10
LEARNING TO BE CREATIVE
“Education is not a linear process of preparation for the future: it is about cultivating the talents and sensibilities through which we can live our best lives in the present and create the future for ourselves.”
THERE ARE COUNTLESS CREATIVE TEACHERS who do wonderful work in their own classrooms, studios and laboratories. There are whole institutions that pursue innovative programs within their own districts, and whole districts that are battling to do the same in their regions. For the most part, these innovations are happening not because of the dominant cultures of education but in spite of them. The challenge is to take innovation to scale: to transform education in ways that address the real challenges of living and working in the twenty-first century.
TRANSFORMING EDUCATION
Nowadays, “school” usually refers to particular sorts of formal institution. I’m going to use the term here to mean any learning community, whether for children or adults, public or private, compulsory or voluntary. By “education,” I mean all of it from pre-kindergarten to adult education. By “student,” I mean anyone who is engaged purposefully in learning, whatever their age and whatever the setting. I have two reasons for this approach. First, my arguments are about the qualities of teaching and learning wherever they occur. Second, institutions take many forms. In Chapter 9, I described organizational cultures in terms of habits and habitats. In schools, the habits include the curriculum, the schedule, pedagogy and assessment. The habitat includes the physical fabric of the school, its décor and the surrounding environment. All of these can be transformed with a systematic approach to cultivating imagination, creativity and innovation.
Structures can be changed if there is a will to change them and the purposes are clear. Too often purposes are distorted by institutional habits. As Winston Churchill put it, “We shape our institutions and then they shape us.” The challenge is to re-create our institutions by reframing our sense of purpose.
A culture of creativity
In 1997, I was asked by the British Government to develop a national strategy for creative education in elementary and high schools and I formed and chaired a National Commission to do that. There was already a strategy for literacy, part of which involved children in elementary schools spending one hour each day working on approved literacy materials. There was a similar strategy for mathematics. I suspected from my conversations with the Government that they hoped we might recommend something similar: a creativity hour perhaps, maybe on a Friday afternoon. That would have been a tidy strategy, easily accommodated within the existing system. Our recommendations went a lot further. Promoting creativity systematically in schools is about transforming the culture of education as a whole. The best way is to do what policy makers keep asking and get back to basics. They are often thought to be reading and writing and the STEM disciplines. All of these are important. But there are more basic questions to ask about the purpose of education. There’s a useful analogy with the theater.
Back to basics
Peter Brook is one of the most accomplished theater directors of our times. Brook’s interest is in making theater as transformative an experience as possible. He believes that too often, modern theater is a divertissement. Its purpose has become corrupted by clutter. For Brook, the essence of theater is the relationship between an actor and audience. Nothing should be added to this relationship, he argues, unless it supports or improves it. “I can take any space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching and this is all that is needed for an act of theater to be engaged.” Yet when we talk of theater, says Brook, this is not quite what we mean. “Red curtains, spotlights, blank verse, laughter, darkness, these are all confusedly superimposed in the messy image covered by one all-purpose word. We talk of the cinema killing the theater and in that phrase we refer to the theater as it was when the cinema was born, a theater of box office, foyer, tip-up seats, footlights, scene changes, intervals, music, as though the theater was, by definition, these and little more.”1 Over time the core business of theater has been blurred by every sort of encumbrance, like incremental coats of varnish on an old master.
The analogy with education is direct. At the heart of education is the relationship between teachers and students. If students are not learning, education is not happening. The clarity of that relationship has become obscured by political agendas, terms and conditions of employment, building codes, testing regimes, professional territories, national and state standards and so on. The needs of students are easily forgotten and often are. This is one reason why so many students are pulling out of the system. They feel that the whole baroque system isn’t about them at all.
Complex systems like education depend on a multitude of roles: some are front-line and some are supporting. I once visited a leading hotel chain to discuss their approach to staff engagement. Everyone in the company understands that its core business is the comfort and satisfaction of its guests and that every member of staff has a role in that: not only the front-line staff, who interact with the guests, but also the support staff who don’t. The dishwashers know that a lipstick mark on a water glass can mar the experience of a guest and that their work affects the quality of service as a whole. This sense of common purpose has driven the company’s brand and expansion.
The core purpose of schools is to improve the quality of students’ learning. School principals have a particular responsibility to nurture a culture that achieves this purpose. The culture includes everything that goes on in the school and everyone who contributes to it in one way or another, for better or for worse.
“If students are not learning, education is not happening. Clarity of purpose is vital.”
PRINCIPLES OF TRANSFORMATION
I suggested in Chapter 3 that education has three core purposes:
- Personal: to develop students’ individual talents and sensibilities.
- Cultural: to deepen their understanding of the world around them.
- Economic: to enable them to earn a living and be economically productive.
My arguments about creativity and culture suggest specific principles through which schools can realize these purposes.
