Teaching for Creativity Part 2

I finally finished Nurturing Creativity in the Classroom, a collection of essays I described in my previous post. There were some good articles towards the end of the book. One was the long and comprehensive “Intrinsic Motivation and Creativity in the Classroom” by Beth Hennesey, which delved into the research connecting intrinsic and extrinsic motivation with creativity. While much of the research in the book discusses K-12 education, Diane Halpern’s chapter “Creativity in College Classrooms” highlights the connection between critical and creative thinking, and discusses the use of technology to facilitate creative activity.

The final essay was written by one of the stalwarts of the field, Robert Sternberg in the simple title “Teaching for Creativity”. His prose is lucid and very quotable. Here are my three favorite sections (the first is actually the opening paragraph):

“Creativity is a habit. The problem is that schools sometimes treat it as a bad habit. And the world of conventional standardized tests we have invented does just that. If students try being creative on standardized tests, they will get slapped down just as soon as they get their score. That will teach them not to do it again.”

“Like any habit, creativity can either be encouraged or discouraged. The main things that promote the habit are (1) opportunities to engage in it, (2) encouragement when people avail themselves of these opportunities, and (3) rewards when people respond to such encouragement and think and behave creatively. You need all three. Take away the opportunities, encouragement, or rewards, and you will take away the creativity. In this respect, creativity is no different from any other habit, good or bad.”

“Society tends to make a pedagogical mistake by emphasizing the answering and not the asking of questions. The good student is perceived as the one who rapidly furnishes the right answers. The expert in a field thus becomes the extension of the expert student – the one who knows and can recite a lot of information. As John Dewey recognized, how one thinks is often more important than what one thinks. Schools need to teach students how to ask the right questions (i.e., questions that are good, thought provoking, and interesting) and lessen the emphasis on rote learning.”

I must admit that when I first stated teaching, Sternberg described me very well as someone who emphasized the answering rather than the asking of questions. And yes, I would label the “good” students those that quickly and accurately provided the “right” answers. That tells you something about the narrowness of my questions and perhaps the level in Bloom’s taxonomy in which I was engaging the students. More recently, over the past several years, I’ve tried to change the way I ask questions. There’s nothing wrong with asking some of the lower-level Bloom questions – in fact they’re crucial to get everyone on the same page. But the teacher should not stop there, and neither should the student.

Yesterday, we were covering measurements and units in one of my classes. I planned several activities for the students to engage in to illustrate the key concepts. We started off with them trying to identify me as a perpetrator in a crime (guesstimating height and weight). This led to a discussion about how to calculate averages and when to use an arithmetic average, followed by discussing precision and accuracy, sources and types of errors, and how one makes measurements and calibrates a reference point. Then I used Archimedes’ Eureka moment by posing a number of questions both to get the students to think creatively and how to design an experiment. We calculated what the difference in water displacement might be between a solid gold crown and an alloy. (The quantity is much smaller than the students expected therefore requiring being creative about experimental design to measure as precisely and accurately as possible.) We then talked about the density of water, and I posed the question “How dense are you?” (to student chuckles) and talked about how you might estimate, calculate or measure your own personal density including methods that allowed you to stay dry during the measurement. This then led to a discussion of BMI (Body Mass Index). We did unit conversions, talked about S.I. units, and covered scientific notation.

I enjoyed the class. Hopefully the students did too – they seem engaged at least, although now that I know about the Norm of Civil Attention from Jay Howard’s book, maybe it’s not so easy to tell. Next up is delving into the structure of the atom, and reinforcing how science asks and answers questions.