Reflection: Creativity

The ISTE2012 conference was a gathering of educator/scholars who use (or want to use) technology in teaching but it included so much more. One common strand that I noticed was the issue that creativity needs to be encouraged in the classroom. According to many presenters at the conference, students are showing signs of becoming less creative as they grow older.  I have heard this example several times (so I don’t know who to give credit to): when you ask kindergartners if they can dance, they shout an enthusiastic “yes!” Ask them if they can draw or sing and you hear the same answer. Then a few years later ask them the same questions and the answer will be a saddened “no.” While this scenario is not true for all schools or children, it is a noted dilemma that some teachers want to address. Others will be satisfied with teaching the same lessons year after year, use the same old worksheets and forcing children to endure a painful education. The issue, I believe is that schools (since their beginning) have also produced teachers that do not realize their own creativity.

I have a magazine article that I cut out from Newsweek a few years back and have planned on using some of the examples in the classes that I teach at the University level.  Today I found the article online while searching for more information about creativity. It’s called The Creativity Crisis and was written in 2010 by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman. It features information about an innovator in testing creativity, Paul Torrance and his test that can be given to measure how creative a person is. For 50 years the researchers have kept up with the “Torrence Kids.” According to the article, “what’s shocking is how incredibly well Torrence’s creativity index predicted those kids’ creative accomplishments as adults. Those who came up with more good ideas on Torrence’s tasks grew up to be entrepreneurs, inventors, college presidents, authors, doctors, diplomats, and software developers.”

In addition to the information on creativity, that I received at ISTE2012, I researched and found a website created by Dr. Curtis J. Bonk at Indiana University School of Education for his class called “Instructional Strategies for Thinking, Collaboration, and Motivation (R546).” His site is filled with free resources about creativity, critical thinking and motivational strategies. One of his resource pages had a link to a film about Creativity in America:Creativity and Learning. In this film the same message resounds: the current need in education is to encourage creativity in schools from pre-school onwards.