Teaching Creativity

In this July 10 Newsweek article, entitled "The Creativity Crisis," Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman address a concept that's central to the work we're doing in reforming Staples' educational mission. One of the unintended consequences of our test-based, correct-answer-seeking curriculum is that we teach kids to figure out what we want them to say, what fact they should be pulling from their notes or their textbooks.

When we get obsessed with test scores, we may lose sight of the crucial creative aspect of problem solving and ethical, expressive living. If kids are walked through a derivation or an essay format, they can learn to reproduce it for us, often very accurately and effectively. However, when we teach them that this learning of formulae is real learning, we push kids away from creativity and ownership of their learning and towards parrothood.

This walkthrough model may have a doubly damning effect when it's applied to the wrong kind of "scaffolding" for lower performing kids. Kids in lower level classes are often trailing their peers partly—or largely—because they don't engage in creative, durable problem solving. A successful kid attacks a problem from multiple angles, enjoying the challenge with no fear of failure, either because he is confident or because the problem is presented in a context that allows responsible risk taking.

An unsuccessful kid gives up because the solution has not been previously presented, and he lacks either the skill to come at the problem multiple times from multiple angles or the will to do so. That will can be sapped by a series of perceived failures (I'm bad at math), a lack of engagement for personal reasons, or a lack of creative ability.

I use the following scenario to illustrate this point with my students: take two students of equal ability in math, and give them a test with ten questions, each progressively more difficult. Question one is easy, and both students are sure to get it. Question ten is very difficult, and it's extremely unlikely that either student will be equipped to answer it. Tell student A the following: "I'm giving you ten questions, each more difficult than the last. I expect that you'll find them too difficult after about question four. Don't worry; just do your best." Tell student B this: "I'm giving you ten questions, each more difficult than the last. They get harder and harder, but I bet you can figure them all out if you really think about it and try a bunch of different ideas."

Which student do you think will get further along? Which student will learn more? Over time, if Student A internalizes the message "You're only about this good at math" and Student B internalizes "you can figure all of these out if you try," you'll have produced one student who's "bad at math" and one student who loves it. Obviously, there are more factors that come into play in a student's development in a discipline, but I think a message that encourages problem solving and taking creative, responsible risks will create more "good at math" kids.

As a teacher of writing, I cannot count the number of times I've had a smart, hardworking student whose growth was chilled by repeated attempts to fine tune a previously successful format, when what he needed to be doing was making repeated attempts to creatively reinvent his writing. The kid learns a standard essay format in the eighth grade and is moderately successful in retreading and refining that format in the ninth grade. Since we typically teach writing by making kids write and then pointing out their errors, he learns that excellence in writing is following through on a format without errors.

Then, in tenth grade, I ask him to find something textual and honest to say, and he's lost. He wants a three-part thesis he can prove in five paragraphs, and since he's been successful in that format, he believes that continuing to grow as a writer means continuing to hunt down errors. The message that is often lost is that good writing is about the depth, significance, and form of what you have to say. It's what's in there that makes it great writing; it's not what errors you took out.

So here's my favorite quote from the article, and the one I think that best crystallizes its relevance to our work: "When creative children have a supportive teacher—someone tolerant of unconventional answers, occasional disruptions, or detours of curiosity—they tend to excel."

Our teaching model needs to move away from rows of desks at which children sit and pursue correct answers based on the material they read and the things we say. Our model needs to create a safe space—both geographically in the classroom and metaphysically in our assignments—for kids to be spectacularly wrong. We need to teach through inquiry, not explanation. Our scaffolding needs to encourage creativity by presenting kids with problems they have to solve; it cannot simply help them reconstruct a formula.

Those traditional formats and genres—the geometrical proof, the analytical essay—are not necessarily flawed themselves; rather, our teaching of them is flawed when it asks kids to arrive at a predetermined starting point by following the rules we tell them. You can't blame the teachers: it's simply more feasible to grade correct answers and teach rules when you have to meet state standards in oversized classes. Creative teaching is often as scary to outsiders and even the teacher himself as creative thinking is to kids who've learned that success involves figuring out what the adult is asking you to write down.