyment. It can produce effective solutions to highly complex societal problems; lead to higher levels of career success; and create intense personal enjoyment, engagement, and meaning in life (Kaufman, 2009).

But the benefits come with a cost; creativity requires work, effort, and risk. Many years of painstaking effort are needed to develop the expertise to make creative contributions that go beyond the everyday level. Moreover, even everyday creativity takes effort, subject-matter understanding, the ability to put a new spin on the task at hand, and the willingness to share one's creative expression with others-risking rejection, ridicule, or worse.

When a young student shares a new and personally meaningful perspective on how to solve a math problem, she risks having her idea dismissed or misunderstood by her teacher. A student who volunteers to read a story in front of the class is taking the chance of being laughed at by his peers. It does not take many such incidents for a student to learn that it's not worth the effort and risk to share personal ideas-it's much easier to provide the answers that teachers and peers expect.

Part of encouraging creativity, therefore, includes helping students become aware of the potential costs and benefits associated with creative expression. When students understand both the potential benefits and potential costs of creativity, they will be in a position to determine whether the risk is worth it.

5. There's a Time and a Place for Creativity

Given all the talk about nurturing creativity, teachers may feel that creativity should be encouraged and expressed at all times. But would you want a creative dentist or cab driver? It depends. We don't want a dentist trying a new tooth extraction procedure during a routine cleaning or a cab driver exploring a new route during a typical ride from the hotel to the airport. In such cases, we prefer that they conform to what is expected. However, if a tooth unexpectedly shatters during a cleaning, we want that dentist to be creative enough to improvise a way to fix it. Similarly, if we are running late for an important flight and the interstate traffic comes to a screeching halt, we might very well appreciate our cabbie's creative exploration of an alternate route.

Accomplished creators know when to be creative. Therefore, it's important for teachers to teach (and model) how to read a situation and determine whether and how to express one's creative ideas, insights, and behaviors. In other words, students need to develop creative metacognition -a combination of creative self-knowledge (knowing one's own creative strengths and limitations, both within a domain and as a general trait) and contextual knowledge (knowing when, where, how, and why to be creative) (Kaufman & Beghetto, in press).

Educators can help students develop their creative metacognition by providing them with informative feedback on their own creative strengths and limitations. Feedback should follow the Goldilocks Principle (Beghetto & Kaufman, 2007)-it should be neither too harsh (stifling students' motivation) nor too mild (failing to acknowledge real-world standards). Teachers should provide honest feedback that strikes the just-right balance between challenging students and supporting them as they develop their creative competence.

Consider, for example, a student who is assigned to write a historical account of an event during the past decade that had an impact on the local community. The student takes a novel approach to this assignment, combining secondary sources (such as news accounts) and imaginary primary sources ("ghosts of the past" who represent various generational perspectives).

To provide balanced feedback, the teacher might acknowledge the originality and insightfulness of the student's attempt to present multiple generational perspectives of the event. The teacher might then challenge the student to replace the fictional sources with actual primary sources by locating real community members who represent different generations, interviewing them, and incorporating their perspectives into the final paper.

Realizing the Benefits

As parents, educators, and creativity researchers, we are encouraged by the increased attention being paid to creativity and the recognition that it has a role to play in schools and classrooms. It's essential, however, that education leaders develop a thorough understanding of creativity and that they take the time and care necessary to ensure that the benefits of creativity are realized in schools and classrooms.

Nurturing Creativity in the Classroom edited by R. A. Beghetto and J. C. Kaufman (Cambridge University Press, 2010).

Contemporary Perspectives on Research in Creativity in Early Childhood Education by O. N. Saracho (Information Age Press, 2012).

Structure and Improvisation in Creative Teaching edited by R. K. Sawyer (Cambridge University Press, 2011).

Creativity: A Handbook for Teachers edited by A. G. Tan (World Scientific, 2007).

References

Beghetto, R. A. (2010). Creativity in the classroom. In J. C. Kaufman, & R. J. Sternberg (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of creativity (pp. 447-466). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Beghetto, R. A., & Kaufman, J. C. (2007). Toward a broader conception of creativity: A case for mini-c creativity. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 1, 73-79.

Beghetto, R. A., & Plucker, J. A. (2006). The relationship among schooling, learning, and creativity: "All roads lead to creativity" or "You can't get there from here"? In J. C. Kaufman & J. Bear (Eds.), Creativity and reason in cognitive development (pp. 316-332). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Bronson, P., & Merryman, A. (2010, July 19). The creativity crisis. Newsweek, 44-50.

Ericsson, K. A. (2006). The influence of experience and deliberate practice on the development of superior expert performance. In K. A. Ericsson, N. Charness, P. Feltovich, & R. R. Hoffman (Eds.), Cambridge handbook of expertise and expert performance (pp. 683-704). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Hennessey, B. A., & Amabile, T. M. (2010). Creativity. Annual Review of Psychology, 61, 569-598.

Kaufman, J. C. (2009). Creativity 101. New York: Springer.

Kaufman, J. C., & Beghetto, R. A. (2009). Beyond big and little: The Four C Model of Creativity. Review of General Psychology, 13, 1-12.

Kaufman, J. C., & Beghetto, R. A. (in press). In praise of Clark Kent: Creative metacognition and the importance of teaching kids when (not) to be creative. Roeper Review.

Kaufman, J. C., & Sternberg, R. J. (2007). Resource review: Creativity. Change, 39, 55-58.

Plucker, J. A., Beghetto, R. A., & Dow, G. T. (2004). Why isn't creativity more important to educational psychologists? Potential, pitfalls, and future directions in creativity research. Educational Psychologist, 39, 83-97.

Ronald A. Beghetto is associate dean for academic affairs and associate professor of education studies, College of Education, University of Oregon at Eugene. James C. Kaufman is professor and director of the Learning Research Institute, California State University at San Bernardino.

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February 2013 | Volume 70 | Number 5 Creativity Now! Pages 10-15 Ronald A. Beghetto and James C. Kaufman The first question educators should address is, What is creativity? People commonly think of creativity as the ability to think outside the box, be imaginative, or come up with original ideas.

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IBM report 2010 - Creativity is most crucial factor for success

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IBM report 2010 - Creativity is most crucial factor for success

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creativity selected as most crucial factor for future success

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fewer than half of ceos successfully handling growing complexity; diverging priorities in asia

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IBM 2010 Global CEO Study: Creativity Selected as Most Crucial Factor for Future Success

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According to a major new IBM survey of more than 1,500 Chief Executive Officers from 60 countries and 33 industries worldwide, chief executives believe that -- more than rigor, management discipline, integrity or even vision -- successfully navigating an increasing complex world will require creativity.

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The importance of Creativity in Business

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The importance of Creativity in Business

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NYU-Stern professor Kim Corfman on the importance of creativity in business and the role of culture in spurring or constraining creativity.
Creativity is important for organizations. Period. It's a simple correlation: higher creativity leads to greater innovation within the organization and thus, greater success over the long run. Having said that, creativity is also becoming a very important skill for leaders. A 2010 IBM survey of more than 1,500 CEOs from across the world rated creativity as the most important factor for future success.

Kim Corfman, Professor of Marketing at NYU Stern School of Business, also believes that the happiest people are those who lead more creative lives. "I think [people] will have better lives if they are more creative problem solvers," she says.

In this interview, Corfman talks about the importance of creativity in business and our lives, the role of culture in spurring or constraining creativity, overcoming various barriers to creativity and more.
Q. You say that creativity is the single most important leadership quality. What has catapulted creativity to the very top?
A. There are two things going on. One is changes in the environment, and the other is the recognition of something that has always been true. The rate of change in the world has been accelerating in terms of in developing economies, how easy it is to start a business, the rapidity with which commercial ventures are growing and changing, the recognition of really serious global problems that need more creative solutions to be solved, everything is moving more quickly and the standards are getting higher. So [there is a] much more competitive environment, much more rapidly moving environment, we need new ways to do things.

The other is it's always been critical and important. It's been the key to successful enterprise forever. The word "creativity" is what people now want to talk about. But it's always been true both for business and for individual fulfillment.

The happiest people are those who live creative lives. I think [people] will have better lives if they are more creative problem solvers.
Q. Some people believe that creativity is something that you are born with and it is not something that can be taught. You obviously believe that creativity can be taught. Where are you coming from and why?
A. I do think that there is something that you are born with that can make it easier for you to be creative, but when we are being creative, we are using all of our natural selves, our thought processes, our experiences, associative thinking of a variety of kinds. There is no reason in the world why everybody can't get better at it. There are things you can do to change your mindset, either because you do it intentionally or by practice. And there are tools you can use that help you take advantage of your natural abilities and help you structure your thinking in ways that will make you more creative and help you get into the right mindset.
Q. What is the role of education systems and cultural backgrounds in spurring creativity? Do you think that in some cultures, people are inherently more creative than in others? Nordic countries, for instance, routinely rank high on innovation surveys.
A. You need to feel safe and that requires a certain amount of open-mindedness, willingness to take risks, tolerance for ambiguity, uncertainty in order to be truly creative. [Regarding] tolerance for failure, I don't mean "going out there and risking millions or billions of dollars", but trying things with smaller cost and taking chances. There is a big cultural element to that.