Talent is diverse
Human communities depend on a diversity of talents, not a singular conception of ability. The preoccupation in education with academic ability and particular disciplines marginalizes students whose interests and abilities lie in other domains. Cultivating the larger range of students’ talents calls for a broader curriculum and a flexible range of teaching styles. I don’t mean that students should only study what they like. One of the roles of education is to broaden people’s horizons, but it should also develop their personal talents and interests.
When my wife was in high school in England, she had to spend most Wednesday afternoons in the winter outdoors on a frozen hockey field. This was not her favorite part of the week. She was surrounded by people who were taller, faster, stronger and more committed to hockey than she was. For most of the time she felt as if she was standing helplessly in the path of a freight train. She wouldn’t have minded so much if the girls who relished knocking her down on the hockey field had had to dance with her in the ballet studio once a week, where her abilities shone and she felt most at home.
Alongside any common curriculum, there have to be opportunities for students to go more deeply into areas that interest them particularly and to pursue different sorts of career options. Not everyone wants to go to university, for example, and not everyone should go immediately after high school. Some want to go to design school or to music school or to a dance academy. Others want to get out in the world and pursue their practical work.
Learning is personal
Dennis Littky and Elliot Washor founded Big Picture Learning in 1995, “to encourage, incite and effect change in the U.S. educational system.”2 With 30 years’ experience between them as teachers and principals in public high schools, they started Big Picture with the motto “Education is everyone’s business” and a commitment to show that education can and should be changed radically. They wanted to create schools in which students would take responsibility for their own education; would spend considerable time doing real work in the community with volunteer mentors and where they would not be evaluated solely on the basis of standardized tests. Students would be assessed on their performance, on exhibitions and demonstrations of achievement, on motivation, and on the habits of mind, hand, heart and behavior that they displayed, reflecting the real world evaluations and assessments that all of us face in our everyday lives.
The first school opened in South Providence, Rhode Island in 1996 with a freshman class of 50 mostly “at-risk” African American and Latino students who did not fit in conventional schools. That class graduated in 2000 with a 96% graduation rate: 98% of the graduates were admitted to postsecondary institutions. Each subsequent graduating class has matched or bettered its predecessor. Many of these students are the first in their families to earn a high school diploma, and 80% of them are the first in their families to enroll in college.
In 2001, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation gave Big Picture Learning a grant to replicate the school design in other areas of the country. In 2003, after the continued success of Big Picture schools, the Gates Foundation gave a second grant to fund the launch of even more schools. The Foundation also gave Big Picture a grant to become lead convener of the newly formed Alternative High School Initiative (AHSI). Today there are 65 Big Picture schools operating in 14 states and schools in Australia, Israel and the Netherlands that use the Big Picture Learning model. All of them, “from Tennessee to Tasmania, from New York City to the Netherlands, embody the fundamental philosophy of Big Picture Learning, educating one student at a time in a community.”
Big Picture schools believe “that all students should have the opportunity to learn in a place where people know each other well and treat each other with respect. Schools must be small enough so every student has genuine relationships with adults and other students and no one falls through the cracks. From assessment tools to the design of the school building itself, a truly personalized school approaches each student and situation with a mind to what is best for the individual and for the community.” The culture of Big Picture schools is an integral part of their success: “Students are encouraged to be leaders and school leaders are encouraged to be visionaries. Our schools strive to create a respectful, diverse, creative, exciting, and reflective culture.”
Littky and Washor say that their mission is to change the way Americans think about the public education system: “Instead of one that judges students and sets limits for achievement, we are building a school system that inspires and awakens the possibilities of an engaged and vital life within our youth … All of our work is intended to influence the national debate about public education. We want to help convince opinion leaders (policymakers, business leaders, media representatives, and educators) as well as parents and the public, that there are better ways to educate our children.”3
No one can be made to learn against his or her will. Learning is a personal act. Of course, under conditions of compulsion and penalty even the most reluctant learners will grudgingly commit some things to memory to avoid unpleasant consequences. When students leave high school prematurely, there are all sorts of programs to re-engage them with education. Most are based on personalized learning. If all education were personalized to begin with, far fewer students would pull away from it. Some people argue that personalizing education for every student is an impossible pipe dream: it would be too expensive and teachers simply could not give every student the necessary time and attention. There are two answers to this argument.
“It is possible to personalize learning for every student. One of the ways this can be done is through the creative use of new technologies.”
First, there is no alternative. Education is personal. Personalized learning is an investment not a cost. I doubt there are many students who leap out of bed in the morning wondering what they can do to raise the reading standards of their local region. The best way to raise standards is to excite the energy and curiosity of the students in the system. We know the cost of not doing that.
Second, it is possible to personalize learning for every student. One way is through the creative use of new technologies. Some countries and states are using web-based technologies to connect students and teachers in personalized learning programs of many sorts. They include Sweden, Finland, New Zealand, Singapore, the United Kingdom and parts of the United States. The changes are happening in universities too. Many institutions are posting their courses online; and every day new resources become available to would-be students. As the market value of university degrees falls and the cost of getting them increases, more people are likely to explore alternative routes to study and qualifications that the Internet is making available. This is not all new.
