18 ways to promote creativity in your classroom everyday

Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten. Then when you hit puberty they take the crayons away and replace them with dry, uninspiring books on algebra, history, etc. Being suddenly hit years later with the ‘creative bug” is just a wee voice telling you, “I’d like my crayons back, please.” Hugh MacLeod

It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken the joy in creative expression and knowledge. Albert Einstein.

I hope you are not looking for formulas. Or handouts. Or a single technique. Or even a “method.” The creativity-inspiring classroom is a culture not a set of rules or specific activities. It is a mindset that teachers demonstrate to their students everyday.

Creativity doesn’t just happen. It needs to be cultivated. Quite honestly, I don’t know if creativity can be taught. It can be:

• —Allowed
• —Encouraged
• Displayed
• —Recognized and rewarded
• —Developed
• Discussed

But directly taught as a separate skill? So far nothing I’ve read or seen allows me to believe it can or should be.

But to keep this from being a terribly short postr, I'll try to identify some things teachers can purposely do in their classrooms that increase the odds of both their students and themselves being more creative.

1. Ban clip art.
2. Ask for information to be shared in at least two media formats or writing types. 
3. Encourage the narrative voice in writing and oral presentations. 
4. Ask for multiple possible answers to questions or multiple possible solutions to problems. 
5. Give points for “design” on all assignments. 
6. Instead of simply telling a student his or her  response is “wrong,” ask for a reason why the answer was given.
7. Use technologies that encourage creativity. 
8. Ask students to help formulate classroom rules, modify procedures, and solve issues.
9. Honor students’ personal interests and unique talents when teaching skills. 
10. Honor student creativity by giving it a CC License. 
11. Respect re-mixing. 
12. Teach the proper use of quoted materials. 
13. Add creativity spaces for display of student work in your classroom.
14. Add “maker-spaces” to your classroom and library.
15. Modify your discussions to allow for divergent ideas and interests. 
16. Discuss the creative work of experts. 
17. Seek out the creative ideas of other educators. 
18. Make creativity a criteria on all assessments. 

I am not going number this final one just because it deserves special attention. I started this post by listing what we as educators can do about creativity. We can:

• —Allow it
• —Encourage it
• Display it
• —Recognize and reward it
• —Develop it
• Discuss it

I will add one more. We also need to respect it and the students who demonstrate it. Remember that courage is a critical attribute of the creative individual. Fear of ridicule clamps a lot of mouths from offering a divergent opinion and keeps a lot of hands from designing something original. (I bet this happens in your staff meetings as well.) Research shows that “communities of creativity” are very effective in bringing out the creativity in everyone in them.

Do an honest assessment of how you personally respond to “wrong” answers, assumptions, or points of view. Are they immediately corrected or they investigated? Do you yourself acknowledge that every individual has a unique set of experiences, point of view, and problems that may be reflected in her work? Do you honestly believe the old adage “there’s no such thing as stupid question?” Do you always dig a little deeper before judging? I have to admit, these are all tough mindsets for me to practice!

A teacher’s respect and the respect she builds in her students is the most important element of a classroom that builds rather than destroys creativity.

What else can and should teachers do on an everyday basis in the classroom encourage creativity?

(This list will be fleshed out in my new book.)

BFTP: If you don't tell your children you love them, someone online will

A weekend Blue Skunk "feature" will be a revision of an old post. I'm calling this BFTP: Blast from the Past. Original post February 9, 2009. One of my favorite researchers, daynah boyd pubished a new book this week. I bought a copy for both my daughter who is the mother of a nearly 13-year-old boy and for myself. It's definitely on my stack of too-reads. boyd also give an interview here.

If you don't tell your children that you love them, they'll find someone online who will. - Moorhead police officer, Mike Detloff

Online predators are in the news again with 90,000 profiles of sex offenders being removed from MySpace. And because of the stories, the calls for blocking social networking sites in schools are being voiced again.

Thankfully Anne Collier at NetFamilyNews.org puts the issue into some sort of rational perspective in Sex offenders in social sites: Consider the facts:

• Not all children are equally at risk of Net-related sexual exploitation (see "Enhancing Child Safety and Online Technologies" from the US's Internet Safety Technical Task Force, with a summary of all child-online-safety research to date).
• A child's psychosocial makeup and family environment are better predictors of risk than the technology he or she uses (also from the ISTTF report).
• The kids most at risk offline are those at risk online (see "Profile of a teen online victim" and the ISTTF report).
• Sexual exploitation as a result of Internet activity (much less social networking) is statistically rare - "too low to calculate in the two national samples we conducted," the Crimes Against Children Research Center has told me.
• The vast majority of teens - 91% - use social sites to keep in touch with friends they see frequently (mostly at school), not strangers ('07 Pew/Internet study).
• The offenders in the vast majority of child sexual abuse cases are not strangers to their victims (multiple sources).
• Despite the establishment of one or more public profiles of "teens" (fake profiles) on MySpace by the Pennsylvania attorney general's Child Predator Unit, "there has apparently not been one successful sting operation initiated on MySpace in the more than two years during which these sting profiles have been in existence" (see "Pennsylvania case study: Social networking risk in context").

Banning, rather than teaching how to use intelligently, social networking sites of any kind is the wrong approach. Period. Blocking access from schools pushes kids to using these sites in places that may have no adult monitoring at all. And while we do need to make sure all students are safe Internet users, are we going the extra mile with those kids who are most at risk?

Those whose parents don't tell them that they love them?

Read and share Anne's full post. Get people asking smarter questions about the real Internet safety issues.

Creativity starts with a personal problem

When I was a librarian long ago, I  had an eighth-grade student in my school who loved horses. She insisted we get horse magazines and horse books for the library. Every picture she drew in her notebook was of horses. She spent her time outside of school caring for her horse, on 4-H projects involving her horse, and riding in horsey sorts of competitions.

Unfortunately her history teacher wanted a research paper done on World War II.

As it happened, I had watched a documentary on WWII just before this assignment was given and I noticed that Hitler’s army used a lot of horses to pull equipment from battlefield to battlefield. While we all know about the Panzers and other technologies of this war, horses were still being used extensively.

So just off the top of my head, I suggested to my little horselover that she use “How were horses used in WWII?”  as her guiding question. And it actually worked. It helped her narrow the focus of her paper as well as got her interested in WWII as a historical event by giving the assignment relevance to her.

The lesson I learned as an educator is that is possible and useful to blend students’ personal interests with academic standards.

Those who study creativity agree that most innovation is the by-product finding solution to a problem. The Apple II was a creative solution to making a computer that was affordable and easy to use. Binding arbitration is the creative solution to resolving disagreements. The Game of Thrones is a creative means of providing entertainment to millions of people. “How shall I love thee, let me count the ways” may have been a creative way to win the heart of a lover and express and inexpressible emotion.

If you think about it, nearly every technology or technical improvement, every work or art, every new strategy in a sport, or any new theory of success, health, or happiness is the result of unmet needs, challenges, and previously unsolved problems.

Can you give me an example of one that isn’t?

The term “personalized education” is getting a foothold in education. Differentiated instruction treats sub-groups of students in different ways. Individualized education treats individuals in different ways. But personalized education asks that we not only treat each student as an individual, but as a being with unique sets of interests and abilities. And we teach those students by linking their learning to those interests and abilities.

Projects that have the greatest chance of bringing out creative results in students will be those that help students solve personal or personally-interesting problems.

As the A-Team like to say, “It’s just so crazy it just might work.”

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