and colleagues is interpreted by some students and teachers as never engaging in open disagreement, dissent, or criticism.
Delayed Feedback
Compare the following profiles of the performance of two students. Each student submitted ten projects, assignments, or other assessments for teacher evaluation. Both students finished the class doing A work, but there the similarity ends.
Student 1: A, A, A, A, A, A, A, B, A, A—Final grade of A
Student 2: F, F, F, A, F, F, F, A, F, A—Final grade?
The first student knows the game of school well. As close to failure and risk taking as the first student comes is to receive a B—a rare occurrence that may lead to challenges for the teacher from both student and parents. The language of the grade doesn’t matter—whether the mark is B or “meets expectations”—the perception, at least in many affluent homes, is that a score less than perfection is a dagger in the heart of a student who is accustomed to only receiving the highest marks available.
The second student swings for the fences, alternating between spectacular failure and success. With a rare degree of resilience, the second student willingly persists in the face of failure after failure, rewarded by the occasional success. Colleges, graduate schools, and employers insist that they value creativity and risk taking, but which student are they more likely to accept or hire? It’s tempting to be cynical about grade inflation among students. However, the same issue presents itself when superintendents routinely meet or exceed the expectations of the boards that hired them and, even in an environment of renewed evaluation and accountability, the vast majority of teachers receive high ratings.
Abdication of Authority
Take it from a parent who has a very difficult time reconciling evidence about risk and error with the reality that error, at least in an environment of high expectations and exceptional academic achievement, rarely occurs. When my daughter makes a scientific pronouncement that is clearly preposterous, I wonder, “Why didn’t her teachers teach her the right way? They are supposed to be the experts!” However, whenever she parrots something she has learned in school with insufficient critical reasoning, I wonder, “Why didn’t her teachers let her explore alternatives and challenge prevailing authority?” I can’t have it both ways, and teachers can’t win in an environment in which parents simultaneously demand student creativity and conformity. We are caught in what might be called Gardner’s Dilemma, after Harvard psychologist and Project Zero founder Howard Gardner. He makes a clarion call for both creativity and disciplinary excellence. To sum it up, you can’t think outside of the box if you don’t first understand the box.
Gardner’s (1993) analysis of the creative processes of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi suggests that wildly diverse thinkers and artists share some common characteristics. Attributing their work to genius alone undermines the historical facts: they studied their craft, worked incredibly hard, and suffered many failures along the road to their success. If these magnificent thinkers had been evaluated on the average of their work, then Einstein would have retired in the Swiss patent office, and Stravinsky would have died on the streets of Paris trying to sell the shoes thrown at him during the premiere of The Rite of Spring.
Disciplinary Silos
Few secondary school administrators understand calculus as well as the mathematics teacher, fugues as well as the music teacher, literature and composition as well as the English teacher, history as well as the social studies teacher, or chemistry as well as the science teacher. Even with experience in teaching the primary grades, few elementary school administrators understand how to teach the essentials of reading, even though they are among the most important instructional skills required in the early grades. Because administrators cannot be experts in everything, it is reasonable to expect education leaders to be attuned to opportunities for meaningful collaboration among the faculty. For example, feedback strategies of the chorus conductor and athletic coach might inform their colleagues’ professional practices in literacy and mathematics. Similarly, secondary school teachers whose students struggle with literacy can learn much from their colleagues who specialize in literacy instruction.
These four challenges—the risk and discomfort inherent in the creative process, students’ need for immediate positive feedback, the abdication of authority by educators and leaders, and the persistence of disciplinary silos—militate against what we know to be essential progress toward creativity. These challenges are not met with an instruction manual or an academic study but rather with educators willing to build a creative culture. That is the focus of the next chapter.
Chapter 2
Building a Creative Culture
It does little good to encourage student creativity unless leaders have first put in place the essential elements of a creative environment. This chapter suggests four such essentials and offers a Creative Environment Rubric (see pages 16–18), so you and your colleagues can begin a quest to save creativity at your school with some objective analysis. These four essential elements include:
1. Mistake-tolerant culture
2. Rigorous decision-making system
3. Culture that nurtures creativity
4. Leadership team that models and supports creativity
Mistake-Tolerant Culture
The first element of a creative environment is a mistake-tolerant culture. Although much has been written and said about the value of mistakes in pursuing creativity, the practical reality is that in most schools, mistakes by students, teachers, and administrators are systematically punished. The least effective creative environments require blind compliance with rules and expectations. Success in these environments is equated with avoiding mistakes. The clear, if unspoken, leadership theme is this: We’ve worked too hard to get where we are to mess it up with any new ideas. Alan Deutschman (2007), in the compelling book Change or Die, writes that over decades of research, a consistent finding reveals that many people would rather die than make significant changes in their lives. The best evidence for such an over-the-top assertion is that more than 90 percent of people who have had open-heart surgery, often due to behavioral decisions such as smoking and a sedentary lifestyle, only briefly change the behaviors that landed them under the surgeon’s knife. Within less than a year, they return to their old lifestyle. They would literally rather die than change.
In the field of education, I am often asked, “If it’s so obvious, then why don’t people just do it?” It is obvious, for example, that frequent feedback leads to better student results, but the vast majority of schools only provide students with meaningful feedback three or four times a year. To do more—certainly to provide feedback on a weekly basis—would leave teachers and administrators open to the complaint of “too much testing,” an assertion that seems to shut down the argument. Imagine if diabetics refused to test their blood sugar level because such an effort involved too much testing.
More than two decades of research, from 1990 onward, demonstrate the strong link between writing and student performance in a variety of academic disciplines. One of the foremost researchers in this area, Professor Steve Graham of Vanderbilt University (2009–2010), documents not only the academic impact of writing but also the value of handwriting. Yet at both the K–12 and collegiate levels, the amount of writing required of students is declining (Arum & Roksa, 2010). Cursive writing is nearly extinct from public school settings, and most prevailing English language arts standards have abandoned the practice.
The zeal by students, parents, and teachers for immediate mastery requires