There is another thing, which is, people tend to exaggerate the negative consequences of taking risks. There are some things that would be foolish to do even if there is a reasonably high probability of success but the cost is so great and you don't want to try it. But most of the times the risks are not as great as we think they are. We exaggerate those. So, partly cultural, partly just having a clear view of what consequences will pay.
[Watch the video below] Q. It's also interesting that you mention the fear of failure because if you look at some of the most innovative places like Silicon Valley, failures are celebrated, but not so much in cultures like in China where it would be a big barrier. What would it really take to change the perception towards something like failure, especially when people have inherited attitudes towards it?
A. It is about understanding what you are talking about when you are considering failure. Failure can occur at many different stages in the innovation process. You can use tools that help free you up to think of goofy crazy things, many of which may be ridiculous and wouldn't work, but they may lead you to something that actually has a merit.

People are even afraid in a group discussion suggesting something that isn't a complete perfect idea that's going to succeed. If you can create an environment in which people are willing to put those ideas out there and help them understand that the costs are non-existent, then you can walk your way up to taking chances that may have slightly bigger consequences. Failure doesn't have to mean huge amount of money. Most of the failure we fear is the judgment of our peers or employers.
Q. You often talk of both internal and external barriers to creativity. While the internal barriers are about our own biases and fears, the external barriers are about our environment and external constraints. In your opinion, which ones are tougher to overcome and why?
A. I think our internal barriers, simply because we won't push against the external barriers unless we overcome the internal ones. If I know what makes me intrinsically motivated, then I would be able to look for environments in which I can be those things. If I'm a manager, I would create an environment in which people who work for me can to do that as well. So if I had to start at one place, it would be there. Because if you start with the understanding of what's required for you and other people, then [you have] better chances to get rid of the external barriers.
Q. Talking about the internal barriers themselves, these are sometimes things we are born with or we've been conditioned to behave in certain way. Those are not things that you can suddenly get over. So how does one overcome these internal barriers?
A. There's a big debate on whether we are born with those. Whether we are or not, from the moment we come from this world, we are creating patterns or finding categories so that when we look at something, we know what it is.

But one of the negative consequences of that is we categorize very quickly. One of the things we can do is to practice questioning our categories and assumptions. You can do that by doing mental exercises, but also by intentionally identifying the constraint you are assuming you are operating under in solving this problem. You may find that some of them are invalid that you don't really need to operate under them. There is scientific evidence to show that people who put themselves in different environments suddenly realize: "Oh, I've been making assumptions about this! I've been looking at this in a certain way and I don't need to. Maybe it makes sense in some situations and maybe not in all of them."
Q. So far we have talked about creativity at the individual's level. When we talk about creativity at an organizational level, we often find that creativity is the responsibility of one department-e.g., the R&D team-and it is not something that is seen as an organization-wide responsibility.
A. I think it's mostly limited. You have a group of people who are supposed to be product innovators. If they have all the information they need, they have an environment that promotes that kind of creativity. That can work. If everybody else is just simply an executor, that's okay. But in organizations you need creativity in every part of the organization to take full advantage of the organization's knowledge and be as responsible as possible to the demands that the market has been placing on you.

So, your sales people have knowledge that this group over here is supposed to be creative, can possibly have an impact on the consumer. Taking advantage of the knowledge of everybody in an organization is something that can be done in a separate process.
Q. What's your view on taking creativity outside an organization?
A. This has become a hard way of referring to the kind of knowledge that leads to the most creativity shaped knowledge. Adapt that knowledge in the domain in which you are solving problems or doing your job, but you also need a very broad exposure that can be relatively superficial to many different domains because some of the most interesting innovations come from making connections between where I am and something very remote.

There is a classic example of George de Mestral and the Velcro. He was walking his dog and got burrs caught into his coat. He put one of them under the microscope and saw there were those little hooks. That led to the invention of Velcro. Both in your field and many different areas, you can draw analogies and you can see metaphors. In the case of de Mestral, don't categorize this as a walk with the dog, categorize this as noticing an interesting question and then pursue it.
Q. We've been seeing a lot of things related to creativity. Design thinking is in vogue. Then someone else came along and said that it doesn't work anymore, and the right thing to do is creative intelligence. What's your take on these concepts? How efficient are they in spurring innovation and creativity?
So design thinking came along because we were neglecting a couple of things. We were neglecting something that marketing faculty have been saying forever, which is understand the consumer, find out what's important to them and develop empathy. The other thing that design thinking emphasizes that makes a difference from other approaches is prototyping, rapid prototyping in every stage in the process.

None of these is new. But they come along and say, this is being neglected. I have been talking to innovation consultancies and hear them complaining about one approach or another. Usually it's because there is an overemphasis on certain phases and some under-emphasis on others. Fahrenheit 212 is a company that has been growing phenomenally in the past several years and thinks design thinking is an absolute failure. It is if you don't make sure there is a business model behind the things that you've decided to introduce. In some cases, design thinking has been applied in a way that neglected the fact that you need to make money at the end of the day. But it doesn't mean that the process itself is flawed. Any tool needs to be used intelligently.

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The Importance of Creativity in Business

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NYU-Stern professor Kim Corfman on the importance of creativity in business and the role of culture in spurring or constraining creativity. Creativity is important for organizations. Period. It's a simple correlation: higher creativity leads to greater innovation within the organization and thus, greater success over the long run.

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Unlocking the creativity of children and young people

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Creativity with it's winding and meandering journeys and productivity with its straight line efficiency don't always get along. What you do to improve one seems to reduce how well you can complete the other.

For the last couple of weeks, I've been talking about being more productive. First were some thoughts about the importance of focus and then it was an overview of the Getting Things Done (GTD) productivity system.

GTD has helped plenty of people, myself included, get more done and be more productive, however, it's not a perfect system. It can be difficult to include creative work in a meaningful way that helps you do the work quicker or better.

Today I want to continue this series and talk about the issues I've had trying to fit creative work into GTD. In fairness, it's not just GTD. It's all productivity systems and the always existing tension between creativity and productivity. The focus will be on the issues. In a couple of weeks I'll offer some thoughts about how you can still get productivity systems and creativity to play nice together.

Note: If you're unfamilar with GTD, you should probably read the previous post in this series before reading this one.

Creative Tasks are Hard to Define in Advance

In his book, David Allen talks about vertical and horizontal focus. Vertical focus is about projects with well-defined outcomes and the next actions to reach those outcomes. Horizontal focus is about single (though also well-defined) tasks that we need to be reminded about.

With creative work, the act of creation is often when the task gets defined.

All productivity systems, GTD included, are focused on breaking up larger projects into groups of smaller, actionable, and well-defined tasks. Creativity tends to have more ambiguously defined tasks. That's the biggest conflict I find between creativity and GTD. It's not only creative work, though. It's really anything where tasks are difficult to define.

With creative work, the act of creation is often when the task gets defined. How can you add those tasks to a system when you won't know what the tasks are until you're immersed in the creative process?

For example say you've started a new design. You've talked with the client and understand the problem you're to solve. You're ready to develop a concept for the site. How would you break that down into well-defined tasks?

I find that difficult, because I don't necessarily know where the concept will come from or how I'll arrive at it. I'm sure some of my time will be spent thinking about it while I stare off at the ceiling. My subconscious will work on it while I'm out shopping for groceries or hanging out with friends one evening.

I'll probably spend time looking at other websites, magazines, nature, anything for inspiration. I'll spend some time sketching and some time organizing lists of words and notes and thoughts. The thing is, I don't know exactly what I'll do for a given project that will lead me to a concept. I explore different things on different projects. I also have no idea how long I'll need to do any of these things.

Creative work is more difficult to define down to the task level because the tasks are often found in during the creative process. That ends up leaving creative tasks as something more encompassing than what we typically think of as a task.

For example while writing a book this spring and summer I had tasks like:

Each of the above would span days or weeks. Tasks tend to be things you can do during a single work day. I could break each of the above up into different chapters or even sections I suppose.

Write draft chapter 1

Write draft chapter 2

Write draft chapter 3

The above isn't going to help me get a draft written any quicker or better, though. It's not a necessary reminder while working on the book either. Being focussed and having deadlines were more than enough of a reminder. The tasks become little more than extra stuff to manage.

