• Instruct students to examine a rubric for evaluating a persuasive letter they submit. In the self-evaluation column on the rubric, the students note their score for each rubric criterion. They highlight challenging key words in the rubric and state the reasons for their score.
• Instruct students to evaluate who would be the best author to bring to the school after a special presentation for examining the school budget. Students identify the kind of qualities the school should consider when deciding whom to select. After researching the authors, students also rate each on the identified qualities and prepare a digital presentation to persuasively convince the school’s library media specialist that their author is the best choice.
• Instruct students to create a rubric to evaluate which new student-created plan for the school’s website is the best. Students evaluate three such plans and record strengths and areas of improvement for each rubric indicator.
Thinking at the Create Level
The highest level of Bloom’s taxonomy revised is the Create level and, not surprisingly, it is both the most nebulous and most complex (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001). Sir Ken Robinson asserts that creativity is “a process of having original ideas that have value” (as cited in Azzam, 2009, p. 22). Developmental and cognitive psychologist Wendy L. Ostroff (2016) comments, “Creativity is imagination in action” (p. 76).
For our purposes, creativity involves having students organize information in a new way to design a product. At this level, students utilize the thinking processes of the Understand, Analyze, and Evaluate levels to design a new product that demonstrates understanding of content. On the importance of creativity to learning, best-selling author Robert Greene (2012) writes:
First, it is through all of their hard work, the depth of their knowledge, and the development of their analytical skills that they reach this higher form of intelligence. Second, when they experience this intuition or insight, they invariably subject it to a high degree of reflection and reasoning. (p. 259)
The challenge for teachers is ensuring that the creative tasks they assign meet the necessary criteria. When students produce a poster or website, it does not necessarily mean the task is on the Create level. To be on the Create level, the task must ensure that students are engaged in brainstorming new ideas, identifying the best idea, planning a solution, and then designing a solution different from others.
Because Create-level content has multiple, demanding criteria, it’s important that we explore this level of Bloom’s taxonomy revised (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001) a little deeper. Educational consultant Patti Drapeau (2014) establishes the following six criteria for students who think creatively:
• Express ideas other students don’t think of.
• Like to choose their own way of demonstrating understanding.
• Ask questions that may seem off-task or silly.
• Enjoy open-ended assignments.
• Prefer to discuss ideas rather than facts.
• Prefer to try new ways of approaching a problem rather than accepted ways. (p. 6)
In schools, teachers can post problems or challenges with multiple solutions to inspire creative thinking. The structure of Create-level tasks might be different from a typical essay or multiple-choice assessment. In fact, it might be more performance oriented. As a performance assessment, teachers might establish work and assessment criteria that require students to exhibit knowledge and skills through some form of product, presentation, or demonstration showing they can transfer knowledge and skills into real-world contexts. Often such assessments have interdisciplinary connections (Hofman, Goodwin, & Kahl, 2015). There are many positive effects of Create-level performance assessments, including engaging in critical and creative thinking, personalizing learning with more meaningful tasks, engaging students in real-world tasks, and extending learning opportunities outside the classroom through collaboration (Hofman et al., 2015).
Reeves (2015) states there are four elements for supporting creative thought in schools: “(1) mistake-tolerant culture, (2) rigorous decision-making system, (3) culture that nurtures creativity, and (4) leadership team that models and supports creativity” (p. 7). He asserts that creativity involves multiple first drafts to achieve a quality product. Reeves (2015) also identifies eight dimensions associated with creative thought.
1. Research basis: Students use research to support creative ideas.
2. Multidisciplinary perspective: Creative ideas consider different perspectives from multiple content areas.
3. Source material: Ideas build on previous thoughts.
4. Clarity of guidelines: Students receive consistent feedback through rubrics.
5. Products: Students create a product (blog, speech, and so on).
6. Process: There is documentation showing the evolution of students’ thinking throughout the project.
7. Collaboration: The project involves some collaboration.
8. Practice and error: Students repeatedly practice, make errors, receive feedback, and make improvements.
Authentic tasks are a great way to plan a Create-level activity. Utilizing real-world problems is among the most influential instructional practices (Schroeder, Scott, Tolson, Huang, & Lee, 2007; Wenglinsky, 2004). When students are placed in real-world roles like journalists or investigators, they can engage in these higherlevel processes. In these roles, students can engage in the complexities of solving authentic problems. See table 2.2, which compares realistic and real problems.
Table 2.2: Realistic Versus Real Problems
| Realistic Problems | Real Problems |
| Tasks or situations that are: • Plausible—Students recognize they could actually occur. • Interesting—Students expressed interest or have read, seen, or heard about them; they recognize them as pertinent to others. • Engaging—Students perceive them as worth their time and effort. | Tasks or situations that are: • Pertinent—Problems are actually present in the students’ experience. • Intensely involving—Students feel personal concern about them; they have an impact or personal effect on the students’ lives and experiences. • Demanding—Students perceive them as being important and necessary for investing time and effort. • Immersed—The task is part of the students’ current personal experience (living it). • Action essential—A situation the students will actually do something about or take action on. |
Source: Adapted from Treffinger, Schooner, & Selby, 2013, p. 76.
There are three Create-level cognitive processes: (1) generating, (2) planning, and (3) producing.
Generating
When students engage in the generating cognitive process, they explore various ideas or solutions to solve an ill-defined problem through hypothesizing and exploring various relevant options. Often, these new ideas begin as a possibility to explore (Johnson, 2010). To begin this process, students must thoroughly research to understand a topic so the ideas they generate have logical connections to that topic. Their own ideas should also be varied (signifying flexible thinking), unique, and detailed.
To improve the process for students, defer judgment