The Open University is a “distance learning” university that was founded by the British Government in 1969.4 It awards undergraduate and postgraduate degrees, as well as diplomas, certificates and continuing education units. It has an open entry policy, which means that students’ previous academic achievements are not taken into account for entry to most courses. The majority of students are based in the United Kingdom, but its courses can be studied anywhere in the world. The OU has 13 regional centers around the UK and offices throughout Europe, more than 250,000 students enrolled, including over 50,000 students studying overseas. It is the largest academic institution in Europe by student numbers and one of the largest in the world. Since it was founded, more than 1.5 million students have taken its courses. The success of the Open University and other online providers illustrates the widespread hunger for personalized routes into higher education and the growing appetite for innovative ways to provide them.
Life is not an academic exercise
There are many ways to learn other than sitting in a classroom or lecture hall. When education connects with the world beyond school, young people can achieve remarkable things.
“Service-learning” integrates community service with instruction and reflection, to teach civic responsibility and strengthen communities for the common good. The National Youth Leadership Council (NYLC) is one of the worldwide leaders in service education and defines service-learning as “a philosophy, pedagogy, and model for community development that is used as an instructional strategy to meet learning goals and/or content standards.” Dr James Kielsmeier founded NYLC in 1983, “to create a more just, sustainable, and peaceful world with young people, their schools, and their communities through service-learning.”5 NYLC now reaches into every state in the US and 35 countries. NYLC programs have included partnerships with schools, colleges, major corporations, government, faith-based organizations and other nonprofits.
Room 13 is a social enterprise organization that includes an international community of artists, educators and other professionals, and a network of studios in Austria, Botswana, Canada, China, Holland, India, Mexico, Nepal, South Africa, Turkey and the United States. Each studio offers professionally run courses and workshops, painting holidays, expeditions, training and all manner of creative development for adults of all ages. The unique feature of Studio 13 is that its management team is aged between 8 and 11.
Studio 13 began in 1994 when a group of elementary school students established their own art studio in Room 13 in Caol Primary School near Fort William, Scotland. The guiding philosophy evolved through artist-in-residence posts held by the project founder, Rob Fairley. He worked with a number of elementary schools and was asked by students at Caol to become artist-in-residence. With his encouragement, they ran the studio as a business, raising funds to buy art materials and to engage other artists to work with them.
“Its stimulus,” says Fairley “was exasperation at the lack of interest in teaching visual literacy and in teaching the basic technical skills necessary to express ideas through visual imagery.”6 By approaching children as artists and intellectual equals, Room 13 combines artistic development with the skills to run a successful business. Each Room 13 studio is run by the students. An elected management team is responsible for the day-to-day running of the studio, for keeping track of the finances and for making sure all invoices are paid. No adult is allowed to sign the checks. Room 13 is not age or ability specific and there is no coercion. Students come because they wish to and stay for as long as they want, providing they negotiate the time with their teachers and all class work is up to date. Devised and run by elementary school children, Room 13 has grown from a one-day-a-week voluntary project between Fairley and the children of Caol Primary into an international network of studios, with a reputation for creating high-quality artwork and for pushing the boundaries of creative education.
Success creates success
El Sistema is a national music program that has produced a number of outstanding musicians and has changed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Venezuela’s poorest children. The country now has 237 orchestras, 200 youth orchestras and 376 choruses. Among the graduates of El Sistema are internationally renowned musicians such as Edicson Ruiz, Gustavo Dudamel and the acclaimed Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra. Many children begin attending their local El Sistema center, called a “nucleo,” as early as age 2 or 3 and most continue well into their teens. They attend up to six days a week, three to four hours a day, plus retreats and intensive workshops. Participation is free for all students. El Sistema aims “to create a daily haven of safety, joy and fun that builds every child’s self-esteem and sense of value.” Discipline is relaxed but enforced. Although hard work and achievement are crucial to the success of El Sistema, the feeling of fun is never forgotten.
El Sistema takes time to work with the parents of students. Home visits ensure that the family understand the level of commitment required of them. As the students begin to learn their instruments, teachers instruct parents on how best to support them at home. Teachers and students alike are committed to “creating a place where children feel safe and challenged. El Sistema graduates leave with a sense of capability, endurance and resilience, owning a confidence about taking on enormous challenges in their lives. A deep sense of value, of being loved and appreciated, and a trust for group process and cooperation enables them to feel that excellence is in their own hands.”7
“Creativity is possible in every discipline and should be promoted throughout the whole of education.”
Creativity is for everyone
The national creativity commission, which I chaired for the British Government, included scientists, economists, business leaders, educators, dancers, musicians, actors and performers. Our report, All Our Futures,8 dealt with the whole curriculum. Yet some members of the Government steadfastly referred to it as “the arts report.” Creativity is not only about the arts. Work in the arts can be highly creative but so can anything that involves intelligence. There are many arguments for the arts in education but associating them exclusively with creativity is a mistake. It implies that the arts are mainly opportunities for a break from more rigorous academic work: a chance to get creative for a time; a view that misunderstands both the nature of creativity and the arts. It also implies that other disciplines, including math and science, are not creative, which is untrue. Creativity is possible in every discipline and should be promoted throughout the whole of education.