GTD cuts across a wide list of tasks over different projects. Creativity focuses on a single thing and takes time for exploration. I find I can break creative projects into small subprojects, but it's more difficult trying define the work down to the task level. I usually end up with something generic like write draft that lasts multiple days or weeks.

With a lot of creative work you simply don't know what the specific tasks are until you're in the middle of the work. You can add specific tasks to your system as you explore, but you typically explore as you think of things to explore. Having to stop to think about where to go next lessens the exploration.

Creative work also doesn't know what specific outcomes it will arrive at. The reason for creative exploration is so you can discover the outcome as well as how to get there in the process of exploring. You can define the outcome generically, but not with the level of specificity GTD wants.

Creativity, Time, and Flow

Time is another issue. I find my work isn't bound by time so much as guided by it. I need to finish things in a reasonable amount of time, but exact dates usually don't exist. It's also difficult to estimate wow long it might take to complete creative tasks. Tasks that required a few hours on one project sometimes require weeks on another.

Another time factor with creative work is the preparation that's usually required to get into a state of flow. It's difficult to know how much time that will be prior to each creative session.

What happens when you do find yourself in a state of flow, but the clock says it's time for another task? You want to keep that flow going as long as possible. It's irrelevant how much time you schedule to be creative, you want to keep going with it as long as the muse continues to hang around.

This isn't really a GTD issue as the system doesn't require deadlines on tasks and projects. GTD would suggest you continue with your creative flow as long as it lasts and the system will be there to help you decide what to do next when your ready for more.

Still you are adding time as one of the criteria for choosing what to work on next. If you can't reasonably estimate how long your work will take it doesn't help all that much as a criteria for choosing. Too many of my tasks require far more than an hour or two to complete.

If a creative task is going to take days or weeks, how do you know when it's time to choose another task to work on? You're going to work on other tasks while working to complete the one creative task. If that's the case, why do you need to add the creative task to the system. You don't need to be reminded about it and your decisions about when to work on it and when to stop will have nothing to do with the system.

Closing Thoughts

There's a tension between productivity and creativity that's evident when you try to complete creative work more productively. Any system to help you manage tasks is going run into some difficulty when the work to be managed is creative.

Most of the difficulty revolves around trying to define creative tasks and add criteria to help you decide when to work on them. Creativity resists this kind of definition making it more challenging to include in a task management system.

Time is another factor that leads to issues. Creative work often requires prep time and you don't want to end creative or productive flows when they happen.

I'll pick this up again next week and share how I work with GTD in general using the application Things. I'll close the series the following week with thoughts about how I specifically tweak Things and GTD to overcome the challenges of including creative work in my productivity system.

Download a free sample from my book, Design Fundamentals.

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The Difficulty Including Creative Work in Productivity Systems Like Getting Things Done (GTD) - Vanseo Design

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Creativity with it's winding and meandering journeys and productivity with its straight line efficiency don't always get along. What you do to improve one seems to reduce how well you can complete the other. For the last couple of weeks, I've been talking about being more productive.

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This is a wonderful resource which has a great question cubes activity to stimulate creative questioning.

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Questioning is a fundamental element of pedagogy, one you could read endlessly around, but the reality is using questioning to challenge and engage all learners is demanding and potentially problematic to get right. Recently I've been working with a team of teachers, shaping our CPD model in preparation for the new academic year. Engaging in dialogue around teaching and learning with colleagues is always a pleasure and extremely informative, and one aspect continually crops up; deep, challenging and engaging questioning. Firstly, I think it's crucial to outline what we are trying to achieve when we think about the purpose of questioning, for me it includes the following:

Allowing students to develop a fuller understanding of a concept because they have tried to explain it
themselves

To easily recall existing knowledge

To be able to link the ideas in the lesson with existing knowledge

To tackle problems at a deep level and be able to extend their thinking

To engage easily with a task because they are clear about what is expected

To develop independence in the way they learn and think

Making the assumption that we are all familiar with Blooms Taxonomy; a cognitive approach to to classify forms and levels of learning, research has shown that as teachers we tend to ask questions in the "knowledge" category 80% to 90% of the time. These questions are not bad, but using them all the time has the potential to be. So, to try and utilise a higher order level of questioning that requires much more 'brain power' and encourages more extensive and elaborate answers, we need to develop innovate approaches in our day-to-day practice. In the table are the six question categories as defined by Bloom. Nevertheless, having the theory is one thing, but being able to effectively teach critical thinking skills using blooms taxonomy to underpin effective, active engagement for all learners is another.

So I ask the question; how do we plan for deep questioning that will challenge all learners? Recently we've developed some simple yet effective 'quick wins' on this front. Although planning for questioning is vital, so too is managing and challenging misconceptions as they arise in learning, which often requires us to deviate from the 'plan' and rightly so.

Active engagement

We value cooperative approaches to learning and therefore seek imaginative ways to actively engage all students in their learning, and making blooms interactive has been one effective strategy allowing us to accomplish this. Essentially, we have focused on how the theory can be applied in an instant and when/where necessary, ultimately never losing sight of the sole intention of challenging all students to move their learning forward. Through interpretation and classroom based action research, the 'questioning key ring' has been developed, offering a simple aide-memoir for the teacher and students alike.

Expanding upon this further, the strategy is now linked explicitly to think dice to help promote students' active engagement in their learning. This adds a fun dimension whilst enabling students to lead effective questioning of their peers. This can be and has been applied to all subjects from Key Stage 3 through to Key Stage 5. I'm not advocating that this is and should be the only pedagogical strategy in your 'toolbox' but it has developed into one highly effective way to engage students in their learning, whilst stimulating deep thinking from effective questioning. Since I posted these pictures on twitter, I've had a lot of requests for the resource and questions regarding the thinking dice. Below is the word document that supports this and is the template for the printed key ring, simply click on the link below it to download. The dice were purchased from thinkingdice.com

To download this editable file as a word document click here

Good luck with your questioning!

Follow @gary_s_king

About garysking

Deputy Headteacher - leader of Teaching & Learning. Change maker and believer in quality first teaching.

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Questioning is a fundamental element of pedagogy, one you could read endlessly around, but the reality is using questioning to challenge and engage all learners is demanding and potentially problematic to get right. Recently I've been working with a team of teachers, shaping our CPD model in preparation for the new academic year.

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While the best Socratic seminar questions may seem simple, they are also highly strategic - designed to engage students with a text, challenge them toward increasingly complex thinking, and inspire them to explore big ideas.

What makes a good Socratic seminar question?

Good Socratic questions are always open-ended, thought-provoking, and clear.

Student in a Socratic seminar

Open-ended: Questions are designed to elicit multiple perspectives. Numerous answers can be correct as long as the students stay on topic.

Thought-provoking: To start, questions should spark numerous responses. Then, they should challenge students to evaluate and synthesize their ideas.

Clear: Participants should be able to understand right away what the facilitator is asking. This means phrasing questions carefully to keep them short and simple, even when the topic is complex.

Find free Socratic Seminar lesson plans

Questioning strategies for Socratic seminars

Facilitators should plan their questioning strategy ahead of time, preparing questions to engage students in dialogue. A lesson plan should include opening questions, core questions, and closing questions.

Seminar topic: M.C.'s Escher's Convex and Concave

Opening questions and closing questions ask the students for their personal perspective. These questions are known as maieutic, from the Greek word for midwifery, because they encourage students to give birth to their own ideas.

During the core of the dialogue, questions are more analytical than personal, requiring careful observation of the text and attention to logic.

Teachers should also be ready to ask students follow-up questions, and they should allow students to shape the dialogue by asking questions of each other.

Opening questions: What is the text about?

The goal of opening questions is to engage all of the participants in identifying the main ideas in a text.

What word or phrase is most important?

Which character is meant to be the hero or protagonist?

What is the most surprising statement in the text?

What is the most striking image or metaphor?

What would be another good title for this piece?

A round robin format is a good way to get all of the participants involved at the the beginning. Students can go around in a circle to give their answers or try "hoppin robin," by jumping in when they choose, as long as everyone responds. Opening questions should be designed for short answers.

Core questions: What do you think about ideas in the text?

The goal of core questions is to have the participants analyze the seminar text and develop their ideas about it.

Why is the argument structured in this way?

What evidence does the author use to back up his or her point of view?

What do the authors mean when they say ________________________?

How would the original audience have interpreted this statement?

What is the relationship between __________ and ______________ ?

During the seminar, facilitators ask increasingly demanding questions. They may ask students to support their ideas with evidence from the text; to respond to another student's point of view; to identify the assumptions behind their thinking; or to re-evaluate their ideas, considering other perspectives or evidence.

Closing questions: What does it mean to you?

The goal of closing questions is for participants to consider the ideas and values from the text, in real-world applications.

What additional points should be included in this text?

How would our daily lives be different without this concept or idea?

In your opinion, is it morally right to take the action described in this text?

Based on this story, do you think people's actions are determined by fate or by choice?

