CREATIVE AND CRITICAL THINKING

High School
Painting a Picture of
Our Creative David Mc Grath, HS Principal Schoolby
In his popular TedTalk soon to top 15 million views, Sir Ken
Robinson shares the endearing anecdote of a little girl in a
classroom drawing a picture of God. The teacher leans in to
break the news gently, “Honey, no one knows what God
looks like.” The child replies with unscathed focus on her
drawing, “Don’t worry. They will in a minute.”
Such confidence and poise. So much to gain and so little to
lose... she has not yet learned inhibition and taking chances
is second nature to this five year old.
The call for 21 st century schools to highly value and
effectively teach creativity is loud and clear. We know the
world is changing at a mindboggling rate. We know
industrial economies are giving way to service economies.
And we know that most jobs our children will occupy don’t
even exist today.
With instant communication and collaboration through
video conferencing, social media and collaborative 2.0
spaces, we know our global interconnectedness is greater
than ever and infinitely more complex. Last month we
were at a hiring fair in San Francisco, Skyping with a
candidate in Missoula who later that evening conferenced
with our next high school principal and his family in Mexico
City. Before the end of the fair, we had met candidates in
person from all over the US and Skyped with teachers in
the Philippines, Mexico and China.
The very nature of knowledge is changing too. Like the
radio and printing press before it, the Internet brings the
next seismic shift of information away from the privileged
and educated few towards the knowledge-hungry masses.
With a few clicks of a mouse, people all over the world are
enrolling in university classes through free online providers
linked with top universities. Currently at ASFG, we have a
growing number of teachers enrolled in free college
courses through a web-based system called Coursera.
However, with access to information expanding, the
challenge becomes less how to acquire knowledge but
rather what to do with it. The convenience of knowing stuff
dissipates as the power of imagining stuff grows. IBM’s
2010 global CEO study, Capitalizing on Complexity, found
that in our increasingly complex and interconnected world,
“creativity trumps all other leadership characteristics.”
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The degree to which we are highly creative determines
more than ever our success or failure. In the tech industry
alone examples are everywhere. Google conducts 5 billion
searches a day while AltaVista is unknown to this
generation of digital natives. Facebook soars and MySpace
is a distant memory. We browse through Chrome and
Firefox and have long forgotten our Netscape bookmark.
Live Profile is prolific and most teens have never heard of
ICQ. Innovators know that what works today not only may
not work, but will not work tomorrow.
Is this a new idea that imagination, ingenuity and creativity
are essential skills of our modern era? Certainly not. To
quote the over-quoted Albert Einstein, “The true sign of
intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.” Almost 50
years ago Ted Kennedy eulogized his fallen brother Robert,
“some men see things as they are and ask why, my brother
imagined things that never were and asked why not.”
If we really want our students to “get ahead” in their own
projected professional and personal paths towards success,
they have to be able to imagine, create and innovate. To
land that ideal job, or better said, to create that ideal job,
our students need to be highly creative.
But more important than preparing them for their own
individual career and life paths, we teach creativity so that
our students will be (cliché alert) global citizens and
leaders of tomorrow. Can we invent our way out of the
many self-created and self-perpetuated problems such as
global warming, poverty and human aggression? I am
optimistic, but without creative people, the answer is a
resounding no. I believe our fourth ASFG learning goal,
community contributor, more than individual pursuits is at
the heart of our efforts to teach creativity.
So if the call for creativity is loud and clear, how are we
doing in education? Are we ahead, with or behind the
curve? I’ll let the educational pundits argue on the
theoretical stage. For us here in schools working with
students, teachers and parents every day, our beliefs,
decisions and strategies matter. Where should we focus our
efforts?
Let’s start by debunking some myths about creativity itself.
What our learning community believes about creativity is as
important as our determined strategies to teach it.
Myth 1. Creativity is born and lives most vibrantly in the arts.
