About
Creativity – in culture, business, technology, scientific research, civic life and philanthropy – is one of Washington state’s competitive advantages in the world. Yet in the current culture of public education, it’s often challenging for teachers to teach creativity and for schools to focus on it. Fundamentally, what’s needed now is a consensus that the purpose of school is not just to transmit certain kinds of content knowledge but also to equip students with the habits, mindsets and practices for creative thought and action.
Defining Our Terms
What do we mean by creativity? Creativity is the capacity to make or express things that didn’t exist before or to solve problems in new ways. It’s different from imagination, which is the ability to conceive of new things; creativity is about the doing of what is conceived. Creativity is also distinguishable from innovation: innovation is the product of creativity; an innovation advances a form or the state of a field of knowledge or endeavor. The chain of concepts flows as follows: creativity is imagination applied; innovation, in turn, is creativity applied.
Why Creativity Matters
Creativity matters because it is an essential element of self-directed lifelong learning. Creativity matters because it enables our citizens to adapt to rapidly changing economic, civic and cultural circumstances. Creativity matters because it is vital for high-value work and for the competitiveness of our economy: it is the one capacity that cannot – or rather, must not – be outsourced. Observers of globalization like Thomas Friedman, business leaders like Bill Gates, and gurus of education reform like Ken Robinson all agree: creativity should be America’s competitive advantage. But it doesn’t just happen; we have to cultivate it. We want our schools to teach creativity – and to be recognized the world over for generating creative graduates.
In our schools, the goal of cultivating creativity has been obscured by many forces. Yet creativity is the key to keeping students motivated to learn and teachers inspired to teach. The arts are often cited as an exemplar of creativity –and they are. But we believe that creativity is in fact expressed across every discipline. It is part of how scientific experiments are set up, how math concepts are applied, how dilemmas of economics are resolved, how the memories of a community are converted into literature, or how career and technical education courses are made relevant to students who want to pursue a life in the trades.
Creativity Can Be Taught
Too many people, across too many walks of life, believe that creativity is a fixed entity that you either have or you don’t. We believe this notion is flat wrong. We believe creativity can be distilled into discrete and learnable practices, habits of mind, and habits of heart – and that with exposure and repeated practice, every student’s creative capacity can be increased. Pedagogy, teacher training, school design, school leadership, project-based learning, and of course, the classroom experience – all these aspects of education can be optimized for creativity.
Creativity Must Be Taught
Once it is established that creativity can be taught, we are left with an imperative: it must be taught. It must be shared, not with a few but with all students in our state.
Conclusion
The challenge we face is simple: creativity matters more than ever if we want to sustain the dynamism of our state and society, and yet in the current culture of public education, it’s harder than ever for teachers to teach creativity and for students to learn it. There are many reasons why room for creativity is being squeezed out, figuratively and literally. Some are as old as bureaucracy itself, some as new as recent policy directives. But perhaps more fundamentally, what’s missing in our state’s approach to public education is a prevailing mindset that one of the core purposes of our schools is to equip students with a capacity for creative thought, vision and action. Until that mindset is explicitly stated, widely held and relentlessly implemented, we have a long way to go.
Imagine a state where every public school classroom, no matter what the social circumstance, is a hotbed of creativity; where teachers are trained from the beginning to cultivate imagination and creativity; where teachers feel that teaching creativity is not a deviation from the plan but is the very essence of their work; where such teachers and their principals are rewarded for such thinking; where policymakers give educators enough resources and learning time to foster creativity; where elected officials and business leaders and parents take a capacious view of education and see that its end is not only to create trained workers but adaptive lifelong learners who can infuse their workplaces and communities with innovation and imagination.
It’s time for Washington State to lead the way.