Creativity

A definition of creativity

This is the definition provided by QCA and is based on recommendations made in the document All Our Futures:

First, they [the characteristics of creativity] always involve thinking or behaving imaginatively. Second, overall this imaginative activity is purposeful: that is, it is directed to achieving an objective. Third, these processes must generate something original. Fourth, the outcome must be of value in relation to the objective.

A human need

Maslow's Hierarchy of Human Needs places creativity at the top of the pyramid, a zone in which humans achieve self-actualisation. Maslow's humanistic view of creativity relates to notions of child-centred education where the teacher acts as a facilitator of learning. Such a model of education which emphasises process over product can appear to be at odds with formalised summative testing.

In recent years, alternatives to the national curriculum in the UK have made some head way. The RSA's Opening Minds curriculum and Enquiring Minds from Futurelab both propose a more integrated, project based approach to learning with students conceived as co-creators. The effect of these initiatives has been to influence the conception of a new national curriculum that gives a much clearer role for creativity and encourages schools to innovate.

A state of Flow

Proposed by positive psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, the concept Flow describes a mental state in which a person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity. There is clearly a relationship between creativity and flow. Csíkszentmihályi identifies the following nine factors as accompanying an experience of flow:

1. Clear goals (expectations and rules are discernible and goals are attainable and align appropriately with one's skill set and abilities).
2. Concentrating and focusing, a high degree of concentration on a limited field of attention (a person engaged in the activity will have the opportunity to focus and to delve deeply into it).
3. A loss of the feeling of self-consciousness, the merging of action and awareness.
4. Distorted sense of time, one's subjective experience of time is altered.
5. Direct and immediate feedback (successes and failures in the course of the activity are apparent, so that behavior can be adjusted as needed).
6. Balance between ability level and challenge (the activity is neither too easy nor too difficult).
7. A sense of personal control over the situation or activity.
8. The activity is intrinsically rewarding, so there is an effortlessness of action.
9. People become absorbed in their activity, and focus of awareness is narrowed down to the activity itself, action awareness merging.

Not all are needed for flow to be experienced.

This diagram, from Csíkszentmihályi's book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, describes the relationship between Challenges and Skills. Low challenge and high skills leads to boredom. High challenge and low skills can result in anxiety. Flow is experienced when the degree of challenge is balanced by the skills of the person engaged in a particular activity. In fact, a challenge that is slightly greater than the skills possessed results in continued learning and progress along the Flow Channel.

       "Contrary to what most of us believe, happiness does not simply
   happen to us. It's something that we make happen, and it results
   from doing our best. Feeling fulfilled when we live up to our
       potentialities is what motivates differentiation and leads to
   evolution."

This Wiki attempts to review the revised version of Bloom's Taxonomy in the context of learning with digital tools.

Bloom's Taxonomy Revised

Benjamin Bloom first published his "Taxonomy of Educational Objectives" in 1956. It attempts to classify different forms and levels of learning. Bloom identifies three domains in which this learning takes place - the cognitive, the affective and the psychomotor. The most discussed of these is the cognitive domain. The original levels within this domain were: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation. Educators often refer to the notion of "higher order thinking". The belief is that, once the lower order thinking skills (knowing, understanding, applying) have been acquired, higher order thinking can take place (analysis, synthesis and evaluation).

In 2001, Anderson and Krathwohl proposed a revised model of Bloom's taxonomy for the cognitive domain. The illustration opposite provides a link to an animated resource describing this model. There are two significant changes:
1. the shift from nouns to verbs
2. the top category has changed from "evaluation" to "creating"
According to this model, the ability to create new knowledge, to create something original and of value, belongs with the higher orders of thinking.

Here is a list of learning verbs that might be associated with each of the levels of thinking in this revised taxonomy:

Creating - designing, constructing, planning, producing, inventing, devising, making

Evaluating - checking, hypothesising, critiquing, experimenting, judging, testing, detecting, monitoring
Analysing - comparing, organising, deconstructing, attributing, outlining, finding, structuring, integrating
Applying - implementing, carrying out, using, executing
Understanding - interpreting, summarising, inferring, paraphrasing, classifying, comparing, explaining, exemplifying
Remembering - recognising, listing, describing, identifying, retrieving, naming, locating, finding

Creative Thinking

Margaret Boden begins her essay "Creativity and Knowledge" with a couple of helpful ideas:

"Creativity and knowledge are not opposed to one another."
"Creativity cannot happen unless the thinker already possesses knowledge of a rich and/or well-structured kind."

