Developing Creativity in the Classroom

Learning and Innovation for 21st-Century Schools

Todd Kettler, Kristen N. Lamb, Dianna R. Mullet

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000491586
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Developing Creativity in the Classroom applies the most current theory and research on creativity to support the design of teaching and learning. Creative thinking and problem solving are at the heart of learning and application as students prepare for innovation-driven careers. This text debunks myths about creativity and teaching and, instead, illustrates productive conceptions of creative thinking and innovation, including a constructivist learning approach in which creative thinking enhances and strengthens conceptual understanding of the curriculum. Through models of teaching that support creativity and problem solving, this book extends the idea of a creative pedagogy to the four core curriculum domains. Developing Creativity in the Classroom focuses on explanations and examples of how creative thinking and deep learning merge to support engaging learning environments, rising to the challenge of developing 21st-century competencies.

PART I
What Is Creativity?

DOI: 10.4324/9781003234104-2

CHAPTER 1
Understanding Creativity and Innovation

DOI: 10.4324/9781003234104-3

In complex, information-rich environments, the abilities to adapt and innovate are becoming increasingly important. Students are expected not only to master the content standards of the curriculum, but also to develop abilities to think critically and creatively about that content. Teachers and students often hold a wide variety of definitions of creativity. Many associate creativity with the arts. Others think of creativity as a set of personality traits that one either has or does not have. How often do people say, "I'm not creative," as if having or not having creativity is so dichotomous? Both research and anecdotal evidence suggest that teachers and students hold diverse conceptions about creativity —some more accurate than others. The first step to developing creativity and supporting innovation in the classroom is to clearly define creativity and innovation in both general and domain-specific contexts.

Conceptions of Creativity

From Divine Inspiration to Personal Creativity

Although art and intellect flourished in Ancient Greece, the concept of creativity has distinctly evolved over the last 25 centuries. The world of the Greeks was governed by gods and goddesses who were thought to wield power over many day-to-day operations, including tasks that we might consider creative (e.g., poetry, drama, and science). With the emergence of Western Civilization came a divinely inspired view of creativity—humans were the instruments through which the gods performed creative acts. In particular, the Greek sources of creativity were the nine Muses, the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne. The Muses were goddesses who inspired ideas in science, literature, art, music, and dance (see Table 1). When the ancient Greeks engaged in creative work, they evoked the appropriate Muse to breathe through them so that their bodies became vessels through which the gods sustained poetry, drama, art, and science. Socrates taught that inspired ideas originated with the gods and humans received the divine inspiration by setting aside rational thinking to allow the ideas of the gods to purely flow through the poet, artist, or scientist. The concept of creativity has evolved from an ancient mystical process in which reason was a source of interference to a contemporary intentional act of divergent cognition balanced and refined by analysis and expertise.

In the early Roman Empire, conceptions of creative work were similar to those of the Greeks. The Roman gods inspired literature, history, art, and architecture, working through humans who received their inspiration. Interestingly, the Latin language included the noun creatio, meaning creation or something that was made from nothing (ex nihilo). In the later Christian period of the Roman Empire, the term creatio became associated with God's act of creation from nothing. A common thread for the Greeks, Romans, and early Christians was the divine origin of creative acts. Humans were the passive instruments through whom the gods spoke, carved, and sculpted. In those cultures, for a human to claim personal responsibility for the creative work might have bordered on blasphemy. Many of the ancient artworks collected in our finest museums are the works of unknown artists. For instance, the famous Winged Victory of Samothrace (Louvre) is one of the most celebrated sculptures in the world, but the sculptor is unknown—partly because details were lost over 2,500 years, but also because the sculptor was viewed as a mere craftsman in the creative

TABLE 1 The Nine Muses of Greek Mythology Who Originated Creative Thinking

Calliope	The Muse of epic poetry and the Goddess of Eloquence
Clio	The Muse of history
Erato	The Muse of lyric poetry including love poetry
Euterpe	The Muse of music, who inspired poets and dramatists
Melpomene	The Muse of singing and the Muse of tragedy
Polyhymnia	The Muse of sacred poetry and sacred hymns
Terpsichore	The Muse of dance and dramatic chorus
Thalia	The Muse of comedy and idyllic poetry
Urania	The Muse of astronomy

shadows of the gods. Art historians often build careers and reputations on their research and claims of who might have been the artists of such masterpieces, but acknowledging the creator reflects a contemporary value, not necessarily an ancient concern.

Medieval Christianity further restricted creatio to apply only to God's creation —not to the arts and sciences of human creativity Although the medieval period is sometimes referred to as the Dark Ages, there were impressive innovations that our contemporary lens certainly considers examples of creativity: horseshoes, wheelbarrows, plows, eye glasses, chimneys, clocks, 3-year crop rotations, musical notations, gothic architecture, sonnets, universities, and oil-based paints. Despite these inventions, the concept of creativity still was limited to those rare moments when the divine spoke through a human vessel who freed himself from rational limitations. However, a fundamental shift in creativity was on the horizon with the coming of the Renaissance.

The artists, poets, and inventors of antiquity were commonly thought of as craftsmen. In their work, they attempted to make things that imitated truth or reality—no doubt influenced by Plato's theory of forms. Good art was recognized for its technical accuracy, not for its novelty. Renaissance humanism introduced numerous new ways of thinking, including the role of the human creator (Sawyer, 2012). No longer just the conduit through which divine inspiration produced ideas, the Renaissance creator was an innovator, inventor, and idea generator. With the shift to human responsibility for creating also came the beginning of a subtle shift away from art as technical imitation toward individuality and originality. The Renaissance introduced a new image of the creator as one who had unique insights to accompany technical talent (Weiner, 2000).