Which character are you most like? When have you behaved like the other character?

Closing questions can form the basis for follow-up writing assignments or exercises, allowing students to develop the ideas they explore through the seminar.

Resources for Socratic seminar teachers

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Our website offers an introduction to teaching Socratic seminars in elementary, middle and high school.

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While the best Socratic seminar questions may seem simple, they are also highly strategic - designed to engage students with a text, challenge them toward increasingly complex thinking, and inspire them to explore big ideas. What makes a good Socratic seminar question? Good Socratic questions are

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http://www.reggiochildren.it/

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Reggio Children | Centro Internazionale per la difesa e la promozione dei diritti e delle potenzialità dei bambini e delle bambine

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Reggio Children | Centro Internazionale per la difesa e la promozione dei diritti e delle potenzialità dei bambini e delle bambine

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Creativity in the YL classroom - Carol Read

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Creativity in the YL classroom - Carol Read

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excellent video with specific examples of things to do with YLs

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Carol Read: Bringing Creativity into the Young Learner Classroom

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In this talk, Carol Read explores seven ways to promote creativity and illustrates each one with a range of practical ideas which can be used with young learners of different ages and levels. For more information about Tiger Time, visit: http://www.macmillanenglish.com/courses/tiger-time/

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THE SIX TYPES OF SOCRATIC QUESTIONS

Due to the rapid addition of new information and the advancement of science and technology that occur almost daily, an engineer must constantly expand his or her horizons beyond simple gathering information and relying on the basic engineering principles.

A number of homework problems have been included that are designed to enhance critical thinking skills. Critical thinking is the process we use to reflect on, access and judge the assumptions underlying our own and others ideas and actions.

Socratic questioning is at the heart of critical thinking and a number of homework problems draw from R.W. Paul's six types of Socratic questions:

1. Questions for clarification:

Why do you say that?

How does this relate to our discussion?

"Are you going to include diffusion in your mole balance equations?"

2. Questions that probe assumptions:

What could we assume instead?

How can you verify or disapprove that assumption?

"Why are neglecting radial diffusion and including only axial diffusion?"

3. Questions that probe reasons and evidence:

What would be an example?

What is....analogous to?

What do you think causes to happen...? Why:?

"Do you think that diffusion is responsible for the lower conversion?"

4. Questions about Viewpoints and Perspectives:

What would be an alternative?

What is another way to look at it?

Would you explain why it is necessary or beneficial, and who benefits?

Why is the best?

What are the strengths and weaknesses of...?

How are...and ...similar?

What is a counterargument for...?

"With all the bends in the pipe, from an industrial/practical standpoint, do you think diffusion will affect the conversion?"

5. Questions that probe implications and consequences:

What generalizations can you make?

What are the consequences of that assumption?

What are you implying?

How does...affect...?

How does...tie in with what we learned before?

"How would our results be affected if neglected diffusion?"

6. Questions about the question:

What was the point of this question?

Why do you think I asked this question?

What does...mean?

How does...apply to everyday life?

"Why do you think diffusion is important?"

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THE SIX TYPES OF SOCRATIC QUESTIONS Due to the rapid addition of new information and the advancement of science and technology that occur almost daily, an engineer must constantly expand his or her horizons beyond simple gathering information and relying on the basic engineering principles.

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10 reflective Qs

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How deep is your commitment to reflective practice?

Do you maintain a reflective journal? Do you blog? Do you capture and archive your reflections in a different space?

Do you consistently reserve a bit of time for your own reflective work? Do you help the learners you serve do the same?

I began creating dedicated time and space for reflection toward the end of my classroom teaching career, and the practice has followed me through my work at the WNY Young Writer's Studio. I've found that it can take very little time and yet, the return on our investment has always been significant.

Reflection makes all of us self-aware. It challenges us to think deeply about how we learn and why and why not.

Reflection deepens ownership. When we reflect, we become sensitive to the personal connection that exists between ourselves, our learning, and our work. The more we consider these connections, the deeper they seem to become. Reflection makes things matter more.

Reflection helps us get comfortable with uncomfortable. It also helps us fail forward. It's through reflection that we've discovered our greatest power as a writing community: our collective expertise and our willingness to encourage and celebrate risk-taking.

Reflection helps us know ourselves better. It helps us sharpen our vision, so we can align our actions to it. Reflection also helps us notice when we're getting off track.

Perhaps most importantly, reflection helps us advocate for ourselves and support others. Taking the time to reflect enables us to identify what we want, what we need, and what we must do to help ourselves. It also helps us realize how our gifts and strengths might be used in service to others.

I find that often, we struggle to find time to support reflective practice. Deadlines drive instruction far too much than they should, forcing learners and teachers to value perfection, products, and grades more than the development of softer and perhaps, more significant skills. Devoting a few moments at the end of class can make a real difference though, particularly when you pitch a few powerful prompts at learners. These are the ten questions that elicit the most powerful responses from the students I work with.

Ten Reflective Questions to Ask at the End of Class

1. Reflect on your thinking, learning, and work today. What were you most proud of?

2. Where did you encounter struggle today, and what did you do to deal with it?

3. What about your thinking, learning, or work today brought you the most satisfaction? Why?

4. What is frustrating you? How do you plan to deal with that frustration?

5. What lessons were learned from failure today?

6. Where did you meet success, and who might benefit most from what you've learned along the way? How can you share this with them?

7. What are your next steps? Which of those steps will come easiest? Where will the terrain become rocky? What can you do now to navigate the road ahead with the most success?

8. What made you curious today?

9. How did I help you today? How did I hinder you? What can I do tomorrow to help you more?

10. How did you help the class today? How did you hinder the class today? What can you do tomorrow to help other learners more?

The learners I serve typically capture these reflections in a special section of their notebooks. These entries grow in number over the course of time, and eventually, they revisit them to prepare for conferences.

The influence that asking reflective questions has on the quality of our conferences is incredible. In fact, I hesitate to confer with kids unless they've had a chance to pursue purposeful reflection first.

Try it yourself. See how it makes a difference for your students. You can find a set of printable reflective prompts here.

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About The Author

angelastockman

A former English teacher, Angela Stockman is the founder of the WNY Young Writer's Studio, a community of writers and teachers of writing in Buffalo, New York. She is also an education consultant with expertise in curriculum design, instructional coaching, and assessment. Read more from Angela at Angelastockman.com.

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Ten Reflective Questions to Ask at the End of Class

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How deep is your commitment to reflective practice? Do you maintain a reflective journal? Do you blog? Do you capture and archive your reflections in a different space? Do you consistently reserve a bit of time for your own reflective work? Do you help the learners you serve do the same?

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creative classroomlooks like with ref to Italian schools

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creative classroomlooks like with ref to Italian schools

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What does a creative classroom look like? You might expect to see a profusion of student artwork, brightly decorated bulletin boards, and projects in various stages of completion. But teachers who've received the American Teacher Award (ATA), sponsored by the Walt Disney Corp., say a stimulating visual environment is just part of the picture.

Much more important, say ATA teachers honored for their creative teaching, is a classroom's "mental environment" -- a climate where kids and teachers are free to study and explore important curriculum topics with rigor but without restraint. In creative classrooms, teachers are mindful of state and local standards, but they approach required topics with a playful enthusiasm that inspires students to learn. They prompt students to think deeply, pose questions, and pursue "big ideas" from many perspectives. And they allow students to show their understanding of essential curriculum concepts in their own ways.

"When you walk into a creative classroom, you can feel the electricity of the learning," says Linda Darus Clark, a social studies teacher and 1995 ATA award winner.

Pinning down creativity

A classroom's atmosphere can be a clue to its creativity. But what, exactly, is creativity? Pinning the concept down has troubled psychologists and cognitive scientists for decades, so answers vary. Still, researchers agree on one thing: An act of true creativity results in a product that's original and has significant value.

In The Courage to Create, philosopher and psychologist Rollo May draws a distinction between talent and creativity, noting that many individuals are thought of as talented whether they put their gifts to good use or not. By contrast, he says, creative people are judged by the products they craft, which might be inventions, insights, or new ideas.
Robert Weisberg draws the same conclusion in Creativity: Beyond the Myth of Genius, noting that creativity is rightly associated with novel products, but only if the products serve a useful purpose.

And the same is true for kids, according to Joseph Renzulli, director of the National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented. Problem solving is the heart of creative learning, he says, noting that "history does not remember students who merely scored well on IQ tests or simply stored up facts." Renzulli's research on students' creative and productive behavior indicates that, with the right kind of teaching and curriculum, almost all kids are willing and able to tackle and solve complex problems.

Researchers also agree that highly creative people tend to have certain common characteristics. Erwin Segal, with the Center for Cognitive Science at the University of Buffalo, describes creative individuals as hard working, dedicated, enthusiastic, and self-confident. Plus, he says, they have an abundant storehouse of knowledge and skills in the subjects that interest them, allowing them to invent and experiment with new ideas.