She then suggests that creativity is the ability to come up with new ideas, but that this "newness" is problematic. Ideas can be new with respect to the whole of human history, or they can be new in relation to the person's previous ways of thinking. In schools, we are generally dealing with the latter of these two types of creative newness, what we might refer to as "small C creativity". Boden then goes on to describe three different types of creative thinking:

Combinational - the production of new ideas by combining (associating) old ideas in unfamiliar ways.
Exploratory - this can happen when a person has learned some of the rules of a particular conceptual space, sometimes leading to new and surprising discoveries
Transformational - this involves the significant alteration of one or more of the accepted rules in the relevant conceptual space. It is examples of transformational creativity that often make it into the history books

There are many misconceptions about creativity. For example: Only a genius can be creative. Or: Creativity involves world-shattering light bulb moments. Boden helps to put the record straight. Knowledge and rules are important for creative thinking. Everyone can do it.

Thinking Hats

Conceived by Edward de Bono, the Six Thinking Hats approach aims to support group discussion and individual thinking through a structured process which assumes that the brain thinks in a number of distinct ways.

These are:

Neutrality (white) - considering purely what information is available, what are the facts?
Feeling (Red) - instinctive gut reaction or statements of emotional feeling (but not any justification)
Negative judgement (Black) - logic applied to identifying flaws or barriers, seeking mismatch
Positive Judgement (Yellow) - logic applied to identifying benefits, seeking harmony
Creative thinking (Green) - statements of provocation and investigation, seeing where a thought goes
Process control (Blue) - thinking about thinking

De Bono argues that the dominant form of thinking in Western culture is represented by the black hat of negative judgement (logic). The system of thinking hats legitimises the use of other approaches to solving problems by valuing the role of intuition, creativity and instinct.

Divergent & Lateral Thinking

Established in the 1950s by psychologist J.P. Guilford, the concept of Divergent Thinking describes the process of developing multiple solutions to a given problem or stimulus. Often seen as a major component of creativity, divergent thinking can have a number of characteristics: fluency (the ability to produce ideas quickly); flexibility (the capacity to consider a variety of approaches simultaneously); originality (the ability ot produce ideas that are different from those of others); and elaboration (the ability to think through the details of a given idea and carry it out). The video opposite is a short extract from Sir Ken Robinson's lecture at the RSA in which he discusses the role of divergent thinking. Edward de Bono has developed a similar theory which he prefers to call Lateral Thinking. This is the process of arriving at new ideas through an indirect, creative approach. De Bono has created several sets of thinking tools to support the development of lateral thinking.

"You cannot dig a hole in a different place by digging the same hole deeper"
Edward de Bono

Creativity in the National Curriculum

Personal Learning and Thinking Skills

Personal Learning and Thinking Skills (PLTS) are an important feature of the new national curriculum and attempt to "provide a framework for describing the qualities and skills needed for success in learning and life."

The framework comprises six groups of skills:

independent enquirers
creative thinkers
reflective learners
team workers
self-managers
effective participants.

Cross-curriculum Dimensions

"To achieve the aims of the curriculum, young people need to experience opportunities to understand themselves and the world in which they live. Cross-curriculum dimensions provide important unifying areas of learning that help young people make sense of the world and give education relevance and authenticity. They reflect the major ideas and challenges that face individuals and society.Dimensions can add a richness and relevance to the curriculum experience of young people. They can provide a focus for work within and between subjects and across the curriculum as a whole, including the routines, events and ethos of the school."

