When Schools Get Creative
Despite obstacles—large class sizes and an emphasis on standardized tests—some teachers are nurturing pure imagination
For Ismet Mamnoon, the study of creativity has been a “life-altering” family affair, affecting everything from how she schedules her time to how her family makes decisions about their home to how she communicates with her daughters. Mamnoon was an accountant and a 39-year-old mother of two when she returned to school in 2009 to earn a master’s degree in creative studies at SUNY-Buffalo. It changed how she thought about the world, she says, “like someone had turned on a light in a part of my brain that I hadn’t even known was in darkness.”
Mamnoon has since attended annual creativity conferences with her family; inspired her husband, a physician, to take an introductory creativity course; and built a career around teaching the creative process to other parents, business leaders and educators in countries around the world.
She is one of many people now arguing that creative thinking is more important than ever before. And although some education experts have long advocated for the introduction of creativity into the classroom, they say more people now seem to be heeding that advice.
Gerard Puccio, chairman of the International Center for Studies in Creativity at SUNY-Buffalo, says it’s never been easier than it is now to persuade academics and students that creativity is essential. “There’s never been a time in my life when it’s been in greater demand,” says Puccio, who has spent nearly 40 years working in the field of creativity. SUNY-Buffalo now has about 100 graduate students enrolled in its creative-studies program — roughly five times as many as it did in 2000.
Many K-12 schools and universities across the country are experimenting with innovative teaching methods to foster greater creativity in their students, motivated by global competition and the realities of the ever-changing workforce into which students will graduate. But such initiatives can be hindered by large class sizes, an emphasis on standardized testing and curricular demands that limit teachers’ free time and flexibility.
“I just see it as a perfect storm,” Puccio says. “Here you have the world demanding creativity skills, but education, in some ways, has moved in the opposite direction, with a focus on standardization and making every kid the same, versus allowing their creative potentials to flourish.”
The average U.S. public-school student takes 112 mandatory standardized tests between pre-kindergarten and their high school graduation, according to a 2015 report by the Council of the Great City Schools. And a 1995 study by researchers at Union and Skidmore colleges found that although teachers often say they enjoy having creative students in class, they tend to respond negatively to character traits associated with creativity—such as impulsiveness and nonconformity—making school a generally inhospitable environment for it.
Meanwhile, studies show that creativity can boost happiness and well-being and is increasingly necessary for 21st-century success. A 2016 report by the World Economic Forum predicted that the top three job skills in 2020 will be complex problem-solving, critical thinking and creativity, noting that although artificial intelligence will continue to disrupt the workforce and replace certain jobs, creativity is a uniquely human advantage.
That pace of technological change has raised questions about the role of education: Are classes in which teachers simply distribute information and encourage rote memorization useful in a world where students have Google at their fingertips? Puccio and other creativity experts would say no, arguing that education should focus more on teaching students higher-order creative-thinking skills. They have sought to dispel stubborn myths about creativity: it’s widely considered a rare natural ability that emerges in a momentary flash of brilliance, often in the arts, but experts say creativity is actually a structured process that can be applied in areas of study and work outside the arts. And because it’s a process, rather than a spontaneous stroke of genius, they’re calling for creativity to be taught to students from kindergarten to graduate school in order to adequately prepare them for the future.
For the past year, Jennifer Isernhagen’s children did not bring their books or backpacks to school on Wednesdays—a day when there was no homework at New Jersey’s Primoris Academy, because there were no core classes on those days. Instead, students spent that day rotating through interdisciplinary courses of their choosing, ranging from musical theater and architecture to robotics and app development. “My daughter’s taking martial arts—I would not have seen that one coming,” Isernhagen says. “She did that on her own.”
“I would love, as a parent, to have some input, but I also really like that they have the autonomy to choose,” she adds. “There are so few opportunities for children to have control and be assertive about their learning.”
Primoris Academy—a private school where tuition ranges from $14,500 in elementary school to $24,500 in high school—has sought to make creativity a core tenet of its curriculum, grouping students by ability rather than age, emphasizing hands-on learning activities and giving freedom to teachers to experiment with their lesson plans. “We encourage failure and then revision, and we give a lot of open-ended tasks,” says Cara Ruggiero, the school’s dean of instruction, noting that the school aims to get students working together as much as possible. “It’s definitely much louder, and a bit more messy.”
In Keith Sawyer’s creativity classes at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he assigns a variety of projects to his students—design a typeface, program a robot, produce a music track—but introduces speed bumps and new requirements each week, forcing students to rethink their plan and making it impossible for them to get it right the first time.