Creative schedules
The schedule or timetable is the management tool for organizing time and resources. In theory, the purpose of the schedule is to facilitate learning. In practice, it can have the opposite effect. Instead of the timetable flexing to meet the needs of teaching and learning, students and teachers alike are shunted through the day on the fixed rails of the timetable. Lessons take place in set units of time, irrespective of the activity, in patterns that repeat week after week. Practicing a language may be best in short, frequent periods of immersion; working on group projects in science or the arts usually benefits from longer blocks of time. The schedule can and should be sensitive to these differences.
The School of One (SO1) is a middle school mathematics program of the New York City Department of Education.9 It began in 2009 and is now operating in six schools in Manhattan, The Bronx and Brooklyn. The mission of the school is “to provide personalized, effective and dynamic classroom instruction so that teachers have more time to focus on quality instruction.” The school has developed a suite of computer programs, which include student profiles based on detailed assessments together with input from parents and teachers, and a lesson bank of materials in various formats. At the heart of the system is a computer program known as the learning algorithm, which generates unique daily schedules and resources for each student and teacher. These schedules include group work, collaborative projects and individual study time. The teachers are freed from most of the routine tasks of administration and can focus on “providing quality support and instruction to the students.” The teachers can override the schedules for themselves or particular students.
The 2010 pilot was evaluated by New York City Department of Education’s Research and Policy Study Group, which found that participating students significantly outperformed nonparticipating students. In 2009 it was listed by Time magazine as one of the 100 Best Innovations. The School of One promises other innovations using IT, contributing, as the school puts it, to “the mass customization of student learning.” Another reason to rethink the schedule is that students’ energy levels vary with the rhythms of the day.
Russell Foster is head of Circadian Neuroscience at Brasenose College, Oxford. He has been conducting memory tests with teenaged students at Monkseaton High School in North Tyneside in the UK. His research suggests that teenagers’ brains work two hours behind adult time. Young people’s body clocks may shift as they begin their teens. Teenagers get up later not because they’re lazy, but because they are biologically programmed to do so. Dr Paul Kelley, the principal of Monkseaton and author of Making Minds, says that continuous early starts create “teenage zombies” and that allowing them to begin lessons at 11 a.m. has a profound impact on learning.
Dr Kelley argues that depriving teenagers of sleep may affect their mental and physical health as well as their education. We don’t need science to tell us that rousing teenagers from their beds early in the morning results in abrupt mood swings and increased irritability. It may also contribute to depression, weight gain and reduced immunity to disease. Dr Kelley said: “This affects all teenagers from about year eleven and stays with them until their university years and beyond. The research shows that we are making teenagers the way they are and that we need to do something about it.” One outcome of the research is “spaced learning,” in which teachers give short lessons, sometimes of less than ten minutes, before changing to a physical activity and then repeating the lesson. In one trial, the pupils scored up to 90% in a science paper after one session involving three 20-minute bursts, interspersed with ten-minute breaks for physical activity. The pupils had not covered any part of the science syllabus before the lessons.10
The Sudbury Valley School was founded in 1968 in Framingham, Massachusetts, in the United States. It is a private school, attended by children from the ages of 4 to 19 and is organized on two basic principles: educational freedom and democratic governance. It sits in a long tradition of democratic schools that includes Summerhill School founded in 1921 in Suffolk, England by A.S. Neill. In Sudbury Valley as at Summerhill, students are responsible for their own education. The school is run as a democracy in which students and staff are equals.
Students decide for themselves what they will do and when, how and where they will do it. This freedom “is at the heart of the school; it belongs to the students as their right, not to be violated.” The premises of the school are that “all people are curious by nature; that the most efficient, long-lasting, and profound learning takes place when started and pursued by the learner; that all people are creative if they are allowed to develop their unique talents; that age-mixing among students promotes growth in all members of the group; and that freedom is essential to the development of personal responsibility.”
Students initiate all their own activities and create their own environments.
Adults and students mix freely. “People can be found everywhere talking, reading and playing. Some may be in the digital arts studio, editing a video they have made. There are almost always people making music of one kind or another, usually in several places. You might see someone studying French, biology, or algebra. People may be at computers, doing administrative work in the office, playing chess, rehearsing a show, or participating in role-playing games. In the art room, people will be drawing; they might also be sewing, or painting, or working with clay, either on the wheel or by hand.” The physical plant, the staff and the equipment are there for the students to use as the need arises: “The school provides a setting in which students are independent, are trusted, and are treated as responsible people; and a community in which students are exposed to the complexities of life in the framework of a participatory democracy.”11
Sudbury and Summerhill are not isolated experiments. There are now dozens of schools based on similar principles in more than 30 countries. Although they are mostly private schools, they are part of a growing movement worldwide to engage students directly in the design and management of their own education. They include a remarkable network of democratic schools and of “education cities” which has been cultivated by Yaacov and Sheerly Hecht and their team, and whose work is promulgated through an important and growing global network of related initiatives.12
All schools are unique
For several years, I acted as mentor to a statewide program of creativity and innovation in Oklahoma. The state has a nationally recognized program of early years’ education. In The Element, I describe one school in the Jenks schools district of Tulsa, which has a wonderful relationship with an unusual partner. The Grace Living Center is a retirement home. The supervisor of the Center approached the school district to ask whether they could participate in the district’s reading program. As a result, the district established an early years’ classroom in the foyer of the retirement home and this is where a group of young children goes to school each day. At the center of the partnership is the Book Buddies program, in which members of the home spend time, one-on-one, listening to the children read and reading to them. The results have been remarkable.