Cross-curriculum dimensions include:

Creativity in the classroom

This advice comes from the excellent Learning and Teaching Scotland website:

The following approaches can help teachers to promote creativity in the classroom:

Ensuring that planning incorporates a range of teaching and learning styles.
Providing regular opportunities for hands-on experimentation, problem solving, discussion and collaborative work.
Creating opportunities where pupils are encouraged to actively do the work and question what is going on.
Making use of creative thinking techniques such as Brainstorming, Thinking Hats and PMI.
Sharing the learning intentions with pupils and providing them with opportunities for choosing how they are going to work.
Encouraging pupils to improvise, experiment and think outside the box.
Actively encouraging pupils to question, make connections, envisaging what might be possible and exploring ideas.
Asking open-ended questions such as ‘What if…?’ and ‘How might you…?’
Joining in with activities and modelling creative thinking and behaviour.
Encouraging pupils to develop criteria that they can use to judge their own work, in particular its originality and value.
Facilitating open discussion of the problems pupils are facing and how they can solve them.
Encouraging pupils to share ideas with others and to talk about their progress.
Using failure or setbacks as opportunities to learn.
Ensuring that assessment procedures reflect and reward creativity, enterprise and innovation.
Making effective use of encouragement, praise and positive language.
Creating opportunities to learn through the imagined experience, giving them a safe context to explore ideas using drama techniques.

The following list is taken from an excellent online introduction to creativity in education by Department of Educational Psychology and Instructional Technology, University of Georgia:

Provide in-class time for individuals and groups to just think and let their ideas marinate.
Reward creative ideas and products through public recognition - even if the ideas are still developing or perhaps fail.
Encourage students to take unique and different approaches in their work and reward any efforts in this direction.
Allow mistakes and model positive, supportive responses to mistakes. Encourage learning from their mistakes.
Encourage mental flexibility - taking other viewpoints that they might not usually take.
Explore the environment to stimulate curiosity about their world.
Question students' assumptions and guide them to dig deeper and consider their beliefs and others' to expose students to other ideas.
Stop evaluating or judging too soon. There is a time and place when ideas and their constraints need to be considered, but not too soon or the process will flounder.
Foster cooperation rather than competition.
Offer choices.
Encourage dissent and diversity.
Regularly provide positive feedback.

Image by Zach Bulick

Arthur J. Cropley has the following to say about the link between creative teaching and creative learning:

"Research has shown the importance for the emergence of creativity of a "congenial environment" and appropriate "social support factors". The classroom is, of course, one of the most important environments in which children spend time. Some teachers are particularly good at organising this environment in a way that promotes students' creativity. They provide a model of creative behaviour, reinforce such behaviour when pupils display it, protect creative pupils from conformity pressure applied by their peers and the system, and establish a classroom climate that permits alternative solutions, tolerates constructive errors, encourages effective surprise and does not isolate non-conformers. Research on teachers rated as particularly successful with gifted children has made a direct link between giftedness and creativity: These teachers, among other things, emphasised "creative production", showed "flexibility", accepted "alternative suggestions", encouraged "expression of ideas", and tolerated "humour". They were themselves creative and had stronger personal contacts with their students."

Creativity and educational reform

Elliott W. Eisner has made a significant contribution to the debate about the role of creativity in school reform. Eisner articulates a view of schools as places where children create meaning from experience, and that this requires an education devoted to the senses, to meaning-making and the imagination. He believes that the curriculum should foster multiple 'literacies' in students (especially by looking to non-verbal modes of learning and expression) and a deepening of the 'artistry' of teachers. Consequently, Eisner argues against a technocratic view of education, one in which schools can be easily measured by a set of pre-determined outcomes. This view is echoed by other thinkers, like Sir Ken Robinson, who value the role of the imagination in the process of building understanding.

In a fascinating talk delivered in 2002 at Stanford University entitled "What can education learn from the arts about the practice of education?" Eisner argues persuasively that artistry should be at the core of the education process and that the arts provide highly valuable and distinctive modes of thinking. Referring back to the ideas of Sir Herbert Read, Eisner proposes that the main purpose of education should be the creation of artists:

"By the term artist neither he nor I mean necessarily painters and dancers, poets and playwrights. We mean individuals who have developed the ideas, the sensibilities, the skills, and the imagination to create work that is well proportioned, skilfully executed, and imaginative, regardless of the domain in which an individual works. The highest accolade we can confer upon someone is to say that he or she is an artist whether as a carpenter or a surgeon, a cook or an engineer, a physicist or a teacher. The fine arts have no monopoly on the artistic."