I disagree. It is within the arts where creativity is most
appreciated and recognized as an essential component to
the learning outcomes. However, creativity needs to be
highly appreciated and taught in the sciences and
mathematics. A beautiful poem which envelopes us in the
human spirit undoubtedly requires creativity. But so does a
new scientific model or an unconventional strategy to solve
a math problem. The quantitative reasoning developed in
the sciences goes hand in hand with creativity.
Myth 2. Creativity happens spontaneously often without out
much practice or background knowledge. I disagree. I believe
in “learning the basics” for true innovation seldom stems
from a peripheral or shallow understanding of the
conceptual building blocks within a particular subject.
Myth 3. Creativity is an inborn trait and is largely unlearned.
I disagree. Under the right conditions, with the right
community values and with deliberate teaching and
assessing, creativity can certainly be learned.
Myth 4. Creativity is by nature immeasurable in any reliable
way. I disagree... wholeheartedly. Assessment of creativity,
while elusive, is an extremely important part of providing
an education that promotes and specifically teaches it.
On the last point, I, the enthusiastic quantitative thinker,
Mr. McMeasurment, believe the most important next-step
is to imagine and build agreement around, not only the
conditions that will promote creativity but also the
observable product of creativity. And I finally arrive at my
thesis statement.
For whatever endeavor we purport to be “effective” or
“helpful” on our never-ending but infinitely rewarding
journey to teach and learn creativity, we must first agree
upon and then describe what a highly creative person does.
Our efforts to teach creativity will only be a means to the
end of being creative. As faithful backwards-designers, we
must first imagine what would be the observable outcome
of a highly effective program of creativity and then use
those outcomes to determine if our strategies are working
or not.
To focus only on the conditions that allow for students to
be creative and ignoring the assessment of creativity itself,
is like building a beautiful playground but then never
observing the students playing on it.
Perhaps the easiest method of measuring our students’
creativity is applying a test like the Torrence Test of
Creativity which measures five mental characteristics:
fluency, elaboration, originality, resistance to premature
closure and abstractness.
A typical item on such test might ask students to come up
with as many uses for a brick as they can. Or, students are
asked to draw a picture incorporating a given figure such as
the one below. Such measures are appealing because they
provide norm-referenced scores of creativity that allow us
to step back and see beyond our local
school context.
But the short-comings of such a
standardized approach are widespread.
Our efforts to assess the teaching and
learning of creativity must be more robust and more
centered in authentic projects. In-house examples at ASFG
such as our emergent curriculum in early childhood,
Invention Convention in elementary, Project 20/20 in
middle school and our senior projects in high school result
in demonstrations of creativity that might not reliably show
up on a standardized test.
Our daunting task to robustly assess creativity endures but
so does our resolve. We continue on this journey of
imagination...
So let’s together paint a picture of a creative school. Or,
write a poem or a play. Storyboard a short film, AutoCad a
blueprint, and for those mathamagicians out there, create
and test a formula that predicts the interplay of essential
variables of a creative school. Whatever our creative lens,
let’s picture it….
What do we see? What color are the walls and where do
they stand? How is the furniture arranged and in what
unique architectural spaces?
What do we hear? What sounds emanate from the
classrooms, halls and playgrounds? Hammers pounding,
drills boring, keyboards clicking? Who is speaking, who is
listening and who is the audience?
What do we smell? The musty scent of crisp pages in a
classic novel? The distinctive air around a freshly printed
3D model? The richness of tilled earth from our school
garden?
What do we feel? The human touch, the sorrow of a
theatrical tragedy, the exhilaration of improv, the calming
reassurance of a scientific experiment well-designed and
evidence well-collected and interpreted?
And, most importantly, at the end of the day, after we
establish the conditions in our school that encourage
creativity and continue to explicitly teach it, how do we
know if our students are successful in learning to be
creative? What observable outcomes, projects, products
and performances will provide the evidence that our
students are ready to participate in our ever
changing, increasingly complex and
interconnected world?
High School
march
2013
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