Always Be Creating
Are your students creating?
No matter the age of your students or the subject that you teach, this is an important question that every educator should be thinking about.
Let me let you in on a little secret.
What you are teaching no longer matters.
The content of your courses is now irrelevant.
Think about that. You know it is true, don’t you?
Anybody can learn pretty much anything at any time. You no longer need to go to a school, find an expert to apprentice under, or even buy a book if you want to learn about a particular topic. In a matter of minutes, you can learn practically anything from that smart device you carry around with you in your pocket.
Knowledge is plentiful, accessible, and free. As teachers, if we believe the greater purpose of our work is to pass knowledge onto students, we are setting ourselves up to be obsolete in a few short years.
What you are teaching, no longer matters. But who you are teaching matters more than ever.
It is by focusing on who we teach (our students) and not what we teach (our curriculum) that we educators can rediscover the value of our profession. Education should be about helping our students develop the many important skills they will need for the day that they graduate high school and enter the workforce. Of these skills, none is more important than creativity.
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What kind of world will our students graduate into?
This can be a daunting question to consider. I am the principal of a school that serves students from kindergarten to grade twelve. Kindergarten student who walked through the doors to my school this past September will graduate in the year 2033. This particular group of students will be a part of the workforce of the 2060s and 2070s, and quite possibly beyond.
We do not know what knowledge will be necessary to work in this unknown future. It is possible that whatever knowledge these students will require does not even exist yet. We do know that students who possess creative skills will be employees who will be in high demand. Low skilled and repetitive jobs are being phased out by automation and will not exist in the future. Jobs that require critical thinking and creative problem solving will be the jobs for which our students will be competing.
Creativity is founded on uniqueness and originality Schools on the other hand value conformity.
Consider our world in 2021. Ignoring the fact that we are in the midst of a global pandemic, our planet is on the cusp of a series of environmental and economic challenges that are threatening our very existence. We need creative problem solvers and critical thinkers, not complacent automatons, in order to ensure that we flourish as a species.
So what role do schools have in fostering creativity in our students?
The truth is that our current education system has been founded on a model of compliance while choking the creativity out of our students. Consider the typical image of thirty kids crammed into a classroom. Students are all sitting in rows, each one facing the front. They are all reading the same text, writing the same tests, and arriving at the same answers. Creativity is founded on uniqueness and originality Schools on the other hand value conformity.
Creative individuals often possess characteristics that are not embraced by traditional schools. Creative individuals tend to be messier. They are more likely to challenge authority and group think. They tend to do their best work on their one time and may not respond well to the strict bell schedules that schools follow. They like to move around and not sit in desks. These behaviours are not embraced in schools. In fact, they are often punished.
George Land has done some great research on creativity. He has a YouTube talk called “The Failure of Success.” It’s worth watching. You can find it here:
Land discusses a fascinating longitudinal study on creativity in school aged children. When students start kindergarten, 98 percent of them show a strong inclination towards creativity. However, by the time those same students reach adulthood, only 2% remain in touch with their creative faculties. Schools are literally training the creativity out of our students. It’s obvious that we have work to do.
So how do we change our classrooms so that all of our students are able to tap into their creative potentials? Here are some ideas.
- We need to ensure that our students are “doing” and not “listening.”
Our students spend too much time in school listening to instruction instead of exploring ideas with their entire bodies. While there is a role for traditional instruction in schools, exploration needs to become a much bigger piece of the picture. Furthermore, exploration and play-based learning cannot be something we relegate to our youngest students. We need this philosophy to be pervasive from kindergarten to high school.
- We need to make kids active producers of content.
Students today consume more content than ever before, but are they producing their own content? In today’s society, it is easier than ever before for students to express themselves. Schools need to do a better job of having students become writers, photographers, videographers, coders, actors, bloggers, YouTubers, video game developers, movie directors and musicians. Students consume all of these mediums passively, but it is in the creation of these mediums that meaningful life-transforming learning can take place.
- We need to help students discover their passions.
In a world where students can learn about any subject, there is no need to limit ourselves to the narrow curriculum that we all work within. We need to make room for student choice and encourage students to chase their interests. Maybe we should think of the curriculum as sign posts on a journey of discovery, not as final destinations that have been predetermined for our students.
- We need to harness the power of technology.
Students have better filmmaking equipment in their pockets than George Lucas did when he produced Star Wars in 1977. Using their cell phones, students can take pictures, edit photos, produce music, record video, produce video games, design web pages, create animations, and teach themselves coding. They have the most sophisticated creative tools in history at their disposal and we need to use them. If you look at a student with a cell phone and see it as a disruption to your teaching as opposed to a tool for their learning, you are missing a huge opportunity.
- We need to teach students to be entrepreneurial.
Ask a kindergarten student what they want to do and they will come up with dozens of options. Ask a high school student what they want to do and they will be stumped. School has trained students to follow instructions at the expense of students being inspired to follow their own ideas. We need to teach students to be entrepreneurial. Genius Hours, Passion Projects and Maker Spaces are great ways to make this happen; however, entrepreneurship should not just exist in pockets of isolation. We need to build into all courses by allowing for student choice.
6 We need to empower students to take risks and teach them to embrace failure.
Schools have always discouraged failure. We celebrate correct answers and deduct marks from tests when students are wrong. If we want students to be able to create, they need to be comfortable in experimentation and not always landing on the right answer. This is a major paradigm shift for most classrooms.
7. We need to end high stakes assessments that focus on memorization skills.
The ability to memorize a lot of information does nothing to encourage creativity. Memory is actually a fairly low order skill. With repetition, most anybody can remember anything. Creativity is a higher order skill. Putting our energy and focus on creativity over memory will have much more meaningful payoffs for students and develop students who are much better rounded..
8. We need to have kids show us their learning in ways that are meaningful to them.
Traditionally, schools have done a great job of giving students information. What schools have not done a great job with is teaching students what to do with that information. Instead of having students conform to one way of knowing and having them all do the same project or test, we need to encourage students to show us how they know something in ways that are meaningful to them. Such an approach will encourage creativity while increasing student ownership and engagement.
If we are not allowing time for students to create in all of our classes, we are missing a valuable opportunity for our students to learn about their world and their place in it. We are also denying them the opportunity to push their own boundaries and achieve their creative potentials.
If we want students to have authentic learning experiences, if we want them to be engaged, and if we want to ensure they are developing as their best selves, we need to ensure that they are given the opportunity to exercise their creative muscles. In all classes. In all grade levels.
Let’s not stop at merely preparing students for the future. Think of the possibilities for our world when we prepare our students to create the future.
In your schools and in your classrooms, always be creating.