Over 70% of the children leave the program reading at Grade 3 level or higher, outperforming many other children in the district. The reason is that they have had personalized support. Second, they are learning much more than how to read. Through their relationships with the members of the home, they are learning about the rich traditions of life in Oklahoma. Third, medication levels at the home have fallen dramatically. The senior citizens have a new reason to live and a new energy for their days. They have a purpose. But every now and then the children have to be told that one of the book buddies will not be coming back again, because they have passed. So, at this young age the children are learning too about the natural cycles of life and death.
In most education systems, people are segregated by age. This project shows what can happen when the generations are brought back together and re-establish some of their traditional relationships. As with all genuine innovations, the outcomes, as Elliot Eisner once said, are a surprise not a prediction.13 Small, creative changes in any school can have major benefits. Large changes may have correspondingly dramatic results.
The culture of a school is much more than the curriculum, teaching styles and forms of assessment. Culture is about values, ambience, tone and relationships. In these respects, all schools are different and they should be. Diversity is essential to move the system beyond industrial models of standardization and conformity. The challenge is not to take a single model to scale: it is to propagate the principles of creativity so that every school can develop its own approach as a unique community. As in Tulsa, often the simplest ideas can have large effects.
We’re in this together
Transforming education takes partnership and collaboration. Everyone has a stake in the future of education and in many parts of the world there are formal alliances between schools and the business, philanthropic and cultural sectors. In the United States, the Partnership for Twenty First Century Learning is a national organization that “advocates for 21st century readiness for every student.”14 The partnership and its members provide tools and resources to help the US education system keep up, “by fusing the three Rs and four Cs (critical thinking and problem solving, communication, collaboration, and creativity and innovation).” The partnership advocates for local, state and federal policies that support this approach for every school.
The Partnership for Next Generation Learning is a collaboration between The Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and a consortium of states and foundations. The partnership is establishing a network of “innovation laboratories” in education. CCSSO has called for a new education system, “one that is designed around the fundamental premise that we will provide each and every child with personalized learning experiences leading to success.” The aim of the strategy is to change the national conversation about how to improve educational outcomes. The CCSSO notes that there are many examples, in the US and internationally, in both formal education and other sectors, of what transformative learning looks like: “Unfortunately, these examples remain exceptions rather than the norm. We are still falling short of wholly systemic transformation because existing federal, state, and local systems are not conducive to fostering innovation and making transformative shifts to new policy.” Although many are working to improve various elements of the current system, the Partnership for Next Generation Learning “is ready to engage those who are prepared to shift energy, time, and investment away from fixing what we have toward creating the public education system that we need … and making this transformation a reality for all students.”15
In the United Kingdom, The RSA (Royal Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) has been a leading campaigner for educational transformation. It coordinated the drafting of an “Education Charter” with multiple partner organizations, committed to a more holistic education. The Charter led to the development of the national Whole Education movement, which “knits together academic, practical and vocational learning calibrated to the potential of each individual.” The basis of Whole Education is the conviction that education should “invest in the intellectual development of the young person as well as the development of social and emotional competencies. These competencies are a major part of the foundations that allow every young person to learn effectively and contribute positively to their own development and attainment and to the development of a good society.” Whole Education partners with over 5,000 schools and colleges and numerous youth organizations and charities that work directly with young people. The aim is “to ensure that all young people have access to an education that equips them with the skills, knowledge, attitudes and resources necessary to cope and thrive in life beyond school and make a positive contribution to their societies.”16
National, state and local policies for education have profound effects on the climate in schools. It is important to persuade policy makers to change the policy climate in the best way possible. But schools cannot wait for policy changes before they do anything themselves and students can’t postpone their lives in the meantime. Schools often have more freedom to innovate than they commonly think. Creativity is not about a lack of constraints; it is about working within them and overcoming them.
CREATIVE TEACHING
No school is better than its teachers. National reform movements in education often focus on curriculum and assessment. The element that is most often overlooked is the only one that really makes a difference to student achievement: the quality of teaching. When you think of your own time at school it is the people you remember, and especially the teachers who turned you on and the ones who turned you off; who built you up or knocked you down. A casual remark by a teacher, or even a raised eyebrow, can set you on a lifelong journey of discovery or put you off taking the first step. Mastery in teaching is like mastery in any other profession. Expert practitioners in any field – doctors, lawyers, chefs, artists, scientists – have a wide repertory of techniques and deep knowledge and practical experiences to draw from. Knowing which to draw from to meet the needs of the present situation is the connoisseurship that expert teachers also share. A creative culture in schools depends on re-energizing the creative abilities of teachers.