The skills to create

In Creativity in Context, Harvard University's Teresa Amabile also reports that creative individuals rely on a repertoire of knowledge and skills to wonder, imagine possibilities, and mentally play with high-level ideas. Like Segal, Amabile finds creative individuals are intrinsically motivated to tackle -- and finish -- complicated tasks. Perseverance (or what Joe Renzulli calls "task commitment") is a necessary quality, Amabile says, noting that creative individuals concentrate for long periods and persist even when their work becomes frustrating and ends up in failure.

Teachers in creative classrooms understand that kids need to have their own repertoire of knowledge and skills to pursue high-level inquiries and problem-solving. They foster thinking skills such as these, recommended by educational psychologist Alan Bowd of Canada's Lakehead University:
| Fluency -- produce many responses to an open-ended question or problem
| Flexibility -- generate unconventional ideas and view situations from different perspectives
| Originality -- produce unique, unusual, or novel responses
| Elaboration -- add rich detail to ideas
| Visualization -- imagine and mentally manipulate images and ideas
| Transformation -- change one thing or idea into another to see new meanings, applications, and implications
| Synthesis -- combine parts into a coherent whole.

Creativity, Renzulli says, is based in fluency, flexibility, and originality of thought. Students whose teachers encourage them to experiment with ideas and to be "mentally playful" -- including taking risks in their thoughts and actions -- stand a good chance of being creative and productive.

A climate for creativity

Recently I watched creativity flow in an eighth-grade social studies classroom. The teacher, midway through her second year, already knew how to draw her students -- including a handful of recalcitrant kids -- into a study of the Great Depression. She began with stories, poetry, original photographs, newspapers, and other original sources.

Then she encouraged the students to raise thoughtful questions that she used as a foundation for sustained, probing inquiry throughout the unit. With great skill, she wove threads of economics and politics into daily lessons. All the while the teacher prodded students to "make the pieces fit into the big picture."

This teacher created a mental environment that was a creative inspiration to her students. To demonstrate her knowledge and understanding, one girl created a diary of the Depression from the point of view of a 13-year-old whose family suffered from joblessness, hunger, and despair. Delving into the "stories behind the story," as they put it, two boys published a Depression-era newspaper featuring editorials, advertisements, and accounts of the stock market crash and factory closings.

But in other classrooms I've seen creativity go awry. In one sixth-grade class, for example, an English teacher ordered her students, as 25 percent of their grade, to come up with "creative covers" for their nine-week book reports. When I asked the teacher to explain the purpose of the covers, she floundered, unable to give a sound rationale for the kids' half-hearted crayon drawings and glued-on magazine pictures.

Even worse was the fifth-grade teacher who painted over brown-clay figurines that her students had sculpted under the direction of an artist-in-residence who specialized in ancient Egyptian art. The teacher explained that she found brown clay "unattractive" and decided that white paint would make the kids' artwork more appealing for a display at an upcoming open house.

Forcing a focus

Fostering creativity isn't easy, and teachers can hinder kids' creative and critical thinking even when they think they're encouraging these traits. That warning comes from Marvin Bartel, an art instructor at Indiana's Goshen College and a blunt critic of what passes for creativity in most classrooms.

For example, he says, teachers might tell students they can write on any topic or work on any project they choose in the belief that open-ended assignments give students creative options. But unrestricted freedom is often a bad idea. When teachers fail to make standards explicit and fail to impose limits, Bartel says, students tend to hand in less-creative work. Few teachers recognize that limitations motivate creativity by "narrowing the realm," forcing students to focus and bring new ideas to the surface. To jump- start students' creativity, Bartel recommends having students reverse the steps in a process or limiting the materials they can use.

Teachers create a different kind of problem when they give students models to copy or adapt. Imitation and repetition are useful for developing basic skills, but they don't foster critical thinking or innovation, Bartel says. To help students generate creative ideas, he suggests instructing them in the kinds of techniques creative people often use in their work, such as listing and sketching possibilities, conferring with others, and judging their own ideas for usefulness, durability, and complexity.

Bartel also recommends focusing on the familiar, rather than on the extreme or exotic. He encourages teachers to help students look at what they see and experience every day from many different perspectives and then bring a fresh viewpoint to their studies. Teachers often praise students for far-out projects, thinking such works are creative even when they have little merit. But creativity is more likely to flourish when teachers ask students to work with familiar content and ideas, says Bartel, who adds that he draws his most creative inspirations and produces his best art work when he begins with his immediate surroundings.

Starting early

Children's creativity can be squelched all too easily, and when that happens, many kids shut down and lose interest in school. Early childhood experts Carolyn Edwards and Kay Springate say teachers in all grades -- but especially those teaching very young children -- should build kids' confidence in using their imagination.

Teachers in American schools often underestimate young children's powers of observation and thinking, both precursors to creative expression. Edwards and Springate point to Italy's famous Reggio Emilia preschools, where 4-year-olds are encouraged and expected to combine high-level thinking and deep feelings in their day-to-day learning. In the Reggio Emilia schools, children's work samples show they're developmentally capable of analysis, synthesis, and evaluation -- the highest levels of thinking in Benjamin Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives.

Harvard University's Howard Gardner, a cognitive psychologist who calls the Reggio Emilia preschools "the best in the world," documents how teachers in these schools encourage children to accurately and creatively interpret and represent natural events, such as storms and rainbows.

Reggio Emilia teachers pay close attention to children's observations and interests and listen carefully to children's questions and theories, Gardner says. During a unit of study, the teachers provide resources and work as partners with children as they discover and investigate the world at their doorstep. Perhaps most important, the teachers know when to encourage children to take risks and when to stand aside and refrain from interfering with children's learning.

Teachers in all classrooms -- including those who teach high-level subjects in upper grades -- would do well to consider the same strategies. Edwards and Springate have the following tips on stretching students' creativity:
| Time. Give students extended, unhurried time to explore and do their best work. Stand aside when students are productively engaged and motivated to complete an interesting and creative task.
| Space. Provide students with an area to leave unfinished work to be completed later. Create an inviting work space that has natural light, harmonious colors, and stimulating resources.
| Materials. Provide an abundant supply of interesting and useful materials, including writing and art materials that students can use freely to invent, experiment, and demonstrate ideas and products.
| Climate. Create a classroom atmosphere where students feel mistakes are acceptable and it's appropriate to take risks. Allow a reasonable amount of noise, mess, and freedom.
| Enrichment. Introduce students to out-of-class experiences so they encounter ideas to use in classroom learning. Help students think about their experiences and what they mean.

Surely this isn't too much to ask. Even when they feel burdened by state standards and high-stakes testing, teachers need to put forth effort to create a classroom environment that is both visually and mentally stimulating. They need to be certain that a spark of learning -- that electricity -- is present in their daily lessons. Otherwise, they might as well turn out the lights and send the kids home.

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What does a creative classroom look like? You might expect to see a profusion of student artwork, brightly decorated bulletin boards, and projects in various stages of completion. But teachers who've received the American Teacher Award (ATA), sponsored by the Walt Disney Corp., say a stimulating visual environment is just part of the picture.

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During a recent appearance on BBC's Question Time, Michael Gove, the secretary of state for education, extolled the importance of encouraging creativity in schools. He's right. Creativity is essential to the success and fulfilment of young people, to the vitality of our communities and to the long-term health of the economy. The trouble is that his current plans for the national curriculum seem likely to stifle the creativity of students and teachers alike. Consequently, anyone with a serious interest in student achievement, cultural vitality and economic sustainability should be deeply concerned.

We shouldn't be surprised when a politician says one thing and does another. The important issue here is that when he talks about creativity, Gove seems to mean what he says but to misunderstand what he's talking about. His views also suggest some serious misconceptions about teaching and learning in general. So what is creativity, and how does it work?

I define creativity as the process of having original ideas that have value. Creative work in any field often passes through typical phases. Sometimes what you end up with is not what you had in mind when you started. It's a dynamic process that often involves making new connections, crossing disciplines and using metaphors and analogies.

Creativity is about fresh thinking. It doesn't have to be new to the whole of humanity - though that's always a bonus - but certainly to the person whose work it is. Creativity also involves making critical judgments about whether what you're working on is any good, whether it's a theorem, a design or a poem.

There are various myths about creativity. One is that only special people are creative; another is that creativity is just about the arts; a third is that it's all to do with uninhibited "self-expression". None of these is true. On the contrary, everyone has creative capacities; creativity is possible in whatever you do, and it can require great discipline and many different skills.

