Creative Qualities
When a process is not yet successful in approaching the goal, students refine and adjust; they revise and revisit. In the end, we help them decide when to stop and begin a new task. Anyone who creates something knows that the creative process could go on infinitely. Often, bringing closure to a creative effort means accepting that the process has run its course for the time being.
Regardless of whether we are working to enhance creativity through our attention to processes within our classroom or striving to provide catalysts to creativity through unique products, we are primarily working to develop or enhance specific personal qualities that are closely associated with creative people, which include the following (Dacey & Conklin, 2004; Renzulli, 2000; Sawyer, 2006; Wagner, 2012). (For a more in-depth list of the qualities of people in tune with their creativity process, please refer to table A.1 on pages 201–202 in appendix A.)
Developing these qualities is part of the most important work we (as teachers) do with our students because it influences who they become as learners and creators in the long term. Being aware of these qualities allows us to support students’ whole development as they grow and learn.
Through creative processes in our classrooms, we can build curious, imaginative learners. Very young students, such as those in preK through fourth grade, often enter our schools filled with wonder and possibility. Through creativity, we can sustain those qualities. By providing time for students to ask their own questions and imagine their own products, stories, and solutions, we communicate the importance of these qualities in a variety of learning contexts.
Creativity also provides the perfect fertilizer to grow the qualities of risk taking, critical thinking, and persistence. When elementary-grades students work with unfamiliar materials or create their first stories in writing, we can take the opportunity to invite them to try things in new ways, seek new ideas, and persist through immediate challenges. As students advance through the grades, we can continue to invite them to solve problems in unique ways and try different approaches on for size. By withholding summative assessment in favor of formative assessment in the early stages of the creative process, we explicitly show students that the creative journey is equally as important as a right answer. We give students time to persist through wrong answers and solutions that do not yield desired results. We allow them time to fix mistakes and try new approaches when necessary.
By structuring conditions in which students can develop and use these qualities, we are supporting the move toward an increasingly creative classroom. When we understand the qualities that underlie creative processes, we can explicitly encourage students to strengthen them in their everyday experiences. We can share these qualities with students, assess their development, and celebrate them when they are visible.
Instruction and Assessment Processes
It is important that we have clarity about when it makes sense to insert the opportunity to develop these qualities and the creativity they support into our learning plans. Sometimes the creativity will lie in the products and performances that students create, and sometimes the creativity will rest in the processes we use to get to very specific products. We may look to our learning goals (standards, outcomes) to guide this decision.
When a goal asks students to focus on developing a specific product (informational writing, a map, a short narrative paragraph, a formula, an accounting spreadsheet, a dramatic play), then allowing students to determine the form their product will take and determine their own success criteria may not be an option. In these cases, we may choose, instead, to use creative processes to get to that single end product. We may invite students to explore how to best work through the writing process and design a plan that is personally relevant. Or we may allow students to engage in research in ways that encourage personal decision making, source curation, and data collection. We may ask them to imagine a plan for rehearsal that will give them the best results possible. By employing creative decision making within the process of learning, even when the product is non-negotiable, our students have a strong hand in creating the learning design and, as a result, practicing many skills they need to become creative individuals.
Other learning goals may require students to engage in very specific processes (collaborative thinking, data analysis, lab safety, ball throwing). In cases like these, predetermined criteria guide and develop the process, and the creative potential lies in the product. Students may create their own games in which to practice throwing a ball. Or they may be able to engage in data analysis as part of a creative service project. They may employ lab safety in experiments of their own design, or collaborate as part of creating a mural with classmates. The opportunity for lesson design that unlocks creativity is immense, even when certain aspects of our teaching and learning seem non-negotiable.
We can always plan learning experiences that allow students to practice developing qualities of creative people. We may specifically encourage curiosity by introducing unusual or unfamiliar objects to elementary students in a science or a social studies class and ask them to generate questions based on what they see (or smell, or hear). Or we may show students in middle or high school ambiguous images and have them engage in a quick write (writing for two to ten minutes without stopping, editing, or planning ahead) based on all the things they wonder about what they see. If we