“I think if we really want kids to develop as creative thinkers, we need to make the rest of school—in fact, the rest of life—more like kindergarten,” says Mitchel Resnick, who leads the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab to develop new technologies for creative learning. He says all stages of education should allow more time for students to work collaboratively on interdisciplinary projects that pique their interests. “Learning a fixed set of facts during your schooling is not going to provide very well for your whole life, since the world keeps changing,” he says.
Some creativity advocates call for a radical overhaul of the educational system, from classroom design to curriculum requirements. But others suggest that the solution, especially in the short term, is to work within the current system while making creativity a deliberate part of every lesson, no matter the discipline.
“I think we need to get over the idea that creativity can’t operate in these constraints,” says Ronald Beghetto, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Connecticut who has written about creativity in the Common Core classroom. “I think it’s just about rethinking the curriculum and rethinking the time we have.”
Beghetto says it’s important to introduce real-world applications into as many lessons as possible. Teach students about perimeter by asking them to design a rooftop garden benefiting the local community, for example, or teach them about photosynthesis by growing vegetables for a nearby food bank or soup kitchen.
He thinks education should leave room for more uncertainty and more student-led discovery. Ask students how many different ways they could possibly solve a particular math problem, he says, or ask them to list all the questions they have about a particular unit before launching into a detailed lecture.
His 12-year-old daughter, Olivia—who once complained that elementary school was a “worksheet factory”—has wondered why her teachers often ask questions for which they already have a specific right answer. “A lot of times we, as educators, over-plan students’ learning experiences,” he says. “I think we send the message that ‘OK, nothing is welcome in this space other than what I already expect.’ ”
Certain degree programs and schools have started to champion innovation, but the U.S. educational system has yet to make fostering creativity a broader priority. And experts worry that the United States will soon start to trail other countries in innovation.
Mamnoon, the former SUNY-Buffalo creativity student, has traveled around the world since 2010 to lead creativity workshops for educators in China, Chile, Canada, Mozambique, Jordan and Colombia. But she was asked to run a workshop for educators in the U.S. for the first time only last year, when she led training for teachers at a New York elementary school.
Professors say part of the problem is that innovative learning techniques are resource-intensive. It’s expensive to use cutting-edge technology and to redesign classrooms for movable desks and whiteboards. By comparison, lectures foster less creativity but are economically practical.
Part of the problem is also that, from the top down, the U.S. educational system is not designed to incentivize creativity, as schools are tasked with meeting certain testing standards and colleges still prioritize SAT and ACT scores in admissions.
Robert Sternberg, a Cornell University professor and former administrator at Tufts and Oklahoma State, advocates incorporating creative criteria into the admissions process, asking applicants to design a science experiment, complete an unusual writing prompt or submit a drawing. The process, when applied, changed whom the schools admitted, finding strong applicants who might otherwise have been overlooked because of lower SAT scores.
But Sternberg said it is difficult to change the long-term status quo at universities, where administrators are beholden to many constituencies, including alumni, donors and lucrative athletics. “The creative-kid constituency is not a powerful one,” he says. “They’re not necessarily the kids who are going to get the highest grades, because grade-getting isn’t what they specialize in. They’re not necessarily rich, they’re not necessarily politically powerful . . . They don’t have anyone going to bat for them.”
Sternberg says it’s bad for higher education and society at large if most students at universities are content to play within the existing system and lack the skills to challenge it. “You get a lot of kids who are smart, but they’re smart in the way of ‘Tell me what to do and I’ll do it really well.’ You give them a structure, and they’ll work within the structure,” he says. What the world actually needs, he suggests, are “the kids who can create the structure.”
In 2006, Sir Ken Robinson, a creativity expert and education adviser, gave what remains the most popular TED talk of all time—asking whether schools are killing creativity. Robinson thinks that question is still relevant today, but he’s optimistic about what the future of education looks like.
“There is boundless energy among teachers, and I’m excited by the fact that more and more people are looking for alternatives, and that’s the insurgent energy that we should be tapping into,” he says. “If you give people permission to do it, if you say it’s OK to try this, and if you remove some of the penalties for innovation, my experience has always been that people rise to the challenge.”
MIT Media Lab’s Lifelong Kindergarten holds a workshop using Scratch, which allows students to program interactive stories, games and animations.
Mitchel Resnick runs the group.
Students work on architecture projects at New Jersey’s Primoris Academy, a private school that encourages hands-on creative activities.
Keith Sawyer conducts his creativity class at the University of North Carolina. He likes to change up expectations so students have to think on their feet.