“There are three related tasks in teaching for creativity: encouraging, identifying and fostering.”
In Chapter 7, I distinguished between the two traditions of individualism: the rational and the natural. To some extent these have been associated with different styles of teaching. So-called traditional methods are usually associated with formal instruction to the whole class and with rote learning; progressive methods with inquiry-based learning, and with students working individually or in groups to explore their own interests and express their own ideas. Both have an important place in creative education. Sometimes it is appropriate for the teacher to give formal instruction in skills and techniques, or to convey specific ideas and information; at others it is more appropriate for the students to explore ideas for themselves. Some of these methods do put a strong emphasis on creativity; some do not. Some of this work is excellent; some is not.
There is a difference between teaching through creativity and teaching for creativity. Good teachers know that their role is to engage and inspire their students. This is a creative task in itself. Teaching for creativity is about facilitating other people’s creative work. It involves asking open-ended questions where there may be multiple solutions; working in groups on collaborative projects, using imagination to explore possibilities; making connections between different ways of seeing; and exploring the ambiguities and tensions that may lie between them. Teaching for creativity involves teaching creatively. There are three related tasks in teaching for creativity: encouraging, identifying and developing.
Encouraging
The first task in teaching for creativity in any field is to encourage people to believe in their creative potential and to nurture the confidence to try. Other important attitudes for creative learning are high motivation and independence of judgment; a willingness to take risks and be enterprising; to be persistent and to be resilient in the face of false starts, wrong turns and dead ends.
Identifying
Everyone can learn the general skills of creative thinking. In addition, we all have personal creative capacities. A creative musician is not necessarily a creative scientist; a creative writer is not necessarily a creative mathematician. Creative achievement is often driven by a person’s love of a particular instrument, for the feel of the material, for the excitement of a style of work that catches the imagination. Identifying people’s creative abilities includes helping them to find their creative strengths: to be in their element.
Developing
In teaching for creativity, teachers aim to:
- promote experiment and inquiry and a willingness to make mistakes;
- encourage new ideas, free from immediate criticism;
- encourage the expression of personal feelings;
- convey an understanding of phases in creative work;
- develop an awareness of the roles of intuition and of aesthetic judgment;
- facilitate critical evaluation of ideas.
CURRICULUM
The curriculum is the knowledge, ideas, skills and values that students are expected to learn. There is a difference between the formal curriculum, which all students have to follow, and the informal curriculum, which is optional, including after-school programs. The whole curriculum is all the learning opportunities that a school provides including the formal and informal curriculum.
One obvious purpose of the curriculum is cultural. One of the roles of education is to put a stamp of approval on certain sorts of knowledge and experience and to suggest, by implication, that others are not so worthwhile. As the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu puts it, education distinguishes between the spheres of “orthodox and heretical culture.”17 Many things are not taught in schools. Witchcraft and necromancy are not, at least not usually. A curriculum has a second function, which is managerial. Schools need curricula so that they can organize themselves, know how many teachers to hire, what resources are needed, how to arrange the day, whom to put where, at what time and for how long. A balanced curriculum should give equal status and resources to literacy and numeracy, the sciences, the humanities, the arts and to physical education.
High standards in literacy and numeracy are essential in themselves and they are the gateways to learning in many other disciplines. Languages and mathematics offer much more than basic literacy and numeracy. The study of languages should include literature, and the skills of speaking and listening. Mathematics also leads into rich fields of abstraction and the conceptual languages of science and technology.
Science education encourages an understanding of evidence and the skills of “objective” analysis; gives access to existing scientific understanding of the processes of the natural world and the laws that govern them; and provides opportunities for practical and theoretical inquiry, by which existing knowledge can be verified or challenged. Science education also promotes understanding of the scientific concepts and achievements that have shaped the modern world and of their significance and limitations.
The humanities are concerned with understanding human culture. These include history, the study of languages, religious education and aspects of geography and social studies. Humanities education deepens students’ understanding of the world around us: its diversity, complexity and traditions. It enlarges our knowledge of what we share with other human beings, including those removed in time and culture, and develops a critical awareness of our own times and cultures.
The arts are concerned with the qualities of human experiences. Through music, dance, visual arts, drama and the rest, we give form to the currents of feeling and perception that constitute the lived experience of ourselves and of other people. The arts illustrate the diversity of intelligence and provide practical ways of promoting it. They provide the most natural processes for giving form to personal feelings and emotions and how they connect with our ways of thinking about the world; they are among the most vivid manifestations of human culture.
