a personal acquaintance, someone you have observed from afar, or an historical (or even fictional) person. What are ways that you and your creative exemplar are similar? How are you different?
4. What are the resources within you—your experiences, deeply held beliefs, exceptional moments of learning and insight—that you can use to open the doors to creativity?
5. You have probably witnessed situations in your professional career when experts disagreed. How did you and your colleagues deal with divergent and strongly held views? What do your most promising experiences in sorting out alternative expert views suggest for how you can analyze divergent views to promote student creativity?
CHAPTER 2
CURIOSITY
Complete the sentence, “Science is …” from a student’s point of view. We would suggest that science is asking questions when you don’t already know the answers. Too often, students think that science is all about distinguishing igneous from sedimentary rock, gases from liquids, or otherwise providing answers that we already know—or at least are supposed to know. But the spirit of scientific inquiry is the same one that drives creative endeavors: curiosity. Curiosity and its cousin, critical thinking, are the gateways to creativity. How we nurture and encourage curiosity, and how we often punish it, will provide insights into how we can expand creativity opportunities for students and teachers. Curiosity is the motivation behind critical thinking. While curiosity is born of an emotional quest—the human desire to know more—critical thinking is the analytical partner, giving us tools to challenge prevailing patterns of thought that fail to satisfy our curious minds.
Warren Berger (2014) defines a beautiful question as “an ambitious yet actionable question that can begin to shift the way we perceive or think about something—and that might serve as a catalyst to bring about change” (p. 8). Questions of any sort—beautiful or not—require the virtue of curiosity. Unfortunately, this virtue is in rare supply. Berger explains:
To encourage or even allow questioning is to concede power—not something that is done lightly in hierarchical companies or in government organizations, or even in classrooms, where a teacher must be willing to give up control to allow for more questioning. (p. 6)
In order to create space in any dialogue, whether among students, educators, administrators, or policymakers, there must first be room for questions to which the answers are unclear and unknown. In a medieval pedagogical setting, the apprentice asks questions and the master provides answers. But in the 21st century, we must all be apprentices and see answers not from all-knowing masters, but from our collective wisdom. If we expect a spirit of genuine inquiry at the highest levels of leadership and policymaking, this acceptance of the unknown must be modeled in the classroom. The teacher who responds to a question, “I don’t know; let’s learn more about this …” is neither uninformed nor incompetent, but a model for the processes of inquiry on which creativity depends.
The Vice of Confidence
One of the constants that’s drilled into us from childhood onward is to believe in ourselves. It is an important component to resilience, and it is easy to understand why we want to instill confidence in our children. Confidence as a trait often begets confidence. Those who are more assured of their own ability to succeed are more likely to take the risks necessary to succeed in the future. Likewise, those who become insecure, constantly doubting themselves, can develop habits that either consciously or subconsciously sabotage their individual efforts. Psychologists call this phenomenon confirmation bias (Kahneman, 2011).
But is there such a thing as too much confidence? What happens when we become confident in beliefs that haven’t been tested? What happens when confidence mutates into closed-mindedness? If we start believing too much in our own hype and belief systems, not only do we run the risk of being blinded to further opportunities by internal orthodoxy but we run the more dangerous risk of not recognizing when we are wrong. Not that there’s anything wrong with … well, being wrong! We all know people who are often wrong but never in doubt. For the rest of us, being wrong about something, and then going through the process of confronting evidence that contradicts our claim, and then going through the slow and sometimes painful process of changing our minds, is an essential part of being human. It is when we refuse to go through that process that we enter the realm of delusion.
Pioneering psychiatrist Karl Jaspers (1963) identifies three indicators of a delusional mindset: (1) certainty of belief and absolute conviction of rightness, (2) incorrigibility, which is defined by the unwillingness to be swayed by evidence that’s contrary to those strongly held beliefs, and (3) beliefs themselves that are strange and bizarre. Jaspers’s work continues to be widely influential in the 21st century (Blackwood, Howard, Bentall, & Murray, 2001). In the context of creative idea generation, it makes sense that one’s beliefs will and perhaps should be strange and bizarre, but the other two indicators of delusion are definitely worth examining. Beliefs can be affirming and comforting on a deep psychological level—especially beliefs we come to and develop ourselves. This makes us predisposed to defending them and protecting them from outside scorn or invalidation. However, if our goal is to develop the best product or idea, it is essential that we hold our own ideas and products to the kind of rigorous examination the rest of the world will. The curious person can celebrate the thrill of discovery, but relentlessly asks, “What is next? What is better? What could I have missed?”
Success itself can harden long-established beliefs that don’t necessarily match every circumstance. Consider the world-altering Napoleonic Wars of the early 19th century. After astonishing successes against Spain, Italy, Austria, and Prussia, often due to Napoleon Bonaparte’s strategic brilliance, it made sense for the self-proclaimed emperor to be justly confident of not only his own abilities but the tactical principles behind them. So when Napoleon led an army of more than 450,000 soldiers across the border into Russia in an effort to break up their coalition with Britain, it made sense that he would once again outmaneuver his adversaries and prevail. However, he ended up failing spectacularly during a Moscow winter that devastated more than 90 percent of his troops and ruined his reputation (Tufte, 2006).
In some ways, Napoleon’s strategy was effective. His superior forces and strategic impulses won him hard-fought battles throughout his invasion of Russia. But instead of capitulating and beginning the negotiations of defeat like the rest of the forces that Napoleon vanquished, the Russian army had a lot of space into which to retreat and began destroying their cities rather than having them utilized by the French army. Again and again, Napoleon witnessed the Russians employing the same burn-and-run tactics but did not change course, seemingly incapable of or unwilling to recognize the strategy he so firmly believed in could be flawed. Yet when he finally came to Moscow, Napoleon was astonished that the Russians had simply abandoned and scorched their capital. Blinded by his previous successes, Napoleon failed to observe and adapt to the different circumstances. Napoleon was not necessarily wrong about his prowess or ability, but he was simply wrong to think his belief system was universally applicable.
Students elevating confidence over curiosity is similarly problematic. While some students display an overconfidence that can do them a great disservice by limiting curious exploration of questions and critical thinking, in interviews and observations we conducted as research for this book, we found a marked pattern of unwillingness to challenge prevailing wisdom, particularly among girls and women. Overconfidence displayed by men when compared to their female competitors in the job market has a dramatic effect when two otherwise equally qualified people are searching for jobs. This ineffective socialization is hardly an accident.
Mixed Social Cues
While some students’ curiosity may be stunted by overconfidence, on the other end of the spectrum are students who may be stifled by having their curiosity punished. Curiosity
