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Collard, P., & Looney, J. (2014) - Nurturing Creativity in Education. European Journal of Education, 49
Collard, P., & Looney, J. (2014) - Nurturing Creativity in Education. European Journal of Education, 49
Source: European Journal of Education , Vol. 49, No. 3 (September 2014), pp. 348-364
Published by: Wiley
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of Education
Introduction
Creativity is widely acknowledged as vital for social and economic innovation and
development as well as for individual well-being. On a personal level, it is about the
desire for self-expression and identity. Martha Nussbaum (2011) argues that
human dignity and progress are rooted in each individual’s capabilities, including
those that are central to creativity: being able to use the senses, imagine, think,
and reason, and to have the educational opportunities necessary to realise these
capacities.
Creativity is also core to progress in knowledge societies. Work is increasingly
carried out in non-permanent project-oriented teams, with each member taking on
significant responsibilities. Workers need to regularly adapt to new situations and
new approaches to problem solving. In their personal lives, individuals have more
opportunities to tailor services and products to suit their own needs in ways that
were not possible in societies that emphasised mass production and consumption
of standardised goods, calling on their creative capacities (Miller & Bentley, 2003).
Leaders in the public, private and social sectors are more frequently required to
respond to new strategic challenges. Individuals and societies that embrace crea-
tivity and experimentation are more likely to realise the benefits of knowledge-
intensive societies (Michalski, 2011).
It is therefore not surprising that, across continents, creativity is a priority for
education and is central to the discourse on 21st century learning. The OECD
emphasises the importance of preparing learners for the unknown: jobs that do not
yet exist, technologies that are yet to be invented, and problems that have not yet
been anticipated (OECD, undated).The OECD’s Innovation Strand also includes
a strong emphasis on nurturing creativity in education. The European Reference
Framework on Key Competences identifies creativity as a transversal theme that is
important for the development of basic skills of language, literacy, numeracy and
information and communication technologies (ICT). The EU declared 2009 the
‘Year of Creativity and Innovation’, with a strong focus on the role of culture and
diversity in European society and, in education, on barriers as well as good
practices (Banaji et al., 2010; Cachia et al., 2010). Beyond Europe, ministries and
departments of education in Australia, Canada, England, Hong Kong, Singapore,
Taiwan and the US are among the countries that have developed policy initiatives
to support learner creativity (Craft, 2007; the US President’s Commission on the
Arts and Humanities, 2011; the Ministry of Education website, Singapore,
undated; the Ministry of Education website, Taiwan, undated).
In this article, we explore how a greater focus on creativity changes the dynam-
ics of teaching and learning.We are concerned with how teachers nurture everyday
creativity and how they themselves develop more creative approaches to teaching.
We also explore the themes of ‘closed’ and ‘open’ learning, as defined by Miller,
Looney and Siemens (2011). ‘Closed’ learning refers to learning where the knowl-
edge to be acquired is already well defined and goals are clear. ‘Open’ learning
Creative Individuals
Early research on creativity in education focused on identifying learners with high
creative potential. It was assumed that creativity was a fixed trait — a sign of
giftedness — and it was hoped that its characteristics could be assessed easily so
that exceptional talent could be nurtured from an early age. The widely used
Torrance Tests of Creativity and Divergent Thinking (1966, 1974) and tests
developed by Guilford (1950, 1967, 1973), for example, measured ‘divergent
thinking’ and ‘ideational fluency’ — i.e. how many different and novel solutions a
learner could generate to address a given problem — as elements of the learner’s
potential. The focus was very firmly on big ‘C’ creativity, and little thought was
given to teachers’ roles in nurturing everyday creativity beyond gifted programmes
or arts classes.
Various commentators have criticised these early approaches, noting, for
example, that the number of ideas a person generates and how unique or uncom-
mon they are do not reveal their value or usefulness (Cattell & Butcher, 1968;
Runco, 2001). Rather, the most creative people seem to be those who are able to
arrive at the ‘best’ solution in the shortest period or with the greatest simplicity.
Researchers still consider that personal traits, or dispositions, are correlated with
creativity. But they also believe that all individuals can develop capacity for every-
day creativity (small ‘c’ creativity), including divergent thinking and the ability to
generate new ideas or develop skills for creative problem solving over time (Runco
& Albert, 1986). Teachers and parents have an important role to play in nurturing
and, as we highlight later in this article, assessing these creative dispositions. These
include:
• Personality variables, such as ‘openness to experiences’ (Amabile, 1990;
McCrae & Costa, 1987), curiosity, willingness to explore the unknown
(Edwards, 2001) and ability to tolerate ambiguity (Barron, 1969).
