Inspiring Creativity and Innovation in K-12. Douglas Reeves
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Use Brainstorming as the Best Way to Generate New Ideas
Demand That Student Work Is Right the First Time
Insist That Creative Work Is Immune From Evaluation and Criticism
Avoid Assessment of Creativity
Attitudes and Beliefs That Undermine Creativity
Creativity Is a Natural Talent or Gift
Real Creative Work Is Distinctly Original
Creativity Cannot Happen Without Inspiration
Left-Brain and Right-Brain Differences Heavily Influence Creativity
Creative Inspiration Is Like Lightning
Standards of Evidence
Personal Beliefs
Personal Experience
Collective Experience
Systematic Observation
Preponderance of Evidence
Chapter 4: How Educators and Leaders Can Encourage Creativity
Eight Dimensions of Creativity Assessment
The Current State of Creativity Assessment
Metarubric for Assessing Creativity Rubrics
Chapter 5: Adapting the Four Essential Questions of PLCs to Creativity
PLCs and Achievement
Using the Four Essential Questions to Enhance Creativity and Achievement
Chapter 6: Creativity for Education Policymakers
Inclusion
Collaboration
Debate, Dissent, and Discipline in Decision Making
Accountability
Forgiveness
About the Author
Douglas Reeves is a partner with Creative Leadership Solutions, serving education systems around the world. The author of more than thirty books and eighty articles on leadership and education, he has been named twice to the Harvard University Distinguished Author Series, received the Contribution to the Field Award from the National Staff Development Council (now Learning Forward), and was named the Brock International Laureate for his contributions to education. He is the founding publisher of the SNAFU Review, a literary and artistic project supporting disabled veterans whose writing and art inspire others struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder.
To learn more about Doug’s work, visit http://creativeleadership.net or follow him on Twitter @DouglasReeves.
To book Douglas Reeves for professional development, contact [email protected].
Chapter 1
Why Creativity Is Vital
Sir Ken Robinson’s writing (2014) and wildly popular YouTube videos (thirty million hits and counting) make clear the importance of creativity for the future of the planet. Creativity is the first priority in talent selection by the Global CEO Study (Lombardo & Roddy, 2010), finishing higher in that survey than integrity and global thinking. Creativity is foundational to human progress, scientific endeavors, and educational success. In the best synthesis of the international evidence, Heather Hammond and colleagues (2013) and John Hattie (2012) find durable positive relationships between creativity and student achievement and conclude that successful nurturing of creativity depends on feedback that is accurate and active.
The fundamental question is this: Why do so many people enthusiastically watch a Ken Robinson video and devour research about creativity and achievement and then do absolutely nothing about what they learned? This book explores the challenges of creativity and offers practical advice for educators, school leaders, and policymakers. It is not enough to acknowledge that creativity is important; we must first understand why creativity presents such a challenge, particularly in an educational environment.
The quest for creativity presents four central challenges to education professionals and students. First, creativity is risky and uncomfortable. Second, creativity fails to offer the immediate positive feedback to which generations of students have become accustomed. Few students persist in the face of failure—the inevitable result of creative efforts. Third, the abdication of authority by teachers is worrisome to teachers, students, parents, and administrators. Fourth is the challenge of disciplinary silos. Despite abundant evidence that the development of creativity depends on interdisciplinary efforts, faculty members, particularly at secondary and collegiate levels, find the greatest professional and psychological security within the academic disciplines where their expertise is unchallenged.
Creative Discomfort
Risk, failure, and ambiguity—these are among the essential ingredients of creativity. Yet while there is nearly unanimous praise for the concept of creativity, there is little enthusiasm for the difficult, challenging, and sometimes embarrassing steps required to achieve the goal. Prolific inventor James Dyson (2000) estimates that he experienced more than five thousand failures before developing the eponymous vacuum cleaner that now dominates the industry. Stories of successful ideas go back centuries to the time of Archimedes, who is credited with the original “Eureka!” moment, sitting in his bathtub pondering a challenge from the king. But it’s a good bet that Archimedes took a lot of baths before yelling “Eureka!” as he ran naked through the town, proclaiming his discovery of water displacement by irregularly shaped objects.
Discomfort is not, however, part of most school environments, where students and teachers are encouraged to “get it right the first time.” The common use of the average—the default of most computerized evaluation systems when summarizing a set of scores—means that the risk, experimentation, and discomfort experienced during the first days of school are part of final student and teacher evaluations. Even the Global CEO Study finds that while 60 percent of leaders claim to value creativity as one of the primary attributes of leaders they hire, more than 70 percent admit that they do a poor job of assessing and encouraging it (Lombardo & Roddy, 2010). In the business world, it’s difficult to engage in creative discomfort when your bonus as well as your mortgage payment depend on tomorrow’s results.
In education, creative ways of engaging students give way to the exigencies of tomorrow’s test. For example, one of the best ways to encourage creativity is with an environment of debate and dissent (Rogers & Simms, 2014). Yet this promising instructional strategy