Inspiring Creativity and Innovation in K-12. Douglas Reeves

reconciling evidence about risk and error with the reality that error, at least in an environment of high expectations and exceptional academic achievement, rarely occurs. When my daughter makes a scientific pronouncement that is clearly preposterous, I wonder, “Why didn’t her teachers teach her the right way? They are supposed to be the experts!” However, whenever she parrots something she has learned in school with insufficient critical reasoning, I wonder, “Why didn’t her teachers let her explore alternatives and challenge prevailing authority?” I can’t have it both ways, and teachers can’t win in an environment in which parents simultaneously demand student creativity and conformity. We are caught in what might be called Gardner’s Dilemma, after Harvard psychologist and Project Zero founder Howard Gardner. He makes a clarion call for both creativity and disciplinary excellence. To sum it up, you can’t think outside of the box if you don’t first understand the box.

      Gardner’s (1993) analysis of the creative processes of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi suggests that wildly diverse thinkers and artists share some common characteristics. Attributing their work to genius alone undermines the historical facts: they studied their craft, worked incredibly hard, and suffered many failures along the road to their success. If these magnificent thinkers had been evaluated on the average of their work, then Einstein would have retired in the Swiss patent office, and Stravinsky would have died on the streets of Paris trying to sell the shoes thrown at him during the premiere of The Rite of Spring.

Disciplinary Silos

      Few secondary school administrators understand calculus as well as the mathematics teacher, fugues as well as the music teacher, literature and composition as well as the English teacher, history as well as the social studies teacher, or chemistry as well as the science teacher. Even with experience in teaching the primary grades, few elementary school administrators understand how to teach the essentials of reading, even though they are among the most important instructional skills required in the early grades. Because administrators cannot be experts in everything, it is reasonable to expect education leaders to be attuned to opportunities for meaningful collaboration among the faculty. For example, feedback strategies of the chorus conductor and athletic coach might inform their colleagues’ professional practices in literacy and mathematics. Similarly, secondary school teachers whose students struggle with literacy can learn much from their colleagues who specialize in literacy instruction.

      These four challenges—the risk and discomfort inherent in the creative process, students’ need for immediate positive feedback, the abdication of authority by educators and leaders, and the persistence of disciplinary silos—militate against what we know to be essential progress toward creativity. These challenges are not met with an instruction manual or an academic study but rather with educators willing to build a creative culture. That is the focus of the next chapter.

Chapter 2

      Building a Creative Culture

      It does little good to encourage student creativity unless leaders have first put in place the essential elements of a creative environment. This chapter suggests four such essentials and offers a Creative Environment Rubric (see pages 16–18), so you and your colleagues can begin a quest to save creativity at your school with some objective analysis. These four essential elements include:

      1. Mistake-tolerant culture

      2. Rigorous decision-making system

      3. Culture that nurtures creativity

      4. Leadership team that models and supports creativity

Mistake-Tolerant Culture

      The first element of a creative environment is a mistake-tolerant culture. Although much has been written and said about the value of mistakes in pursuing creativity, the practical reality is that in most schools, mistakes by students, teachers, and administrators are systematically punished. The least effective creative environments require blind compliance with rules and expectations. Success in these environments is equated with avoiding mistakes. The clear, if unspoken, leadership theme is this: We’ve worked too hard to get where we are to mess it up with any new ideas. Alan Deutschman (2007), in the compelling book Change or Die, writes that over decades of research, a consistent finding reveals that many people would rather die than make significant changes in their lives. The best evidence for such an over-the-top assertion is that more than 90 percent of people who have had open-heart surgery, often due to behavioral decisions such as smoking and a sedentary lifestyle, only briefly change the behaviors that landed them under the surgeon’s knife. Within less than a year, they return to their old lifestyle. They would literally rather die than change.

      In the field of education, I am often asked, “If it’s so obvious, then why don’t people just do it?” It is obvious, for example, that frequent feedback leads to better student results, but the vast majority of schools only provide students with meaningful feedback three or four times a year. To do more—certainly to provide feedback on a weekly basis—would leave teachers and administrators open to the complaint of “too much testing,” an assertion that seems to shut down the argument. Imagine if diabetics refused to test their blood sugar level because such an effort involved too much testing.

      More than two decades of research, from 1990 onward, demonstrate the strong link between writing and student performance in a variety of academic disciplines. One of the foremost researchers in this area, Professor Steve Graham of Vanderbilt University (2009–2010), documents not only the academic impact of writing but also the value of handwriting. Yet at both the K–12 and collegiate levels, the amount of writing required of students is declining (Arum & Roksa, 2010). Cursive writing is nearly extinct from public school settings, and most prevailing English language arts standards have abandoned the practice.

      The zeal by students, parents, and teachers for immediate mastery requires that students quickly acquire and master new skills. This expectation would never be applied to proficiency in music or all but the simplest athletic endeavors. Only using what Hattie (2012) calls deliberative practice yields improved performance. However, applying this fundamental learning principle is systematically ignored in a culture in which mistakes—the essential building blocks of deliberative practice—receive negative reactions. Only in a school that actively opposes effective practice would you find the definition of perfect homework or perfect project work that is free from errors.

      Lest this book appears to criticize students who have been taught to use negative feedback and mistakes to fuel their improvement, it’s important to acknowledge that these students learned well from their adult role models. It’s difficult to argue that self-esteem isn’t a good thing; indeed, without a sufficient quantity of self-esteem, people lose the confidence to learn. However, the concept of self-esteem has been distorted from a healthy sense of confidence and personal efficacy—the sense that one can influence results with learning and hard work. In common school parlance, self-esteem is the product of endless reassurance from adults that children are almost perfect and nearly incapable of making mistakes. The social harmony of “you’re awesome, I’m awesome, we’re awesome” rarely gives way to the counterpoint of “I know I can do better if I work harder.” But one of the most difficult things for many students (and parents) to hear is: “You can do better if you work harder.” It requires a courageous teacher who is willing to give candid and critical feedback to students and withstand the possible withering assault of emails from parents.

      Consider how many teaching and learning initiatives are rolled out in schools. These efforts, however well intended, are often more characterized by announcements, labels, and speeches than substantive changes in professional practice. The culture declares victory and moves on rather than expose new ideas to systematic evaluation. As a result, most student, teacher, and administrator evaluations focus on compliance, often with checklists, to ensure that participants in the system follow the rules and stray from the constraints at peril of their grades and careers. Compliance involves homework, attendance, and obedience, ensuring that even the best practices in research-based instruction are strangled in observations and evaluations.

      The tension among three types of feedback—(1)