Greetings, GreenMount Community,
In 1968, George Land administered a creativity test to
1,600 5-year-olds (Land & Jarman, 1992). The test, which he had developed
for NASA to identify innovative scientists and engineers, found that 98 percent
of tested children registered at a genius level on the creative scale. But five
years later, when Land readministered the test to the then-10-year-old
children, only 30 percent of them scored at the genius level of creativity.
After another five years, the number dropped to just 12 percent. The same test,
administered to 280,000 adults, found that only 2 percent registered at the
genius level for creativity. Land concluded that noncreative thinking is
learned.
I recently read this and it got me
wondering if, in some way, we diminish creativity in our students as they
ascend through the grades. Do we lessen
creative opportunities from kindergarten to grade 8? My first inclination is to say that at
GreenMount we focus on creativity at all levels and that the project-based
learning that we incorporate along with our goal to make learning as
experiential as possible makes us an exception to this kind of conclusion. Indeed, I have often said that one of the
goals to prepare our students for an uncertain future is to instill a creative
nature so that they will be able to deal with all the challenges that this next
generation will face. However, I know
that in order to maintain a high creative level in children we must be
deliberate in the kind of instructional program we offer and how we provide
opportunities for students to be creative and the learn to be creative.
In the February issue of Educational Leadership, there are
several articles on creativity that I will share with the staff in coming
weeks. I have shared with them a rubric
for creativity that they can use when assessing the creative aspects of a
project. The rubric assesses creativity
from “Very Creative” to “Imitative” and is headed by four basic categories; Variety of ideas and contexts, Variety of sources,
Combining ideas, and Communicating
something new. One author suggests
that teachers can nurture creativity by minimizing features of the environment
that can impede it (social comparisons, contingent rewards, and so on). Instead,
teachers should help students focus on the more intrinsically motivating and
meaningful aspects of the work by discussing how students might incorporate
their personal interests into the task by acknowledging their creativity (Beghetto,
2013).
I think we do this to a large extent, especially as we
allow students to investigate topics that interest them and for which they can
use their special talents to express their personal ideas about the topic. I think you will see many examples of this at
our theme event of February 22. For
example, students will be conducting a roundtable discussion about the Bread
and Roses strike, which took place during the period of history we are
exploring. The students were given the
basic information about this event and then they were on their own to be able
to have an informative and intelligent discussion with others who may have
opposing views. They will use
traditional research methods to find the information they will need, but they
will create how they want to portray the characters they will represent.
Creativity is a complicated
notion. It is not just thinking “outside
the box” and it takes more than just originality. Creativity requires hard work, effort and
risk. Students need to understand that creativity comes at a cost and that
the risks they take may result in rejection, ridicule, or worse (Beghetto,
2013). This is where the culture of our
school plays an important part in minimizing those risks. At GreenMount, we celebrate risk-taking and
students understand when their classmates look at something in an entirely
different way. I think we do a good job
with this.
So what can you do as parents to
foster creativity? Most of you already
do it, I know. Two articles, entitled The Case for Curiosity and The Power of Noticing, say it all. Even without reading these articles you can
see what your job is. And if you would
like to read any of the articles on creativity, let me know and I will make
copies for you.
Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did
something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they
just saw something. They were able to
connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. – Steve Jobs
Cheers,
Steve