• Cognitive and affective variables such as effort and persistence (Grant &
Dweck, 2003), the ability to generate a variety of ideas (Atchley, Keeney &
Burgess, 1999; Guilford, 1967; Torrance, 1966, 1972), to question and to
reflect critically, and to synthesise ideas from diverse sources (Sternberg &
Kaufman, 2010).
• Creative self-efficacy — i.e. belief in one’s capacity to address challenges and
to persist, as well as willingness to take intellectual risks — are particularly
important (Bandura, 1997). Intrinsic motivation, engagement and intense
focus — what Csikszentmihalyi (1990) has described as ‘flow’ — are also
important.
• Active participation in social networks has been identified as important to
enhance creative potential in studies drawing on educational data mining
techniques and self-reported creativity scores (Dawson, Tan & McWilliam,
2011).
For learners, the classroom and home environments, as well as the broader and
social and cultural context, have a clear impact. Amabile (1990) noted that
individuals were more creative in environments that encouraged exploration and
independent work and that valued originality — in other words, in settings that
encourage open learning. In turn, teachers are also more likely to focus on
learner creativity and teaching creatively in school and policy environments that
value and support them and encourage innovation and associated risks, and that
allow them to develop their own creative dispositions.
Creative Processes
Research on creative processes overlaps, to some extent, with research on creative
dispositions. But it is also concerned with identifying specific behaviours of crea-
tive individuals (e.g. exploratory behaviours, analysis, evaluation, synthesis) and
approaches to problem finding and problem solving in different domains and at
different stages of development.
Disequilibrium may spur creative processes. For example, Timperley and
colleagues (2007) found that learners (including teachers) were most likely to
benefit from creative processes that addressed significant problems or when con-
fronted with new information that challenged their previous conceptions. This
requires that the learner thinks in new ways and makes new connections with prior
knowledge and beliefs. Learners also need to develop the capacity to tolerate
ambiguity and frustration (Albert, 1996).
Creativity in any given domain also entails deep knowledge and the capacity
to access and structure that knowledge (Feldhusen & Goh, 1995). Indeed,
structuring knowledge to enable effective learning and spur new insights is a key
pedagogical challenge in the different domains. There is an ongoing and funda-
mental debate, however, as to whether this should draw on domain-general or
domain-specific knowledge and skills or a mix of both1. In other words, do
creativity and the capacity to structure knowledge in one area (such as music)
transfer to another (such as mathematics) or even within sub-domains (such as
between poetry and short-story writing)? Baer and Kaufman (2005) note the need
for a theory that encompasses both domain-specific and domain-general
approaches,and empirical research on the most effective approaches within and
across domains (see also Lubart & Guignard, 2004; Plucker & Beghetto, 2004).
Creative classrooms are thus student-centred, and as expressed by the popular
maxim, teachers take on the role of ‘guide by the side’ rather than ‘sage on the
stage’. As implied by the research on creative processes cited above, this approach
involves deep domain knowledge, sophisticated pedagogy and openness to the
unexpected. The change in teachers’ roles and classroom dynamics is potentially
quite profound.
Creative Products
Among experts on creativity, there is fairly wide agreement that creative work —
whether of the big ‘C’ or small ‘c’ variety — is novel, appropriate to the task at
hand, and of high quality as compared to some reference groups. In the arts,
creativity may be found in something that is both original and aesthetically pleas-
ing (Sternberg, Kaufman & Pretz, 2002). (At the same time, it should be noted
that the value placed on originality emerged as a construct only in the 19th century
and is rarely found beyond the West).
For a variety of reasons, relatively little attention has been given to the quality
of creative products in schools. As noted above, there is no widely shared definition
of creativity in education policy or in school curricula (Cachia et al., 2010). Nor
are there any clear reference standards for judging the quality of learners’ creative
products at different ages and developmental stages. Indeed, in the realm of
creativity, teachers and other creative professionals may resist any approach that
resembles classic assessment of learner attainment (Fryer, 1996; Lucas et al.,
2013). To some extent, this may reflect teachers’ desire to avoid discouraging
learners’ self-expression. At the same time, learners receive little guidance on how
they might improve or deepen their work. Neither teachers nor learners are
encouraged to develop their own sense of what counts as high-quality creative
work.
