Creativity in Class

I believe creativity is done in the absence of expectation. Sure, there have been many times I pulled something together that was creative because I had a deadline looming. As I look back on my life, though, that has seemed to be the exception. Most of what I have been proud of in developing from the ground up has been those projects that were entirely my own creation. Things that I created without any need to fulfill a requirement or prove something to anyone.

The reason I bring this up is because I see a large disconnect in schooling between the expectation that students use creative thinking in class and the countervailing expectation that the class run in a structured, orderly way. The two just don’t always go together and I’m afraid it’s creativity that loses out most of the time. It comes down to two constraints arising out of the need for classroom management: 1, the students are graded (judged) and 2, the students are to be using their time efficiently. Both pressures, however, negatively impact the students’ ability to play with ideas at will when it is all the students ever operate under. It’s because the task now becomes a chore.

I think there are two remedies that teachers should be given the latitude to try and in turn give their students similar slack. First, the students should have more choice in what projects they want to take on and how they are going to be assessed. Second, the students need to have a period of unstructured time to think and develop their ideas. Teachers and administrators, if they really want to develop creative thinking, will have to learn to turn things over to students more than they are used to. We’ll all be a little bit better off for it.