A recent blog by Grant Wiggins affirmed what I have long believed about creativity: it is a 21st-century skill we can teach and assess. Creativity fosters deeper learning, builds confidence and creates a student ready for college and career.
However, many teachers don't know how to implement the teaching and assessment of creativity in their classrooms. While we may have the tools to teach and assess content, creativity is another matter, especially if we want to be intentional about teaching it as a 21st-century skill. In a PBL project, some teachers focus on just one skill, while others focus on many. Here are some strategies educators can use tomorrow to get started teaching and assessing creativity -- just one more highly necessary skill in that 21st-century toolkit.
Quality Indicators
If you and your students don't unpack and understand what creativity looks like, then teaching and assessing it will be very difficult. Here are some quality indicators to look at:
- Synthesize ideas in original and surprising ways.
- Ask new questions to build upon an idea.
- Brainstorm multiple ideas and solutions to problems.
- Communicate ideas in new and innovative ways.
Now, these are just some of the quality indicators you might create or use. Don't forget to make them age- or grade-level appropriate so that students can understand the targets and how they are being assessed. You might create a rubric from these quality indicators or keep them as overall goals for the students to work on throughout the year. Wiggins mentioned this rubric as a start. The February 2013 issue of ASCD's Educational Leadership also has an article that includes a rubric.
Activities Targeted to Quality Indicators
We have all used activities for students to brainstorm solutions to problems, be artistically creative and more. Now is a chance to be very intentional with these exercises. In addition to just "doing" them, pick the activities that specifically work on quality indicators of creativity. They can occur at varying stages of a PBL project, whenever the timing is appropriate to where students are in the PBL process.
Voice and Choice in Products
We know that students can show knowledge in different ways. In a PBL project, for example, public audience is an essential component, and students must present their work. PBL teachers offer voice and choice in how they spend their time and what they create. This is a great opportunity to foster the creative process. Students can collaborate on how to best present their information, what to include, and perhaps even a target audience. Coupled with the other strategies mentioned in this piece, voice and choice can build creative thinkers.
Model Thinking Skills
There are some specific thinking skills that creative people use. You will often find these in the quality indicators of creative people and embedded in the language. One example is synthesis. In synthesis, people combine sources, ideas, etc. to solve problems, address an issue or make something new. Being able to synthesize well can be a challenge. If we want our students to do well with this creative skill, we need to model the thinking of synthesis in a low-stakes, scaffolding activity that they can translate into a more academic pursuit. I find that the more I help students understand and practice these thinking skills, the better prepared they are to be creative! These mini-lessons and activities occur within the context of a PBL project to support student learning.
Reflection and Goal Setting
Whether you are using S.M.A.R.T Goals or short reflective activities, this is a critical component of teaching and assessing creativity. Students need time to look at the quality indicators and reflect on how they are doing when it comes to mastery. They can also set goals on one or more these quality indicators and how they will go about doing it. This reflective process and metacognition also helps build critical thinking skills, and should be used throughout the process of a PBL project, curriculum unit or marking period. Let's provide opportunities for students to think critically about creativity.
If we want our students to be creative, we must give them not only the opportunity to do so, but also the finite skills and targets to be able to do so. When you combine these strategies, creativity can become part of the culture of a PBL project and classroom in general. You may or may not "grade" creativity, but you can certainly assess it.
How do you intentionally teach and assess creativity in your classroom?
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Comments (15)
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It's all about feedback
The value in assessing creativity lies in the feedback you give. It's not about a grade, it's about growth and being willing to take risks in your thinking.
speaking of Big Al... an
speaking of Big Al... an interesting take on the subject scooped by Beth Dichter and blogged upon by Greg at Digital Tonto. insightful and provocative
.http://www.digitaltonto.com/2011/how-to-unlock-creativity/
Creativity is knowing how to hide your sources - Albert Einstein
You can't really go wrong with the following reads:
The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything - Ken Robinson and Lou Aronica
Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative - Ken Robinson
There are also a great many TED talks from Ken Robinson. I had the pleasure of being part of a seminar and it was truly inspirational.
Creating Innovators- Tony Wagner
A great book with some creative links to video content at its heart.
Educating for Creativity: A
Educating for Creativity: A Global Conversation is a book by Dr. Robert Kelly that I would highly recommend for those interested in incorporating creativity in their teaching. His research identifies seven strands of creative development (easier to create criteria for assessment) and his book explains the concept of creativity and how it can be applied into educational practice.
creativity
Spot on "Future"! The notion of assessing creativity is antithetical; take an interest in the kids' creations and support them!
research on formative assessment
Creativity is complicated to assess, and complicated to improve. What we need is data-driven research on what works and what doesn't. See our upcoming academic workshop on improving formative assessment using data: http://sites.google.com/site/ffileworkshop/
Creativity Is Expression of Self
I am currently taking a creativity class and in my opinion their is no failure when it comes creativity. It is an expression of self and if we were to tell children they failed because they were not creative to our standards then this could hurt the children emotionally and children may have a hard time trying to find the creative side of themselves.
I think what we're missing is
I think what we're missing is the value of failure. Allowing our students to experiment, fail and learn from that failure builds the attitude and resourcefulness foundational to creativity. Todays students have adults hovering at all times-in and out of school-organizing their schedules, setting them up for success and telling them what will and won't work.
While I'm not sure that
While I'm not sure that creativity is a skill or to be taught to the point of activating on demand, it is clear that ability and education provide essentials for it. Inspiration, the spark most often leading to creative effort, loves interaction and brainstorming. Even when not tossing ideas around with others, an engaged mind that listens, sees, and discovers things does so in ways still not understood. From that often comes the creative brilliance that elevates work.
A pretty effective way to inspire some creative effort from children while engaging them with language arts, writing and storytelling in the digital world is with a platform such as the one from BoomWriter Media. It uses both collaboration and friendly competition to prompt children to develop stories for publication in a class or camp setting. That type of communal yet individual experience is a fun way to facilitate a child's creative drive.
As an art teacher, my
As an art teacher, my greatest challenges come from one of two common problems: either I don't give my students enough freedom to explore our materials in a project and they feel unsuccessful or dissatisfied in their product based on the expectation set up by a model; or I don't give enough parameters and students without solid guidelines are confused or bored. That's the problem with teaching creativity - it's not something to teach, it's something to guide. When I have an idea of what an outcome could look like, and I focus on teaching skills to that goal, my students are often frustrated with the task of getting from their step 1 to their step 10 - not stopping to consider that the value of the project is in steps 2 through 9 and what they are learning is not how to paint a lifelike portrait, but how to think through challenges (why doesn't his nose look right?) and finding solutions on their own. What I can't do is teach them how to create solutions to problems: that impulse has to start with them. What I can do, and what I think is the main idea of this article, is create a circumstance in which they are allowed to create and help guide that creativity toward a structured goal through modeling. That, however, is creative thinking, not creativity. I'm too hung up on the idea that creativity is too unique and too individual to be "taught" or developed into an identifiable form. Sure, it seems like semantics, but it is more than that. To suggest that creativity itself is teachable, suggests also that it is learnable and some people will "get it" and some people, naturally, won't. To think that at any age any human might not be able to "get" creativity seems quite narrow-minded to me. Maybe they don't get collaborative creative thinking, sure. But I do believe at any given moment, any person can be unique and create something different than what has been created before.