Educational Leadership - September 2009

education that focuses only on the individual in isolation is bound to frustrate some of those possibilities.

Can you teach creativity?

Yes. But people think they can’t teach it because they don’t understand it themselves. They say, “Well, I’m not very creative, so I can’t do it.”

But there are actually two ways of thinking about teaching creativity. First of all, we can teach generic skills of creative thinking, just in the way we can teach people to read, write, and do math. Some basic skills can free up the way people approach problems—skills of divergent thinking, for example, which encourage creativity through the use of analogies, metaphors, and visual thinking.

I worked a while ago with an executive group of a Native American community. They wanted me to talk to them about how they could promote innovation across their tribe. We sat around a boardroom table for the first hour, and I guess they were expecting me to get some flip charts out and show them some techniques. We did a little of that, but what I actually got them to do was to get into groups and draw pictures of some of the challenges they’re facing as a community.

Well, the minute you get people to think visually—to draw pictures or move rather than sit and write bullet points—something different happens in the room. Breaking them up so they aren’t sitting at the same desk and getting them to work with people they wouldn’t normally sit with creates a different type of dynamic. So you can teach people particular skills to free up their own thinking, of valuing diversity of opinion in a room.

AUDIO

An audio version of this interview is available at http://shop .ascd.org/mp3/el_September _2009_Robinson.mp3

But in addition to teaching those skills, there’s also personal creativity. People often achieve their own best work at a personal level when they connect with a particular medium or set of materials or processes that excites them.

My new book, The Element, is about finding your passion. I talked to many people—gymnasts, musicians, scientists, an amazing woman who was a pool player. Whether it was music or jazz or the triple jump, each of them found something that they resonated with, that they had a personal aptitude

A policy for
creativity in
education needs to
be about everybody,
not just a few.

for. If you combine a personal aptitude with a passion for that same thing, then you go into a different place creatively. You know, Eric Clapton was given his first guitar about the same time I was. Well, it worked out for Eric in a way it didn’t quite work out for me. He got the hang of it, but also combined it with tremendous passion.

If creativity and innovation are so
important, should we assess them?

You can’t assess people—in general—for being creative because you have to be doing something to be creative. If you’re working in math class and the teaching is encouraging you to look for new approaches, to try new ways of thinking, then of course you can begin to judge the level of creativity and imaginativeness within the framework of mathematics as you would within the framework of music or dance or literature.

I make a distinction between teaching

creatively and teaching for creativity. Teaching creatively means that teachers use their own creative skills to make ideas and content more interesting. Some of the great teachers we know are the most creative teachers because they find a way of connecting what they’re teaching to student interests.

But you can also talk about teaching for creativity, where the pedagogy is designed to encourage other people to think creatively. You encourage kids to experiment, to innovate, not giving them all the answers but giving them the tools they need to find out what the answers might be or to explore new avenues. Within particular domains, it’s perfectly appropriate to say, “We’re interested in new and original ways you can approach these issues.”

Whether there would be an individual grade for creativity, that’s a larger question. Certainly giving people credit for originality, encouraging it, and giving kids some way of reflecting on whether these new ideas are more effective than existing ideas is a powerful part of pedagogy. But you can’t reduce everything to a number in the end, and I don’t think we should. That’s part of the problem.

The regime of standardized testing has led us all to believe that if you can’t count it, it doesn’t count. Actually, in every creative approach some of the things we’re looking for are hard, if not impossible, to quantify. But that doesn’t mean they don’t matter. When I hear people say, “Well, of course, you can’t assess creativity,” I think, “You can— just stop and think about it a bit.” ^L

Sir Ken Robinson is an internationally recognized leader in the development of creativity, innovation, and human resources; www.sirken robinson.com.