Sir Ken Robinson is a brilliant communicator and educator. It’s almost impossible to not love his TED talks and this particular quote, ““Creativity is now as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.”
But what is creativity?
Beyond thinking differently?
Ulrich Kraft, a researcher and writer, frames it this way in his 2005 paper Unleashing Creativity (also featured in F.Bloom (Ed)., Best of the brain from Scientific American: Mind, matter, and tomorrow’s brain), “Fresh solutions result from dissassembling and reassembling the building blocks in an infinite number of ways. That means the problem solver must thoroughly understand the blocks.”
Dr. Mariale Hardiman, author of “The Brain Targeted Teaching Model for 21st Century Schools”, reframes for the classroom like this, “In order to think creatively about something you have to have mastered some knowledge about it.”
It’s the old adage of knowing the rules before you can break the rules.
Which is going to involve the F word.
When something doesn’t go quite as planned.
In the film, Jeremy Mettler talks about the push to encourage creativity in his classroom, “If you’re trying something new you’re probably going to fail because you’re just not going to get it on the first try. If you do, then it was too easy or it was a problem that was solved before.”
So the question isn’t so much teaching our kids to be creative, as it is teaching our kids to start over, in the face of failing.
Which brings up the R word.
Resilience is swiftly falling into the overused category in education. It’s up there with grit. But it demands examination. Why does one student, when faced with failure, tackle it with curiosity and inquisitiveness as in, “Hmm…I wonder why that happened,” versus another, who wilts, taking the failure as a personal defeat, personalizing and owning it, as in, “I am a failure.”
Jessica Lahey has written an entire book on failure so I won’t get into it too much, other than to recommend The Gift of Failure and this article she wrote for The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/08/when-success-leads-to-failure/400925/
The gist of it is that parents need to give their children a chance to work through obstacles. Mettler does the same thing in his classroom, “When kids ask me for help, chances are very good I’m not going to get there right away. It’s a class of 25 students. But I also want them to try it on their own first. It gives them a chance to test their abilities and a lot of times, they figure it out. Too often, students assume something is hard, and they haven’t even read the question.”
Angela Watson, from Cornerstone for Teachers, wrote a great post for when students say, “I don’t know.”
So what’s the Y word?
It’s three letters.
And it can make a world of difference to learners.
As in "You don’t know yet. But you'll figure it out."
So what will you do differently on your next try?