and time.
3. Creativity is a solitary pursuit: Often, as students experience the creative process, they share ideas with others, generate new questions, and provide alternate perspectives. Students may find themselves working with peers, asking for opinions and resources that can act as catalysts for further exploration. Gretchen Morgan (2015) states, “In a culture in which we are given permission to be inventive, a strong practice of learning from one another is required to accelerate our collective effectiveness and maintain trust” (p. 72). This social aspect of creativity speaks to the need for teachers to be mindful in learners’ creative processes. Erkens et al. (2017) assert, “Teacher responsiveness to student dialogue, questions, comments, and work can lead to a deeper culture of learning” (p. 120). Teachers act as fellow seekers, critical friends, and experts at various times. They facilitate self-assessment, peer assessment, and research and invite authentic audiences and strong purposes for the work.
4. Creative people break all the rules: In this creativity myth, the rules or specific knowledge and skills within subject areas can get in the way of creativity; they are too constraining and static. People may believe that a “true” creator breaks the rules and pushes past convention. However, rules provide a necessary foundation and shared understanding upon which new ideas, strategies, and approaches can be layered. When students hold knowledge or skill in a particular subject area, that knowledge or skill becomes the language through which students express their creativity. The rules give learners something against which they can assess their creative efforts. They give students the scaffolding they need to reach new creative heights (Dacey & Conklin, 2004).
5. Creativity happens entirely inside the mind, like a flash of inspiration: Sawyer (2006) explains, “Creativity doesn’t happen all in the head … it happens during the hard work of execution” (p. 386). Creativity is not just about idea generation. It is about monitoring and evaluating ideas and approaches and reflecting on inspiration and catalysts. Creativity happens over time, with mini-insight, interspersed between hard, persistent work. Not only will students benefit from creative processes, but they will also benefit from sustained, focused efforts over time. This is truly a win-win.
6. Creativity is all about fun: Creativity is not easy or peaceful. There are moments during the creative process that are downright uncomfortable. Results can be ambiguous, goals can shift, and ideas can falter, all in the name of exploring and elaborating on ideas. Educational consultant Patti Drapeau (2014) confirms, “Creative lesson components are not just feel-good activities. They are activities that directly address critical content, target specific standards, and require thoughtful products that allow students to show what they know” (p. 3). It is through effective assessment practices that teachers and learners can connect the creative processes being used to critical skills and understanding under development. The good news is the kind of resilience students develop as a result of engaging in creative processes will serve them for their lifetime.
7. Creativity is a linear process: This particular myth is one reason educators may not get to creative processes in their classrooms. If we believe that a student has to earn the right to be creative by learning prerequisite concepts and skills, then some students will never get to experience it. Ken Robinson and Lou Aronica (2015) explain—
It is true that creative work in any field involves a growing mastery of skills and concepts. It is not true that they have to be mastered before the creative work can begin. Focusing on skills in isolation can kill interest in any discipline. (p. 147)
Students can gain many of the skills and conceptual understandings we desire through creative processes.
8. No one can measure or assess creativity; the quality of creative products is completely a matter of opinion: When we walk alongside our students in their creative pursuits, we will utilize formative assessment processes to determine degrees of comfort with risk taking and creative progress in relation to student goals. We engage in feedback to propel learning forward and we utilize summative assessment to verify degrees of understanding and skill. Furthermore, we can also assess the development of creative skills. For example, we can capture and assess the quality of questions students are generating or we can assess our learners’ use of materials to create products. Students can receive feedback on their creative processes, not only for the products they are yielding but also for the degree to which their creative processes are allowing them to advance thinking and learning. In this way, students can transfer the creative skills they develop from one context to the next. John A. C. Hattie and Gregory M. Donoghue (2016) elaborate, “Transfer is a dynamic, not static, process that requires learners to actively choose and evaluate strategies, consider resources and surface information, and, when available, to receive or seek feedback to enhance these adaptive skills” (p. 12). The development of these skills and strategies is one of the key benefits of creative processes in our classrooms.
9. Creativity is about off-the-wall or weird ideas: This last myth relates to the misguided belief that students can only develop creativity through the arts. People expect creative products to look odd, discomfiting, or disorganized; it is often because society labels these kinds of products as creative. Creativity, in this case, acts as a justification for products or processes that may feel uncomfortable or unappealing. Some people may claim creative license as an explanation when they offer a process or product that others may not enjoy or accept. In contrast, creativity in its many forms might resemble a tidy mathematics problem, or a clear experimental process. Sawyer (2006) proposes that creativity is “the constant dialogue between unconscious inspiration and conscious editing; between passionate inspiration and disciplined craft” (p. 320). It might look like a well-crafted narrative essay or an organized community event. Creativity does not always look messy. In fact, a true benefit of creativity is its ability to yield refined, organized, logical results (Sawyer, 2006).
By exploring some of the myths surrounding creativity, we can begin to reimagine how creativity might live inside everyday classrooms. Recognizing that creativity is not only attainable for every student but it is also an important way to develop the kinds of skills and strategies students will be able to use throughout their lives allows us to begin to plan how to introduce it into a variety of classroom contexts. The next section details stages that lead to strong creative processes through effective formative assessment.
The Creative Process
While creativity is not prescriptive and can be unpredictable, there are four main stages students move through as they explore creative endeavors while working toward achieving learning goals: (1) exploration, (2) elaboration, (3) expression, and (4) reflection and response. The following subsections (pages 18–19) define and elaborate on each stage. It is important to note up front that while the four stages of the creative process may seem sequential, they are, in fact, flexible. Students may move fluidly back and forth between each, as need dictates. There is no hierarchy, and there is no hard-and-fast rule about how long students should spend in each stage of the process. In fact, it is through the process of assessment that these decisions are made. Assessment reveals degrees of comfort with materials and processes, prior knowledge about the topic or context for the creativity, and learning preferences that may predispose students to certain approaches. Assessment acts as the bridge between one stage and the next. It tells teachers and students when it is time to extend and deepen thinking and focus on new short-term goals. It predicts how much time students might spend in each stage of the creative process.
With regard to timing, it is important to know that creativity can be an extended process that frames an entire unit of study taking several days, or it can move quite quickly, occurring in a single lesson. Students may spend an entire class period generating questions and brainstorming ideas in the exploration stage, or teachers may limit exploration to a five-minute introduction of a single concept