I imagine Gove would agree with all of this. But his conclusions about how to promote creativity are very wide of the mark. On Question Time he had a lot to say about what's involved in being creative. He insists, for instance, that children have to learn the necessary skills before they can start to be creative. In English, he says, "creativity depends on mastering certain skills and acquiring a body of knowledge before being able to give expression to what's in you ... You cannot be creative unless you understand how sentences are constructed, what words mean and how to use grammar."

In mathematics, "unless children are introduced to that stock of knowledge, unless they know how to use numbers with confidence, unless multiplication, long division, become automatic processes, they won't be able to use mathematics creatively ... to make the discoveries which are going to make our lives better in the future".

Even if you're musically gifted, he says, "you need first of all to learn your scales. You need to secure a foundation on which your creativity can flourish." This all sounds like common sense. But like a lot of common sense it's wrong or, at best, a half-truth.

Over the past four years, I've spoken with many people about their particular talents and passions and how they discovered them. In my new book, Finding Your Element, I draw together some of the lessons they can teach us. Hans Zimmer is an Oscar-winning composer, who has created the scores for some of Hollywood's most successful films. As a child he loved to play the piano but had no patience for scales and rote learning. Whenever he tried to play or compose, his teacher would stop him and say: "Go and practise your scales!" He admits to being disruptive at school and was actually thrown out of eight of them. Finally, he arrived at number nine.

The headmaster took him to one side on the first day and said: "Look, I've read all these reports. How are we going to avoid this sort of trouble here? What is it you really want to do?" Hans said that all he really wanted to do was play music. With the head's support, he spent most of the time doing exactly that. Slowly he became engaged in other work too. He remembers a particularly brilliant teacher who took the class for German studies.

"He'd be sitting on his piano stool and he'd be talking about something and then he'd whip around and play the music of its period. Suddenly all this stuff started to come alive. Learning wasn't about learning things by heart and then regurgitating them like a bad cheese sandwich. He was fantastic."

It was the flexibility of that school and the inspiration of a few teachers that helped set Hans on the way to his extraordinary career. You might object that Hans is an exceptional case, but in several ways he is not.

First, creativity, like learning in general, is a highly personal process. We all have different talents and aptitudes and different ways of getting to understand things. Raising achievement in schools means leaving room for these differences and not prescribing a standard steeplechase for everyone to complete at the same time and in the same way.

Second, creativity is not a linear process, in which you have to learn all the necessary skills before you get started. It is true that creative work in any field involves a growing mastery of skills and concepts. It is not true that they have to be mastered before the creative work can begin. Focusing on skills in isolation can kill interest in any discipline. Many people have been put off mathematics for life by endless rote tasks that did nothing to inspire them with the beauty of numbers. Many have spent years grudgingly practicing scales for music examinations only to abandon the instrument altogether once they've made the grade.

The real driver of creativity is an appetite for discovery and a passion for the work itself. When students are motivated to learn, they naturally acquire the skills they need to get the work done. Their mastery of them grows as their creative ambitions expand. You'll find evidence of this process in great teaching in every discipline from football to chemistry.

Third, facilitating this process takes connoisseurship, judgment - and, yes, creativity, on the part of teachers. One concern about the revised national curriculum is that it will be too linear and prescriptive. For creativity to flourish, schools have to feel free to innovate without the constant fear of being penalised for not keeping with the programme. Too much prescription is a dead hand on the creative pulse of teachers and students alike.

Oddly, Gove seems to think he can improve schools by demeaning teachers. He can't. The evidence of high-performing systems around the world is that genuine school improvement depends on positive engagement with the profession. There's no other way. Unless he's prepared to teach everyone himself, he cannot improve education by vilifying educators.

When for the first time in their history two major teaching unions pass votes of no confidence in the secretary of state, he might pause a moment. A good general, it's said, doesn't fire on his own troops. Yet, to judge by his recent rant in the Daily Mail against "Marxist" professors, his head-butting with the unions and his condescension on Question Time to the shadow attorney general, he clearly revels in letting off fusillades against anyone who disagrees with him on education. An essential first step in being creative yourself is to question your own way of looking at things. If he's serious about promoting creativity in others, perhaps Gove could start there.
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To encourage creativity, Mr Gove, you must first understand what it is | Ken Robinson

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During a recent appearance on BBC's Question Time, Michael Gove, the secretary of state for education, extolled the importance of encouraging creativity in schools. He's right. Creativity is essential to the success and fulfilment of young people, to the vitality of our communities and to the long-term health of the economy.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dbhoi01mTo8

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Teacher's Conference 2013 'Seven Ways to Promote Creativity in the Classroom' by Carol Read

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Whether you teach pre-school, young learners, teens or adults, the ability to make your classroom a place where creativity thrives is a crucial factor in motivating and engaging learners. This talk explores seven ways to promote creativity and illustrates each one with a range of practical ideas which can be used with learners of different ages and levels.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AZ2HTuyK34

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Creative thinking: new ideas in education - learning world

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Does creativity come from within or is it a skill which can be developed? Creative education is... euronews, the most watched news channel in Europe Subscribe for your daily dose of international news, curated and explained:http://eurone.ws/10ZCK4a Euronews is available in 13 other languages: http://eurone.ws/17moBCU http://www.euronews.com/2013/12/20/creative-thinking-new-ideas-in-education Does creativity come from within or is it a skill which can be developed?

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-wUWF6VE10

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaweXw03kQI

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Ten years ago this month a 243-page report on the importance of promoting creativity and culture in schools landed on ministers' desks.
It had been commissioned in the heady early days of the Blair government to recommend ways to make progress in the "creative and cultural development of young people" both in and out of school.

The review was led by Sir Ken Robinson and included leading scientists, business leaders, and key figures from the arts world.

It was widely acclaimed.

It argued that creativity was a skill that could be taught.

It was not about progressive teaching or loose discipline. Nor was it in any way an alternative to the essential skills of numeracy and literacy.

Rather it was about encouraging pupils to be innovative and to develop the ability to problem-solve in all areas of the curriculum, from maths to technology.

It argued that such skills were essential to individuals, employers and the whole economy.
Tough
But what has happened since?

There has certainly been cultural activity in schools but even the strongest champions of creative and cultural education would have to admit that the report - called All Our Futures - has not dominated schools policy.

That's because it came out just at a time when the new Labour government was investing its energy in boosting standards in the "three Rs".

Determined to show it was tough in standards, Labour's drive was focused on the Numeracy and Literacy Hours.

Ask a primary school pupil in England what numeracy or literacy is and they will have no hesitation in describing what they do in class for an hour each day.

But creativity? Even if All Our Futures had suggested a "creativity hour" it would probably have been seen as a distraction from the key message on standards.

Of course, it did not recommend anything as gimmicky, since the whole tenor of the report was that creativity and culture are not some sort of bolt-on activities, but are skills that should be developed throughout all aspects of teaching and learning, in science as much as in the arts.

In some ways the report was ahead of its time.

It called for a reduction in the burden of assessment and said the national curriculum should be reduced to take up no more than 80% of the timetable.

The latter recommendation probably now seems too modest, an indication of how far the call for greater freedom for schools has been reflected in subsequent reforms of the curriculum.
Results 'boost'
But any satisfaction the authors of All Our Futures may draw from subsequent events must, surely, be tempered by recognition that there is still a long way to go before creativity is seen as fundamental to teaching and learning in schools.

The current fierce debate about the national tests, or Sats, at age 11 hinges on whether they contribute to a narrowing of the curriculum, with many teachers and schools feeling they dominate the final years of primary school.

Indeed, the accountability criteria that determine success or failure for schools and teachers are overwhelmingly based on formal tests, particularly covering English and maths, not on indicators that reflect pupils' creativity.

So you could not blame head teachers if they felt it was more important to secure their school against league table failure - or the triggering of an Ofsted inspection - than to promote creativity.

However, a report published this week by the new charity Creativity, Culture and Education (CCE) highlights research suggesting that a focus on creativity in schools need not be at the expense of achievement in the basics.

Indeed, it claims the very opposite: that creativity boost exam results and attendance.

The report looks at the record of a programme called Creative Partnerships.

This programme - which fosters collaborative partnerships between schools and creative professionals including artists, performers, architects and scientists - has now engaged almost one million school students and 90,000 teachers.

According to research from the independent National Foundation for Educational Research, which covered 13,000 young people, pupils who have taken part in Creative Partnerships' programmes have often outperformed others who have not been involved.

The NFER research found many of the differences were relatively small but it did conclude that "The results of this study suggest that Creative Partnerships is contributing to improved levels of attainment."

In particular, it found that "Young people who have attended Creative Partnerships activities made, on average, the equivalent of 2.5 grades better progress in GCSE than similar young people in other schools."

While the NFER is at pains to point out that from the evidence so far the gains are small, this is clearly an encouraging sign for those who argue that creative and cultural education is not just some sort of woolly feel-good effect.
Report cards
Perhaps more important, though, is the NFER evidence which suggests Creative Partnerships programmes have been associated with an "educationally significant reduction in absence rates in primary schools".

