Educational Leadership - October 2017

hen I think about the work my middle
schoolers did that cast them most fully in
the role of creator and problem solver, the
assignments reflected four stages and one prin-
ciple. I came to understand those stages and that
principle only over time and through trial and
error. Now, they seem foundational to the kind of
work that is a source of self-discovery and pride for
students—the kind they remember for decades.

A Process, Not a Moment

We tend to think of creativity as fairy dust, magic, and eureka moments. In fact, it’s a process that experts have advised for decades involves four stages: preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification. 1

During the preparation stage, my students’ work was most compelling when they spent a great deal of time reading, interviewing, and making sense of background information. Students whom I taught for two years spent the better part of both years learning and thinking about the nature of the English language, its history, its oddities, its structure, its various expressions, and the cultures in which it has evolved in the United States. By the end of our two years together, their assignment was to create a language (using an alphabet they created) and culture that reflected what they had come to understand. They developed a history of their invented culture, including (but not limited to) its geography, economy, past and present interactions with other entities, economy, and artistic expressions.

Students had plenty of frameworks, insights, and
knowledge to guide their way. As a result, their
work was informed, clever, and deep. Absent the
serious preparation, the assignment would have
made little sense to them and could only have
been produced at a surface level. Preparation to
the point of saturation matters for creativity, and
I learned that even solid students don’t often seek
saturation. It’s a cumbersome and time-consuming
endeavor, not the way many young people elect
to spend their time. Further, they don’t know
how to find, process, organize, question, and ulti-
mately synthesize worthy information. Their work
improved as I learned how to help them develop
those skills.
Once a brain is afloat in background knowledge,
students must take time away from the work—to
let ideas sift, mingle, and percolate. During the
incubation stage, my students backed away from
the work when they got frustrated, hit a wall, or
thought they were finished. Perhaps that meant
going for a run, listening to music, or just being
a bum for a while. Sometimes, incubation meant
playing with ideas or asking, “What if?” This
well-documented aspect of creative production
generally results in the next phase of the process.
The illumination stage is the eureka moment,
the aha! It’s the time when you suddenly realize
your mind has gone somewhere special and has
brought an insight back as a souvenir. In my
own work, and in that of my students, I’ve con-
cluded that incubation needs to happen multiple
times in a significant undertaking, and that those
Carol Ann Tomlinson