Teaching for Creativity and Teaching Creatively: New Roles for Teachers
In this section, we explore innovative ways of nurturing creativity that support both
open and closed learning. We begin with an exploration of partnerships between
teachers and creative professionals. These often focus on finding ways to address a
specific pedagogical challenge. Of course, creative partnerships are only one of
many possible methods for creative learning and teaching.We believe the approach
is worth highlighting, however, as these partnerships may provide significant new
opportunities for collaboration and professional development, as well as for sup-
porting leaner creativity.
We then turn to questions related to assessment of and for creativity. At its best,
creative teaching focuses on finding new ways to ‘make learning visible’, promote
inquiry, engage learners and nurture their own creativity and stretch their capacity
to develop original and high-quality work. Assessment is integral to this process.
But the question of how to assess creativity is particularly challenging in the
context of education. Should quality always be against the learners’ own prior
performances? Is it sometimes appropriate to refer to external standards for
creativity? What about assessment of open learning? We consider the need to build
learners’ own competence to pursue deep lines of inquiry in a given domain, to
assess the quality of their ideas and to refine them as part of the creative process.
physical activity, the field trip, collaborative story telling and imagination was
then replicated in a more complex project in which the pupils worked with a
professional filmmaker to create a short animated film portraying an incident in
Karachi. The teachers were astonished at the levels of concentration and collabo-
ration the pupils were now able to maintain in the complex work of story board-
ing the film. They reported long-term improvements in the boys’ engagement in
learning beyond these workshops.
In a third example at Harrop Fold Secondary School in the UK, creative
professionals working in animation and theatre and teachers focused on improving
the mathematics performance of a disengaged group of 13–14-year-olds. The
theatre professional created scenarios in which some of the learners performed,
while other pupils observed and recorded what was happening. One scenario, for
instance, portrayed a group of gangsters drinking shots of Vodka at a bar. Other
pupils used stopwatches to track how quickly these young actors were able to
‘down the shots’. They recorded their findings in animated graphs. Having gained
confidence from this experiment, the teachers and pupils created a much longer
animation to demonstrate the equation that speed equals distance over time. The
learners were entertained and also showed that they had grasped the concept.
Indeed, they began the year as the lowest performing in their cohort, and, by the
end of the year, outperformed learners who had been considered as more able, but
had been taught in a more ‘traditional’ way.
These lessons in Lithuania, Pakistan and the UK each followed what Thomson
and colleagues (2012) have described as the CCE ‘signature pedagogies’, with
teachers making significant changes in their approaches to learning and how they
saw their own roles.These include: work beyond the classroom and school, the use
of the student’s experiences and work as a teaching and learning resource, the open
expression of emotions, the valuing of collective work, opportunities for open
learning (where the answer is not already known), the use of the body and all the
senses, and engagement with the wider community (see also McLellan et al.,
2012).These and other CCE projects have aimed at nurturing learner creativity —
for example, by encouraging learners to develop their own creative dispositions of
observation and listening. They also help to develop learners’ skills for inquiry,
imagination and quality assessment. They thus combine elements of open and
closed learning for both learners and teachers.
The fundamentally collaborative nature of creative partnerships is vital. Crea-
tive professionals can infuse new energy and insights and bring new approaches
and tools to support teaching and learning.They also bring very different points of
view and tend to be curious (an important creative disposition, as noted above),
asking many questions which may seem naïve to educators, but are nevertheless
important. Teachers bring domain-specific knowledge, a good understanding of
how to structure content and scaffold learning so that it is at the appropriate level
of challenge for their students.Teachers may also have a good understanding of the
kinds of problem representations (heuristics) that promote learner understanding
and catalyse new insights in their domain (Kaplan & Simon, 1990; Kilpatrick,
Swafford, & Findell, 2001). But more research will be needed to understand the
respective contributions of domain-general and domain-specific knowledge and
skills engendered in these partnerships.
It should also be noted that these creative partnerships have included a specific
focus on teacher professional development and have stressed the importance of
long-term relationships. CCE has found that teachers who are most engaged in the
process and over longer periods of time have reported positive impacts on their
own career and creative development, their interpersonal and leadership skills, and
the way they approach teaching and learning.2 For teachers and creative profes-
sionals, these partnerships are a form of open learning. As the outcome is
unknown, they involve a certain level of risk for all concerned. But perhaps because
of this, teachers have also reported that the programme has had a deep impact on
their own creative dispositions and willingness to try new things (Parker, 2013).
