Our Creative Responsibility
Nearly every professional development session for teachers and school administrators includes an oration about the importance of creativity as a 21st century skill, but these educators routinely return home to face the reality of a system that undermines the creative efforts of students and themselves. Despite the rhetoric favoring creativity, the message teachers hear is, “We’ll get to creativity—just as soon as we raise our test scores.”
Even advocates of creativity undermine their case when they refer to creativity as a “noncognitive” skill (Gutman & Schoon, 2013). This wholly inaccurate understanding of creativity sends the message that creativity is a frill—something that competes with and is at the other end of the cognition continuum from “real” thinking and learning.
One reason that creativity myths are so prevalent may be that they remove the responsibility of being creative from individuals, teachers, and organizations and lay the onus on nature. People may feel that if creativity is the exclusive domain of the loner scientist or the eccentric aesthete, then they have no duty or ability to try to be creative themselves—believing that they either possess a certain creative quality from birth or they do not. What we must understand is that creativity is not a trait. It is a set of behaviors that can be developed through practice. Creativity is, to some degree, a way of life. But it is also a responsibility. Creativity is not just the way that the great geniuses of the past have enriched and given meaning to our culture, it is an obligation we all have to enrich and give meaning to our own lives and community. We hope that by exploring and explaining each of the seven main traits and modes of thought that support creativity in the following chapters, we can help in some small measure guide you, your students, and your colleagues to a more fulfilling and creative life.
CREATIVITY REFLECTIONS
1. Identify at least one thing you thought about creativity that changed after you read this chapter, and discuss with a partner or small group. If you have not changed your thinking, consider at least one or two ways in which your thinking has been challenged or reinforced. You might want to consult your responses to figure I.1 (page 8).
2. Identify specific sources of creative inspiration that you find most helpful. These might be nature, music, silence, visual images, or a thousand other sources. Just select two or three, and resolve to make time and space for those sources of creative inspiration this week.
3. Think of someone you regard as an exceptionally creative person—either 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)