Ofsted has also monitored Creative Partnership programmes.

It found "improvements in literacy, particularly writing, and speaking were significant in the majority of schools visited".

Educational research is rarely definitive as there are always so many other variables involved in pupil attainment.

But the evidence so far seems to back the view that putting a real emphasis on creative and cultural education in schools has broad benefits.

However, getting all schools to take this route will continue to be difficult when the accountability measures that determine the success or failure of schools continue to emphasise short-term improvements in formal qualifications.

Perhaps the government's proposed new School Report Cards can find a way of indicating whether a school is successfully promoting creative and cultural education?

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Ten years ago this month a 243-page report on the importance of promoting creativity and culture in schools landed on ministers' desks. It had been commissioned in the heady early days of the Blair government to recommend ways to make progress in the "creative and cultural development of young people" both in and out of school.

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Learning creative approaches that raise standards

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What is the second teacher doing that the first one isn't? He or she is using creativity in that classroom. Creativity makes a huge difference. Creativity is vital for a classroom to be successful. There is a common misconception that the word "creative" has to do mostly with the arts. But being artistic is only a small part of creativity. While any classroom environment would benefit from a teacher blessed with the gift of artistic talent, creativity is many other things.

Creativity is innovation.
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results. If something isn't working, then it's broken and needs to be fixed. Come up with something else that will work for your students.

Creativity is thinking outside the box.
Everything doesn't always have to be black and white. Sometimes the oddball activities are the ones that work.

Creativity is improvisation.
Things don't always turn out the way you planned. When I've realized that a lesson wasn't working midway through, I literally tossed it out and started over. I tried a different angle (in this case, incorporating a movie that my students liked), and it worked.

Creativity is professional growth.
We don't always have all of the answers. If you can't figure out what to do, use your coworkers as resources. You might find some really great ideas that make sense for your students. Also, look at research and see what has worked for other teachers around the world. Use resources like KS2, hubbardscupboard.org, and starfall.com for some fun engaging activities.

Creativity is being a risk taker or mold breaker.
I have had many crazy ideas for things to try in the classroom. Some have worked and some haven't, but I found that trying was better than being stuck in the same pattern that isn't working.

Creativity is passion.
Be passionate about what you are doing. You are there to inspire students to become lifelong learners. If you want them to love learning, you have to love what you are teaching.

Suggested Activities: The Game of Learning

For the first six activities, seat your students in a circle and introduce a ball or something else they can pass easily between them.

1. "I know a word"
You can begin this skills game by saying, "I know a word that starts with the same sound you hear at the beginning of butterfly." Students will raise their hands, and you choose one to tell you a word the starts with "B." Once they tell you the word, toss them the ball. They choose someone else to tell them another word that begins with that letter, passing the ball to the student who gets it right. As the game continues, change the letter every so often. Play until everyone has had a turn. You can use this game for beginning sounds, ending sounds, middle sounds etc.

2. Rhyme time
Say, "I need a word that rhymes with cat." Pass the ball to someone once they give you a correct rhyming word. Keep changing the starting word and continue the game until all kids have gone.

3. Practice counting
You can have your class practice counting by twos, fives and tens. Pass the ball clockwise or counterclockwise, with the student who receives it saying the number that comes next. For example, you say, "We are going to count by fives. Five!" The person next to you says "ten," the next one says "fifteen," and so on.

4. Spelling review
For older kids, you can pass the ball and go through your spelling words one letter at a time. For example, you say, "We're going to spell the word t heir, as in 'This is their ball.'" The first person says "T," the second person says "H," the third person says "E," and so on. If one says the wrong letter, the next person says correct letter and fixes the mistake.

5. "I need a synonym"
This is a great vocabulary building exercise. You can use the ball or a pair of flyswatters, depending on the age of your students. You say, "I need a synonym for mad." Choose someone to give you another word that means the same thing, such as angry, furious and enraged. For older kids, you can put a list of synonyms on the board and divide the class into two teams. Have one person from each team come up and compete. Whoever slaps the board with the flyswatter and says the correct synonym wins a point for their team. In the end all of your students win a better vocabulary.

6. Reinforce other skills
What other subjects are you teaching? You could adapt these games to fit pretty much anything. "I need a name of an explorer." "I need you to name one of the phases of matter." "I need to know one of the reasons for the Civil War." Be creative!

7. Roll dice to have your students answer story questions.
"What is the plot of the story?" you might ask them. "What is the setting?" You can introduce more reflective questions such as, "Why did this character do what he or she did?" and "What was the author's purpose?" You can write these questions on cards or purchase them from reallygoodstuff.com.

8. Sight Word Slap Game
Write your sight words on the board. Separate your class into two random teams. Let one person from each team step forward and hold a fly swatter. Call out one of the sight words. The first one to slap the correct sight word gets a point for their team. Continue until everyone has gone. This is great for helping sight word recognition.

Suggested Activities: The Artsy Side of Creative

9. Use different voices or accents when reading stories to the class.

10. Dress in costumes of storybook characters to leave a lasting impression, or let students dress up as characters to retell stories.

11. Turn your room into the environment of what you are learning about. When the class is learning about fairy tales, turn your classroom into a castle. When you're learning about animals, turn your classroom into a jungle.

12. Create class songs about topics they need to know, or use the music of singers like Hap Palmer and Jack Hartman. You might also borrow songs and games from coworkers. Songs are catchy, and children learn quickly from them.

Creative Science

13. When teaching about the properties of friction, use KS2 for interactive projects you can do in small groups or as a class using a smart board. You might ask your students slide down the hallway first in their socks, then barefoot, and have them journal about the different amounts of friction.

14. When teaching phases of matter, drop some food coloring into beakers of cold and warm water and note the difference. Then pour the contents of one beaker in a bag and put it in the freezer. The next day, compare the liquid bag with the solid chunk of ice and note differences.

15. Use the ice from the above activity and talk about gravity. Stand on a chair and discuss what will happen if you drop the ice, and if it matters which way you drop it. Let your students predict the possible outcomes.

Incorporate Your Students' Favorite Things

16. Survey your students at the beginning of the year. Get to know them and what they like. Then make a point of using their names, favorite foods, games, books, etc. in word problems, writing exercises, shared reading and many other activities. People do better and learn more when working with things they like. As adults we know that we don't want to do something if it's not fun. The same goes for kids.

Creative time savers

17. Have your students rely on each other as resources. For each table, pick a team leader to try answering his or her classmates' questions before they come to you for help.

18. Pair your higher achievers with lower achievers to study sight words, letters or other skills.

19. Put them into literature circles to discuss books.

20. Have them read one another's writing to check for completion or suggest ideas before they come see you.

21. Use the Leap Frog Reader system. You can plug it into the computer to get student scores on activities, which will provide guidelines for what you need to work on. This is a great way to collect data!

22. Have a "math problem of the day" journal to review skills in which your students scored low on assessments. Put the problem on the board and have them copy it into their journals at the beginning of the day. You can take a minute or two after they have completed it to review the problem with the class. Check notebooks later for understanding.

Live Like a Turtle

For those of you trying to figure out how you'll find the time to integrate all this into an already busy teaching day, here's some food for thought. It will take longer to teach a lesson three times than it will to teach it once using a little creativity. Make time for creativity. Most of the above creative activities take only a few minutes to do. They also require very little prep time and cost very little money, if any. So go ahead -- be a risk taker and try at least one of these ideas this week. I'm sure you won't regret it.

As I said above, everyone has bad days, but overall my classroom is a happy place to be. It's like this because I use creativity to make learning fun. I live by these words that Dr. Ruth once said: "Live life every day like a turtle." To get anywhere, a turtle has to stick its neck out and take a risk. So take risks every day. It's the only way to truly live and make a difference in the world.

What are some of your favorite tips and tricks for bringing creativity into your elementary students?

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22 Simple Ideas for Harnessing Creativity in the Elementary Classroom

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Look through the door of one classroom and you might see the students hunched over, not engaged, even frowning. Look through the door of another classroom, and you might see a room full of lively students, eager, engaged and participating. What is the second teacher doing that the first one isn't?

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Creativity is on our minds. That's because it's central, along with skills like collaboration, critical thinking, and communication, to the shift from teacher-directed learning to a more student-centered, project-based approach. We don't want our students' creativity to end with the comments they leave on their friends' Facebook pages. We want them to look at every problem they face with a creative eye: How can I best answer this question? Am I thinking of all the possible alternatives? What's the most interesting approach for me?

But creativity faces an uphill battle. The pressures of standardized testing can make any teacher feel as creative as a bubble test. Here are ideas from the winners of Crayola's Champion Creatively Alive Children grants, schools that found exciting ways to bring more creativity to their classrooms.