As the Renaissance gave way to the Enlightenment, conceptions of creativity swayed between rationalist views—creativity involved conscious, deliberate, rational thinking—and romantic views—creativity emerged from unconscious processes and is potentially inhibited by reliance on rational thought (Sawyer, 2012). In the late 19th century, Henri Poincaré (1854-1912), a French mathematician, added a new twist in the evolution of creativity Poincaré (1948) believed that creativity and invention most often required a combination of dedicated conscious effort followed by a period of unconscious work. The conscious work must solidify the creative solution or innovation generated by the unconscious incubation.

Poincaré's work and the influence of Gestalt psychology at the time led to one of the most influential 20th-century conceptions of creativity In 1926, Graham Wallas published The Art of Thought, introducing his four-stage model of creative thinking (see Table 2). Wallas's model of preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification has been tremendously influential In how people understand creativity, innovation, and problem solving. The model still forms much of the foundation for how many creativity theorists conceive of and research the creative process today (Sadler-Smith, 2015).

Contemporary Conceptions of Creativity

Current beliefs about creativity can be traced back to Ancient Greece, where creativity was largely considered an act of the divine working through an inspired human. Remnants of this conception remain in some romantic understandings of creating today. The notions of the spark of creativity or the muse bringing ideas to life are based on those ancient conceptions. Although many love the idea of divine inspiration, our understanding of creative thinking has evolved over the two millennia that separate us from Plato and Aristotle. Modern conceptions of creativity as an innovative act of cognition proliferated in the latter half of the 20th century.

A good place to begin is the mid-century conceptions of Ernst Kris (1950) and J. P. Guilford (1950). Kris (1950) borrowed from some of the ancient ideas of creativity but combined unconscious processing with intentional thinking that leads to new combinations and new associations of ideas. Creativity, for Kris, was not magical or divine. It was thinking about existing ideas and concepts and generating new ideas that were capable of solving new problems. Around the same time, Guilford (1950) proposed that creativity involved sensitivity to problems, the ability to generate ideas, thinking in different ways, and the production

TABLE 2 Wallas's (1926) Four-Stage Model of Creativity

Preparation	• A period of conscious and deliberate work on a problem • May include formal and informal education when one learns the facts and details associated with an area of study • Characterized by logical thinking and empirical investigation
Incubation	• A period where one does not voluntarily or consciously think about the problem • At this time one might work on other problems or engage in relaxation to allow the unconscious mind to work • Unconscious and involuntary mental work takes place in which prior conceptions and conventional thinking about the problem may be absent • A period of fringe consciousness or intimation links the period of incubation with illumination
Illumination	• A sudden and unexpected insight occurs, representing a series of new representations and possibilities relative to the problem • Illumination presents a new way of thinking about the problem and a creative solution emerges • The "a-ha" moment when one suddenly returns conscious attention to the problem with new insights and novelty
Verification	• A stage similar to preparation where conscious and deliberate work resumes • Rational and logical thinking are used to test the validity and appropriateness of the idea/solution/innovation • The creative idea is tested and revised until an exact form is derived

of novel responses. Most experts agree that the modern study of creativity in the United States emerged in 1950, and the definitions of creativity and creative thinking began a winding journey toward the 21st century

In the second half of the 20th century, several creativity researchers agreed that creative thinking should result in an idea or product that is both novel and useful. Novelty, or originality, has become widely accepted as an essential characteristic of creativity. Novelty in an idea or product implies originality and uniqueness. Novelty includes new perspectives on an old topic or a new interpretation of an existing phenomenon. Useful as a creativity descriptor, on the other hand, may surprise people at first. However, think of useful as a contextual constraint that keeps novelty from going off of the rails. Usefulness in the context of creativity means appropriate or valuable. Useful may also mean that the response fits a prompt. Suppose that high school students are given a writing assignment asking them to explain why the rise of manufacturing and industry at the end of the 19th century was termed a revolution—the industrial revolution. One student writes an elaborate narrative about a young boy who survived a sweatshop childhood and grew up to own a high-end bicycle shop in Brooklyn, NY, where he once sold a bike to Sandy Koufax of the Brooklyn Dodgers. A second student explains that revolution conceptually represents a violent shift. He argues with cunning detail that the rise of manufacturing and industry in both England and the United States created such harsh conditions that literary art flourished as a representation of humanity's violent shift from the pastoral countryside to the grinding gears of the urban purgatory. The revolution, he argues, gave us Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman, who timelessly portrayed the soul of industrialization.

Two essays were written with exceptional novelty; however, the first one drifted too far from the task at hand and failed to pass the useful criteria for creativity In other words, not all acts of novelty are to be considered creative. The second essay gives a unique perspective on why the shift to the industrial economy might be called a revolution and falls within the reasonable boundaries of addressing the task at hand. Especially in a school context, novelty alone does not fall within the defined space of creativity. Students demonstrate creativity when they combine unique or unusual ideas in ways that fit within the curricular scope of what is useful and appropriate.

Three general areas for potential creativity emerged over time—person, process, and product. Teresa Amabile (1996) suggested that we focus on the product for two reasons. First, personality profiles tell interesting stories about those who have been creative, but these profiles do not lead to reasonable educational goals. Second, the creative process may vary by domain and from person to person. Moreover, thoughts alone are often vague and ephemeral, making creative evaluations difficult at best. Amabile argued that products and responses are c...