"Even to talk about effectiveness as though it were independent of the kind of intellectual values that schools ought to support, seems ill conceived. Thoughtful educators are not simply interested in achieving known effects; they are interested as much in surprise, in discovery, in the imaginative side of life and its development as in hitting predefined targets achieved through routine procedures. In some sense our aim ought to be to convert the school from an academic institution into an intellectual one. That shift in the culture of schooling would represent a profound shift in emphasis and in direction."
Elliott W. Eisner

The speech ends with a rallying cry to all educators to set their sites high and campaign for a new vision of schools and schooling that has much in common with the Schools of Creativity project:

"I am talking about a culture of schooling in which more importance is placed on exploration than on discovery, more value is assigned to surprise than to control, more attention is devoted to what is distinctive than to what is standard, more interest is related to what is metaphorical than to what is literal. It is an educational culture that has a greater focus on becoming than on being, places more value on the imaginative than on the factual, assigns greater priority to valuing than to measuring, and regards the quality of the journey as more educationally significant than the speed at which the destination is reached. I am talking about a new vision of what education might become and what schools are for."

The trailer opposite is for a film entitled "We are the people we've been waiting for". Click here to visit the website to find out more.

The Creative Economy

An important context for the increasing support for creativity in education at a national level is the perception that the the skills associated with creativity - resilience, flexibility, effective communication, inventiveness, imagination, collaboration etc. - may be of increasing importance to the economy. This is an extract from a recent government publication about finding new talents for a new economy:

"The creative industries start with individual creativity. So, too, does every child’s learning experience. There is a growing recognition of the need to find practical ways of nurturing creativity at every stage in the education system: from the nursery through to secondary school; whether in academic or vocational courses; on apprenticeships or at university. In a world of rapid technological and social change, creativity extends well beyond art or drama lessons. It is as much about equipping people with the skills they need to respond creatively and confidently to changing situations and unfamiliar demands; enabling them to solve the problems and challenges they face at home, in education, at work; and making a positive contribution to their communities."

In response to the Roberts Review (2005) entitled Nurturing Creativity in Young People, which followed on from the earlier All Our Futures report, and the success of programmes like Creative Partnerships, the government appears committed to further support for the development of creativity. The pilot Find Your Talent initiative promises to be a first step in investing in the creative and cultural development of young people across Britain.

Creativity Quotations

"In the long history of humankind (and animalkind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed." -- Charles Darwin.

"Instead of pouring knowledge into people's heads, we need to help them grind a new set of eyeglasses so that we can see the world in a new way." -- J S Brown.

"Creativity is the ability to see relationships where none exist." -- Thomas Disch

"Think wrongly if you please, but in all cases think for yourself." -- Doris Lessing.

"Creativity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual." -- Arthur Koestler

"Creativity is a central source of meaning in our lives... [and] when we are involved in it, we feel that we are living more fully than during the rest of life." -- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

"The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves." -- Carl Jung

"Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of one's chosen form." -- Stephen Nachmanovitch

"Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. What if they are a little course, and you may get your coat soiled or torn? What if you do fail, and get fairly rolled in the dirt once or twice. Up again, you shall never be so afraid of a tumble." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Imagination is the living power and prime agent of all human perception." -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"Top 10 Creative Rules of Thumb:
1. The best way to get great ideas is to get lots of ideas and throw the bad ones away.
2. Create ideas that are 15 minutes ahead of their time...not light years ahead.
3. Always look for a second right answer.
4. If at first you don't succeed, take a break.
5. Write down your ideas before you forget them.
6. If everyone says you are wrong, you're one step ahead. If everyone laughs at you, you're two steps ahead.
7. The answer to your problem "pre-exists." You need to ask the right question to reveal the answer.
8. When you ask a dumb question, you get a smart answer.
9. Never solve a problem from its original perspective.
10. Visualize your problem as solved before solving it."

-- Charles Chic Thompson