What You Can Do In 4 Minutes

Use Journals-The Right Way

Forced journal writing is a chore. But when done purposefully and with emphasis on scribbling and sketching, journaling offers students an opportunity to reflect and make connections. It's integral to the curriculum at Montana's East Glacier Park Grade School, where students study the state's American Indian tribes all year long. Every week, students respond to prompts that encourage them to link that week's material to their own lives. In a unit on the Native American understanding of nature, for example, they draw or write about a favorite outdoor place in their journals. All it takes is minutes a day.

Drop Everything and Create

For years, many teachers have made time each day for independent reading. At Evergreen Mill Elementary School in Leesburg, Virginia, classes are put on pause for "Stop, Drop, and Create." During these sessions, everyone from students to teachers to support staff tackles the same creative challenge, such as illustrating an imaginary bug or making an underwater creature out of clay. "The creative energy that crackles through our school is incredible," one Evergreen Mill teacher reports. Begin with your own class and then convince other teachers to join in!

Try Cubing

Cubing asks students to think about a topic from different angles. First, you write a question or task on each side of a six-sided block. For example: Who? What? When? Where? Why? How? Or: Describe It, Compare It, Associate It, Analyze It, Apply It, Argue For/Against It. Then students use the cubes in discussion, as writing prompts, or for brainstorming. It has become a beloved technique among teachers at P.S. 315 School of the Performing Arts in Brooklyn, New York. They first used cubing in a project on African culture, but the applications are endless-you might try cubing in reading groups or to make scientific hypotheses.

What You Can Do In 4 Hours

Invite an Artist to Your School

Host a local artist for an afternoon or an entire day. Students will see creativity at work in the real world, learn specific techniques, and strengthen the ideas they've studied in class. The Springville K-8 School in Beaverton, Oregon, calls in local experts to teach concepts that link back to the curriculum. When fifth graders are learning about the ecosystem, for example, a professional illustrator works with students, helping them as they make sketches for a neighborhood field guide. And remember, with the advent of Skype, local has new meaning.

Visit Other Schools by Video

If you belong to a professional learning community, consider spending one of your sessions watching the Champion Creatively Alive Children video series available from Crayola.com. The series features ideas and inspiration from the 2010 grant-winning schools. You'll see teachers and kids in action and discover transferable strategies for your own school. Watch the series with your grade-level team or suggest that your principal incorporate it into your next professional development day.

Let Your Students Be the Guides

Many schools have the occasional open house. Springville K-8 takes it to the next level. Throughout the year, teachers place an emphasis on quality and revision to help students create the finest possible products. The best work is displayed during Exhibition Night, and students serve as tour guides, leading visitors through the displays and explaining the processes involved in creating them. The stepped-up responsibility keeps students engaged and lets them experience the final step in the learning journey-teaching the material to others. Before your next open house, teach your students how to be tour guides. Help them plan what they'll say and the route they'll take through the school. Then open your doors and enjoy!

What You Can Do In 4 Days

Team Up With Colleagues

Whole-school collaboration can be an overwhelming goal. But it all begins with a first step. Start by brainstorming with one or two colleagues on creative ways to connect your lessons. At Flocktown-Kossmann Elementary School in Long Valley, New Jersey, art teacher Melinda Hemberger collaborated with the school's fifth-grade team to teach students about the artist Mondrian in conjunction with their study in mathematics of the Cartesian plane. Teachers at the school found that students gained a deeper understanding of both subjects when they were taught together.

Make Room for Students' Work

When educators at the Springville K-8 School in Beaverton decided to focus on creativity, their first step was to fill the school with student work. Previously, the school had only one display area, near the front entrance, but that soon expanded to include many of the school's other hallways and gathering spots. Take an inventory of your existing and potential display areas, and then recruit volunteers to help transform them. Think outside of the box-consider painting secondhand picture frames in a rainbow of colors and filling them with corkboard. Each month, you can pin new student-generated art in the frames.

Start an After-School Club

If you work with an at-risk population, consider following in the footsteps of the sixth-grade teachers at Harriet Gifford Elementary School in Elgin, Illinois. They submitted the names of boys facing significant academic and social issues. The students were then invited to join a special after-school club promoting teamwork, creativity, and cultural heritage as well as academic skills. The club meets weekly and teachers report that many members have made academic gains. If teachers work together, the groundwork for starting a club can be laid in less than a week.

What You Can Do In 4 Weeks

Paint a Mural

Murals are a perennially favorite project, but how do you tie them to the curriculum and keep them from being just a fun, decorative add-on? At Estelle Elementary School in Marrero, Louisiana, a mural was the culminating project for a school-wide study of the BP oil spill and its effect on the Louisiana coastline. Students at every grade level worked in groups to paint ceramic tiles depicting what they had learned about the state's unique ecosystem. Current events, local history, and local culture can also provide inspiration for a school mural.

Find Community Support

Many organizations work to support the arts in schools. Look for ones in your area that can help supplement your existing curriculum. You may be surprised by what you can achieve. When educators at P.S. 154 in the Bronx, New York, wanted to boost their character education program, they reached out to two local puppeteer groups, Central Park's Swedish Cottage Marionette Theatre and CityParks PuppetMobile. Soon every class in the school had seen a professional puppet show, and students were on their way to making their own shows about character education.

Give Students Choice

The journey from teacher-led instruction to project-based learning is gradual, but there are ways to offer more student choice now. Give students a list of projects to choose from, for example, rather than have everyone do the same thing. At Mitchell Elementary School in Chicago, art teacher Julie Toole began moving from traditional art classes to a studio approach. She introduces an idea or concept, then students decide what they want to make, who they will collaborate with, and the approach they want to use. Toole says she's seen a radical change in students' engagement and in the work they produce. "The students are intrinsically motivated because they are choosing how to best express their ideas." Now other teachers are following suit.

What You Can Do In 4 Months

Have Every Student Write a Book

Can you imagine if every student in your class were a published author? How would it change students' vision of themselves as readers, writers, and creators? At Orems Elementary School in Baltimore, educators set out to have all students publish their own books. The project was multifaceted. Teachers participated in workshops on bookmaking, while working with students on drafting and revising original stories. In art class, students learned about different illustration styles. Students' books have been added to the library for others to enjoy. Find out how to publish kids' books free at studentpublishing.com.

Attempt a School-Wide Project

When an entire school works to learn about the same topic, surprising connections emerge. At Oxford Elementary School in Oxford, Mississippi, students did a school-wide study of Walter Anderson, a local artist, naturalist, writer, and traveler. Teachers across the grade levels incorporated Anderson into their lessons, everyone visited a local museum, and students collaborated on projects in tribute to the artist. The key to launching a project of this scope, says former principal Jeff Clay (now head of the middle school), was discussing the importance of arts-infused education and planning as a team.

Collaborate With Another School

Working with older students can inspire your students' creativity and offer kids at both grade levels the opportunity to make connections. Over the course of several months, kindergartners at Zane North Elementary School in Collingswood, New Jersey, worked with buddies at nearby Collingswood High School on a project about conquering their fears. Students at both levels read Maya Angelou's poem "Life Doesn't Frighten Me" and worked together to paint panels depicting personal superpowers. As the buddies took turns adding to their shared canvases, they learned about respectful collaboration and what it means to work in a creative partnership.

What You Can Do In 4 Years

Assess Your Teaching Style

What is the state of creativity in your classroom? How many of your lessons involve students asking questions, brainstorming solutions, and working with their peers? How often do you take a break from the books and try making movies or creating dioramas instead? What are your goals with regard to creativity? Where do you want to be in one, two, or three years? Delve deeper by taking the SAILS Teaching Style Assessment at roanestate.edu/qep/teachingstyles.html or a Grasha-Riechmann teaching-style assessment.

Embrace Project-Based Learning

Make a plan to increase the number of project-based assessments in your own classroom. A first goal might be to replace one traditional assessment with a project that incorporates cross-curricular concepts and creativity. Show your plan to your principal to get him or her on board. When it's successful (and you know it will be!), you'll have grounding to step up the number of projects throughout the year.

Find Like-Minded Friends

Fellow teachers who believe in the value of creativity are your best allies. Together, you can brainstorm strategies for developing new approaches to the traditional curriculum that encourage students to find their own answers to problems, instead of memorizing the ones in the textbook. You can issue creative learning challenges that capture students' attention and engage their minds. After all, good thinkers and natural collaborators who approach their world with curiosity and persistence are precisely what we hope our students grow up to be.

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Creativity is on our minds. That's because it's central, along with skills like collaboration, critical thinking, and communication, to the shift from teacher-directed learning to a more student-centered, project-based approach. We don't want our students' creativity to end with the comments they leave on their friends' Facebook pages.

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My slides from my recent seminar for LEND on Creating a Creative Classroom Culture in Turin, Italy (March 2015)