Physical education contributes directly to the health and well-being of students. We are embodied beings and there are intimate relations between mental, emotional and physical processes. Physical education enhances creative work by quickening concentration and mental agility.18 Physical education and sport are entwined in all cultural traditions and practices and evoke powerful feelings and values, both in relation to the games themselves and through the sense of collective belonging they can generate. They provide important opportunities to develop individual and team skills and to share success and failure in controlled environments. In these and other ways, physical education has essential and equal roles with other curriculum areas in a balanced approach to creative and cultural education.
There should be equal balance between all these areas of the curriculum because each reflects major areas of cultural knowledge and experience. Each addresses different modes of intelligence and creative development and the strengths of any individual may be in one or more of them.
ASSESSMENT
Assessment is the process of making judgments about students’ progress and attainment. Assessment has several roles. The first is diagnostic. Students may be given tests and assignments of various sorts to help teachers to understand their aptitudes and levels of development in various areas. The second is formative, the purpose of which is to gather evidence on students’ progress to inform teaching methods and priorities for further work. The third role is summative, which is about making judgments on overall performance at the conclusion of a program of work. Methods of assessment can take many forms: from informal judgments in the classroom, to formal assignments and public examinations. They can draw on many forms of evidence: from student participation in class, to portfolios of work, to written essays and assignments in other media. Summative and formative assessment both have essential roles in teaching and learning; in improving the quality of achievement; and in ensuring a healthy balance between factual knowledge and more open-ended styles of learning, all of which are necessary to creative education. The problem for creative education is not the need for assessment, but the nature of it. There are three related problems: the emphasis on summative assessment and testing; the emphasis on measurable outcomes and league tables; the pressures of national assessment on teachers and schools.
National assessment systems tend to emphasize summative assessment. They are used to judge how well the school itself is doing when compared to other schools. The outcomes of these assessments are linked to the public status of schools, to their funding and sometimes to their survival. Generally, national assessments emphasize “measurable outcomes” and focus on testing students’ recall of factual knowledge and skills that can be measured comparatively. They generally take little account of experimentation, original thinking and innovation. The focus of teaching narrows, and so does students’ learning and achievement. Some areas of the curriculum, especially arts and humanities; some forms of teaching and learning, including questioning, exploring and debating; and some aspects of particular subjects, are neglected.
An assessment has two components: a description and a comparison. If you say that someone can run a mile in four minutes or can speak French, these are neutral descriptions of what someone can do. If you say that “she is the best athlete in the district” or that “he speaks French like a native,” these are assessments. Assessments compare performances with others and rate them against particular criteria. Assessments that use letters and grades are light on description and heavy on comparison. Students are given grades without always knowing what they mean, and teachers sometimes give grades without being sure why. I once talked with a high school student who had just completed a three-year program in dance. I asked her what she had got out of the course and she said, “I got a B.”
A single letter or number does not convey the complexities it is meant to summarize. Some outcomes can’t be expressed in this way anyway. As Eliott Eisner put it, “not everything important is measurable and not everything measurable is important.”19 One way to improve assessment is to separate description and comparison. Portfolios allow for detailed descriptions of the work that students have done, with examples and comments by themselves and others. Providing clear criteria improves the transparency of assessments. In peer group assessment, students judge each other’s work and agree on the criteria by which it is assessed. These approaches can be especially valuable in assessing creative work.
Assessing creative development is more nuanced than testing factual knowledge. Creative work has to be original and of value. There are degrees of originality. Judging value depends on clear and relevant criteria. Teachers are often unclear about the criteria to apply to students’ creative work and may lack confidence in their own judgment. Creative work usually passes through various phases. It may involve false starts, trial and error and a series of successive approximations along the way to the finished work. The educational value of creative work can lie as much in the process as in the final product. Assessment has to take this into account and teachers often need advice on how this should be done. Insensitive assessment can damage students’ creativity and may encourage them to take a safe option, avoiding experimentation and never learning how to find and correct their mistakes. There are also issues of comparability. How should people’s creative work be compared between schools or regions?
The difficulties of assessing creative development can be overcome and there is much research, experience and expertise to draw from. Tackling these issues is not a priority in many education systems. The net effect is to increase the emphasis on some forms of learning and to lower the status of others.
LOOKING TO THE FUTURE
In many parts of the world, people are coming together to develop their own alternatives to standardized schooling. Many of them are in the public sector; some are independent schools and some are hybrids, like the charter schools in the USA.20 A small but growing number of people are opting for more radical alternatives including home schooling and “un-schooling.”21 The new pioneers of alternative education come from many different backgrounds and often are driven by dissatisfaction with their own experiences in school and a determination to do better for their own and other people’s children.
Blue Man Group is a world-renowned creative organization based in Lower Manhattan, New York City. The group was founded in 1988 by Phil Stanton, Chris Wink and Matt Goldman. Blue Man Group produces unique performances that combine music, elaborate improvised instruments, comedy and multimedia theatrics. The group has recorded scores for film and television and appears regularly on television. The Blue Men wear black, utilitarian clothes, blue make-up on their hands, faces and bald heads and never speak. They meet everything around them with a childlike innocence and curiosity. Since it was founded the group has grown into an international creative phenomenon, with theaters in New York, Las Vegas, Orlando, Boston, Chicago, Berlin and Tokyo. Now they have started their own elementary school. None of the group’s founders had any of this in mind when they first set out on their journey together.
