“What do you do with an idea?
Especially an idea that’s different, or daring, or just a little wild?”
Kobi Yamada
Imagination, curiosity and playfulness are some of the foundational cognitive processes needed for developing creative intelligence. Children have a natural and innate inclination for learning creativity. However, creativity is fragile and easily thwarted if not valued, fostered or regularly put to work.
Unfortunately, as students transition through standardised schooling, they are unlikely to experience the necessary opportunities to build life-long creative dispositions or experience opportunities to put their creativity to work across all discipline learning. Subsequently, their perception of creativity narrows as does their creative confidence. With this, comes the lack of being able to recognise their full creative potential and the world of possibilities that rests within it. Sadly, creative efficacy becomes even further diminished by the time they reach adulthood – like a muscle that has never been exercised or put to work.
Recent research provides insightful data on how children and adults perceive their own creativity. According to the LEGO Play Well Report (2018) lego-play-well-report-pdf-6-847kb.pdf (theiet.org) and Adobe's "State of Create" report, 60% of children view themselves as creative, whereas only 25% of adults feel the same about their creative abilities (ASU News) (ScienceDaily). This presents a significant conundrum for government, industry and employment readiness within our world of acceleration. Indeed, the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2023 ranks creativity as the second most important skill for workers. How schools actively foster students’ creative intelligence across their entire schooling, and how we teach for creativity as a rich basis for building creative dispositions is becoming vitally important.
At every stage, learners need purposeful and authentic opportunities to build and apply their creativity. This requires well-conceived teaching for creativity and learning creativity activities aligned to mastering discipline knowledge. Additionally, (and not in dissonance) it requires a softening of discipline boundaries and rigid siloed approaches to content delivery. Creative intelligence is dependent on discipline knowledge; however, learners also need opportunities to wrestle with open-ended challenges that help them recognise (and bring to life) the creative potential hidden within problem-solving and innovating within and across subjects and disciplines. The creative intelligence necessary to perceive and resolve interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary challenges is a highly desirable skill and becoming increasingly essential. Schools are well situated to introduce and induct learners of all ages into these ways of thinking and working but not as random, one-off or ad hoc events. Well-conceived interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary learning must become a constant across the entire learning journey to support an invention cycle that shifts learners from imagination to creativity to innovation to entrepreneurialism and from ‘what is’ to ‘what can be’.
Building students creative competency within subject learning can be perceived as being in conflict or as disruptive to the traditional practices of direct and explicit teaching and assessment practices. Overcoming such perceptions requires a recalibration around deeply held values and beliefs that are implicit within our current standardised education model. It requires teachers own creativity and the willingness to adopt new pedagogies within their practice.
Unfortunately, teachers are yet to acquire the necessary toolbox of skills to purposefully teach for creativity confidently and effectively. Nor are they equipped with the knowledge of crucial dispositions that foster creativity, or understandings of how these work in harmony with their own teaching strategies and activity within the learning environment. Once teachers have these skills, they can intentionally curate learning activity to foster learners’ creativity alongside their mastery of the basics. Learning creativity is dependent on teaching for creativity and on teachers own increasing creative confidence within the learning environment.
The capacity to generate, test-out and stretch our ideas is fundamental to being, knowing and understanding the world and our interconnectedness with others. There is agency, empowerment and possibility in generating and surrounding ourselves with interesting and novel ideas – and especially when our ideas are provided opportunity to grow, take flight, and transform into useful and valuable creative innovations. Schools have a role to play in helping students shift from imagination to creativity, and from creativity to entrepreneurialism.
The beautiful children’s book by Kobi Yamada and Mae Besom, ‘What do you do with an IDEA?’ eloquently provokes us to consider ideas. More poignantly it illustrates the tenuous and fragile journey our creativity must navigate on its pathway to realisation.
“What do ideas become? Big things, brave things, smart things, silly things, good things. Things like stories, artwork, journeys, inventions, communities, products, and cures. Everything you see around you was once an idea.”
Kobi Yamada, Mae Besom
When given voice and agency, learners of all ages will produce different, daring and wild ideas. How does your school nurture students’ ideas and foster their creative confidence, and how are you developing the cognitive processes that form creative intelligence within every aspect of their learning? Are your students leaving school in Year 12 more creative than they arrived in Year 1?
The Vivedus Model has been developed to empower teachers and provide schools with the necessary tools and knowledge to seamlessly teach for creativity and learn creativity all within the regular practices of planning, teaching and learning curriculum.
References
Arizona State University. (2023, May 15). New study explores creativity in children and adults. ASU News. Retrieved from https://news.asu.edu/20230515-new-study-explores-creativity-children-and-adults
Beghetto, R. A., Kaufman, J. C., & Baer, J. (2014). Teaching for creativity in the common core classroom. Teachers College Press.
Edelman Intelligence. (2018). LEGO Play Well Report 2018. LEGO Group. Retrieved from https://www.readkong.com/page/lego-play-well-report-2018-4075264
Rubenstein, L. D., McCoach, D. B., & Siegle, D. (2013). Teaching for Creativity Scales: An Instrument to Examine Teachers’ Perceptions of Factors That Allow for the Teaching of Creativity, Creativity Research Journal, 25:3, 324-334, DOI: 10.1080/10400419.2013.81380
ScienceDaily. (2023, April 10). Children's creativity perception surpasses that of adults, study finds. ScienceDaily. Retrieved from https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/04/230410101236.htm
Starko, A. J. (2021). Creativity in the classroom: Schools of curious delight. Routledge.
World Economic Forum. (2023). The Future of Jobs Report 2023. Retrieved from https://www.weforum.org/publications/the-future-of-jobs-report-2023/
Yamada, K., & Besom, M. (2014). What do you do with an idea? Compendium, Inc.