Teachers participating in the evaluation of the programme in England (Lamont
et al., 2010) also noted changes in personal values related to creativity, their
willingness to challenge their pedagogical ideals, improvements in their ability to
conceptualise complex problems and to make connections between disparate
areas, etc.
In their Europe-wide study, Cachia and colleagues (2010) found several bar-
riers to creative learning and innovative teaching in schools. These included:
Curricula — many teachers noted that curricula in their countries do not
provide a clear definition of creativity, nor do they have tools or guidelines as
to how to develop it in their classrooms.
Pedagogy and assessment — while teachers express interest in encouraging
creativity, conventional ‘frontal teaching’ dominates in classrooms, particu-
larly at the secondary level, across the EU-27. Lack of time, overloaded
curricula and an emphasis on traditional approaches to testing and assess-
ment also create barriers.
Teacher training — the need to review and reform teacher training and
prepare teachers to integrate more diverse and innovative methods is seen as
key. Teachers also need to be supported to take creative risks within the
constraints of traditional education.
ICT and digital media — teachers need more personal and pedagogical
competences with ICT in order to integrate tools and content into teaching
and learning in creative ways.
Educational culture and leadership — school leaders, policy makers and
parents need to be involved in the change process.
Cachia et al., 2010
In a more recent survey, 4,000 school and higher education teachers and
parents in Australia, Germany, the US and the UK were asked to identify
their views on the major barriers to creativity in education. Across these
countries, respondents noted a lack of resources (including tools and train-
ing), the low value placed on creativity in education settings, and narrow
curricula and high-stakes testing. Misunderstanding of the importance of
creativity in education, the respondents noted, is also key barrier.
Berland (2013)
Teachers involved in the field trials were positive about the tool’s focus on the
five habits and agreed that it was a useful way of focusing attention on creativity.
At the same time, they expressed their concern that current approaches to struc-
turing lessons did not leave sufficient time or opportunity to put many of the
creative dispositions into practice. Teachers also need training and support and
more opportunities to work together in order to make sense of the terms and the
kind of evidence needed to identify learner progression across the five habits and
more time to develop practices that nurture learners’ creative dispositions.
The focus on dispositions rather than on pure academic achievement and
giftedness aligns well with the focus on small ‘c’ creativity. It also implies a very
different approach to teaching and assessment. An extensive body of research
supports the importance of formative and ipsative approaches to assessment focused
on the importance of effort as opposed to innate ability or talent (what Dweck refers
to as a ‘growth mindset’3) (see also Black & Wiliam, 1998). Duckworth and
Seligman (2005; see also Duckworth et al., 2007) found that learner persistence —
or ‘grit’ in Duckworth’s model — was a more effective predictor of academic
performance and longer-term success than IQ. In addition, the quality of and
attention to learners’ motivation and emotions are important (Gordon & O’Toole,
forthcoming; Hinton & Fischer, 2010; Immordino-Yang & Damasio, 2007).
1983) sets out processes for expert and novice judges to rate product creativity in
different domains. This approach is appropriate for summative assessments, par-
ticularly when the reliability of judgements is crucial (‘reliability’ means that the
assessment could be repeated and produce consistent ratings). Similar product
assessments include the Creative Product Semantic Scale (Besemer, 1998;
Besemer & O’Quin, 1999, cited in Plucker & Makel, 2010) and the Student
Product Assessment Form (Reis & Renzulli, 1991).
In classroom settings, the on-the-spot judgement of teachers and learners
prevails. Timely and specific formative feedback can also improve the quality of
learning and of the resulting work.The way in which teachers structure lessons and
guide dialogue and questioning have an important impact on whether and how
learners make connections between ideas and develop new insights. This kind of
dialogue is also important to reveal learner understanding and can help both
teachers and learners to identify areas where new approaches may be needed — a
formative approach to assessment and learning (Black & Wiliam, 1998). Scaffold-
ing — i.e. setting challenges for learners at the right level and providing as much
or as little information and guidance as needed — can support learners as they
move from novice to more expert levels of performance (Allal, 1999). As noted
above, these approaches require teachers to play very different roles, to have deep
knowledge of the domain they are teaching, and to be open to the unexpected. As
assessment may not be considered as formative until the learning gap has been
addressed, teachers’ pedagogical problem-solving abilities are vital.