As Chris Wink says,22 “When Blue Man first started we weren’t a business, we weren’t a company, we weren’t a show. We were just a community of friends looking for something interesting to do. All we had was a character and a few principles that we shared. We had no idea what we were going to do: we just knew that we were going to explore these ideas using this character.” None of the group remembers which of them first thought of becoming bald and blue. And as Matt Goldman says, it was not a very bankable idea. A trio of bald, blue, silent performers did not have obvious investment potential. They loved the character though, partly because it was as neutral as they could imagine in terms of culture, age and gender.
Being bald and blue was hardly a long-term, linear plan; the evolution of the group was simply carried forward on the excitement of its own creative collaboration. Together they generated lives and careers that none of them could have foreseen. As Chris Wink puts it: “Some people are lucky and want to be rocket scientists or cellists. These are existing media. For others we wanted to be post-modern multimedia vaudevillians who create instruments and explore popular culture in a sort of shamanic primal atmosphere. Where’s that job exist? Because if we could have found it we would have signed up for it.”
The group’s work was guided by some clear principles. One of them was that everyone could be creative. “We needed that idea,” said Chris Wink, “because we had gone through our educational experiences thinking maybe we weren’t creative. And then we got together and said maybe that’s not true. What if that isn’t true?” For Phil Stanton, this was a vital principle from the outset, “and it influenced everything throughout our career.” Although they are a performance-based group, they aim to be creative in everything they do. As Matt Goldman put it: “Being creative wasn’t confined to if you could mold clay or paint on canvas or write music. In the business setting you could be creative in anything in any discipline.”
Matt Goldman and Chris Wink have been friends since they were in elementary school together. Phil Stanton met them later when he moved to New York City in his early 20s. They had an instant rapport. One of the things that drew the group together initially, he says, “even before there was a Blue Man was that we were in our own ways disappointed with our educational experience. It seems like when we’re all kids everybody paints and has fun. But somehow we throw away that kind of inspiration and get rid of a bunch of other things too.”
When they had their own children, they and their wives faced the dilemma of where and how to educate them. After long reflection, they decided they should start their own school: The Blue School. As Matt Goldman explains it: “We wanted to create the kind of school that either we wished we had gone to or that we fantasized would be the school for our children: a school that emphasizes creativity as much as anything else, that teaches kids a special way to treat one another through social and emotional learning. A place where you don’t lose your childlike exuberance, where you have such a zest for learning, a love of life all the way through, and not have it educated out of you.”
The educational model of the Blue School consists of two main elements: the core curriculum, which represents the basic disciplines of the program: language arts, science, fine arts, lively arts, social studies, technology and media literacy, math, physical arts and fitness. The second element is the school’s values: creativity and expression, family and community connections, playfulness, exuberance and fun, self-awareness and well-being, global and environmental exploration, multiple perspectives and differentiated learning styles. Each of the Blue School’s values relates in some way to the idea of connection, “whether it be the connection to a community, to one’s emotions, to one’s artistic voice, to one’s body, to the world, to one’s interests, or to one’s sense of joy and wonder.” The model reflects the work of and principles of The Blue Man Group itself and emerged from the school’s commitment to achieve a new kind of balance between “rigor and enchantment” and a belief that both are essential in education.
According to Chris Wink, “on a metaphorical level, the traditional model of education is that children are freight cars and the school is a grain silo. It fills each of the kids up and then moves them down the track. We’re creating a launch pad where kids are the rockets and we’re just trying to find the fuse.” The Blue School’s approach, he says, “involves having the entire brain alive and exhilarated and tingling with life force. That needs to be part of our educational model. That seems like a crazy revolutionary idea but it really actually seems to us to make sense, to make actual academic sense.”
The work and ambience of the school also reflects the Blue Man Group’s original commitment to trusting in our natural creative powers. As Chris Wink puts it, “People tend to think that the part of ourselves that feels different should be hidden or covered up. The Blue Man message is that you should not hide that part of you because it is the key to your individuality. Letting it out lets all this creativity out. You should have the courage to expose that part of yourself.” There is a point in the Blue Man show when brightly colored paint pours from tubes around the performers’ chests onto drums that they are pounding in a shared, primal beat. “When we drum on paint during our show,” says Wink, “the vibrant colors are a way of expressing what happens when you let your outsider come out.”
Whether in the public or the independent sector, in schools or at home, being creative in providing education and promoting creativity are not dispensable luxuries. They are essential to enable us all to make lives that are worth living and to sustain a world that is worth living in. The cultural and economic circumstances in which we and our children have to make our way are utterly different from those of the past. We cannot meet the challenges of the twenty-first century with the educational ideologies of the nineteenth. We need a new Renaissance that values different modes of intelligence and that cultivates creative relationships between disciplines and between education, commerce and the wider community. Transforming education is not easy. The price of failure is more than we can afford and the benefits of success may be more than we imagine.