one class period. Creativity can occur in many different ways with varying degrees of longevity, scale, and scope. The important thing is to be open to the possibility of inserting the creative stages into daily experiences.
Part of our work in unlocking creativity is exposing our learners to the following four stages in a variety of contexts and inviting them to discover who they are as creative individuals. Some students may find that they need more time in the elaboration stage while others find the expression stage to be the most time consuming. Some learners discover they are able to engage in reflection best when they work with another person, while others prefer to do it alone. Creativity manifests differently for different people, and our students are no exception. We can diligently expose our students to creative processes and ask them to consider which conditions support their creative work and which do not.
Exploration
Exploration is the stage that invites learners into creative processes. This is when students explore materials, questions, and goals and begin to imagine how their creative pursuit might unfold. Elementary students might explore the connection between blocks and LEGO figures, spending time creating stories that involve both. Middle-grades students may choose materials around which to design a lab that answers a critical question. High school students may identify needs within their community that could act as a catalyst for an action plan in physical education. It is at this stage that students first explore goals, derived from standards and learning targets in combination with their own hopes and expectations, as well as criteria that will define their creative decision making.
Elaboration
Elaboration occurs when students settle on a purpose for their creative work. They engage in research and develop the additional skills they might need to expand on their original ideas. This may look like first-grade students exploring butterflies on the internet as part of a science project or middle school students interviewing a community leader to determine important aspects of an advertising campaign. This is the time when learners linger in their questions and refine their goals and criteria for success.
Expression
Expression occurs when students decide how to share their creative work and prepare to do so. This may manifest as a large-scale architecture project that learners in the elementary grades create and share with their peers or a performance that senior students share with the rest of the school, or a small-scale output over a short period of time such as sharing a solution to a mathematics problem with classmates. It is at this point in the creative process that students refine their work and prepare to engage with an audience (big or small), seeking feedback both before and after sharing. At this stage, students may rehearse in front of a smaller group before a larger performance, or they may share a prototype with a critical friend before creating the final, polished version. This stage is about preparation and expression of creative work.
Reflection and Response
Lastly, reflection and response occurs when learners consider their creative efforts and make decisions moving forward. At this stage, they set goals that bridge past creative efforts to future ones. They determine which of their decisions are most successful and which need adjusting. In many cases, this stage is also the final opportunity for students to refine creative products before submitting them for summative assessment. Students focus on celebrating successes and setting goals for future learning.
Figure 1.1 (page 20) illustrates the connection between these four stages and the role that assessment plays in unlocking creativity, connecting and driving creative work from one stage to the next. Also see the reproducible “Applying Assessment Within the Stages of the Creative Process” (pages 45–46) for information on how different types of assessment apply within each stage of the creative process, and guiding questions for assessment work in each stage.
Figure 1.1: Assessment and the creative process.
Creativity in a Classroom Context
Reading research about creativity is fascinating. The topic, even in its most general sense, could keep a person exploring for quite some time. Added to that is all the research on creativity in an educational context, which is equally informative. In the interest of providing a succinct and practical book about how to use assessment processes to unlock creativity, I will spend just a little time sharing some of the keys to understanding creativity in a classroom context, acknowledging the immense volume of work that precedes and informs this one, followed by a discussion of embedding opportunities for creativity in the different content-area classrooms.
Big C and Little c Creativity
Understanding creativity as I am using the term in this book means understanding the difference between those highly creative, almost magical moments inventors and artists experience during their life’s work (what some call big C creativity) and those day-to-day creative moments every human being can experience as part of existing in a complex world (little c creativity). Sawyer (2006) explains the difference between big C creativity and little c creativity—which we can think of as everyday creativity—the kind of creativity we are striving to develop each day in our classrooms:
In contrast to big C Creativity, [there is] “little c” creativity. Little c creativity includes activities that people engage in every day: modifying a recipe when you don’t have all the ingredients called for; avoiding a traffic jam by finding a new way through side streets; figuring out how to apologize to a friend for an unintended insult. A person’s dreams or a child’s block tower could be creative under the second definition, but not under the first. (p. 47)
This distinction is important to establish in order to understand educators’ work inside schools to develop little c creativity so those learners who are interested, someday, in becoming big C creators in any variety of fields have the foundational skills and dispositions to be able to do so.
Furthermore, little c creativity, on its own, cultivates practical real-world skills students will need for success in various aspects of life after school. Tony Wagner (2008) refers to these as survival skills that students need as they navigate this complex world. Among the proposed skills Wagner (2008) identifies (based on several hundred interviews with business, nonprofit, and educational leaders) are critical thinking, problem solving, curiosity, imagination, adaptability, and agility. I would argue patience, resilience, and several others belong on that list as well.
Being able to think critically and solve problems in the workplace is highly valuable to employers who hunger for self-starters who can think on their feet. Curiosity and imagination are critical for students as they navigate the adult world, searching for ways to live productive lives in which they are able to relieve stress, maintain fitness, and nurture friendships, for example. Patience and adaptability become highly important as our students build their own family systems, which will inevitably be complex and taxing at times. Resilience and agility are critical for maintaining balance, for seeking help when needed, and for navigating the difficult journey of human life. Little c creativity can provide a context through which students can develop and hone these skills in a safe environment, where mistakes are not yet high stakes.
Components of Creativity
Creative Schools (Robinson & Aronica, 2015) and The Element (Robinson, 2009) are two of the most practical discussions of creativity in schools. These books explore some of the fundamental reasons why creativity is so essential and why it is so elusive