It is also important to support learner autonomy. In the open learning mode, it
is particularly important that teachers and learners be able to evaluate the quality
of their ideas, make adjustments and test them again. Learners may learn to judge
the quality of their work — whether working towards a specific learning goal with
clear criteria or testing their hypothesis.
Looney (in Miller et al., 2011) suggests that assessment should be seen as a
‘competence’ for both teachers and learners. The term ‘competence’ refers to the
ability to call up both cognitive and non-cognitive capacities in new and unfamiliar
situations. Learning in both open and closed systems requires that teachers and
learners define what, how, with whom and why they learn and are able to provide
or respond to feedback.
Runco (2006) has suggested that creativity in problem solving may be judged
on the basis of the effectiveness of the resulting work. While judgements of the
quality of creative products is to some degree subjective, both teachers and learners
can refine their own judgements through observation and exposure to many
different creative professionals in given domains. As with the assessment of creative
dispositions, a process of sense making is vital. A deeper understanding of why and
how different creative works succeed is vital for both teachers and learners as they
develop their own creative identities. Indeed, if young people are to improve the
quality of their creative work, they will need an honest critical assessment. Too
much attention to the creative process itself may also deflect from efforts to
improve the quality of the outcome. As the Artistic Director of the Royal Shake-
speare Company, Michael Boyd, remarked at a 2007 CCE/RSC seminar on
measuring creativity, ‘There is no point my standing in front of an audience on first
night describing the quality of the creative process that generated the show. The
audience is only interested in the quality of the performance’. Indeed, one of the
paradoxes of creative processes is that they are no guarantee of quality products.
Here again, the approach to assessment is vital. In the most effective classroom-
based formative assessments, teachers focus on the quality of the learner’s work
rather than on their ego, even in the form of praise. Teachers or the learners’ peers
may make specific suggestions for improvement, following clear criteria (OECD,
2005a). Certainly, the lack of standards or the subjectivity of judgements regarding
creative processes and products — particularly in situations where learning is more
open — may make some teachers uneasy. However, teachers and learners may
co-construct an understanding of what works and what does not work well for any
given creative product and thereby refine their assessment competences.
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank Stéphan Vincent-Lancrin of the OECD and Gábor
Halász of the EJE Editorial Board for their comments on an earlier draft of this
article.
NOTES
1. Winner and colleagues (2013) conducted a review of the literature on arts
education and academic attainment for the OECD. They found that empirical
evidence in this field was limited, possibly due to the limited ways in which
creativity has been measured (e.g. Torrance Tests of Creativity on divergent
thinking, as referenced above). Several studies show that learning in the arts
(dance, music, visual arts and theatre) is correlated with better academic
performance, but these studies do not demonstrate any clear causal links.They
also note that some of the difficulties in measurement may be due to the fact
that any subject can be taught in a way that encourages or discourages learner
creativity.
2. Lamont et al. (2010) in their evaluation of Creative Partnerships, which
was implemented across England from 2002 to 2011, found substantial
evidence of positive impacts on teachers’ personal and professional
development:
personal — teachers reported greater enthusiasm for their work, their
own creative development, confidence, values, and their own learning;
interpersonal and leadership — improved skills for collaboration with
peers as well as with creative professionals;
teaching and learning — changes in values, increased use of language
related to creativity, new views on student learning, new classroom
practices and skills to support childrens’ creativity, and new approaches
to curriculum;
career — impacts in this area were less common, but significant for those
with greater or more sustained involvement.
Most teachers in the evaluation felt that Creative Partnerships had a greater
impact on their professional development than other initiatives. Reasons
included: opportunities to develop and use new skills, opportunities to work
with external partners, and improvements in the learning environment. Crea-
tive Partnerships were felt to provide a sustained, whole-school approach to
professional development.
3. Dweck (2006) found that individuals with a ‘growth mindset’ (in other words,
with high self-efficacy) were more likely to succeed over time than those with
a ‘fixed mindset’. Dweck and colleagues tested this proposition with hundreds
of adolescent learners.The learners were all given a baseline nonverbal IQ test.
Following the test, some were praised for their ability and others were praised
for their effort. The researchers found that the learners who were praised for
ability, when given a choice, were less interested in participating in more
challenging tasks. By contrast, 90% of learners who had been praised for effort
preferred the more challenging task.
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