Getting the Creativity Back

I caught Sir Ken Robinson on ABC2 the other morning on his brief visit to Australia and got to thinking about his messages about creativity. TED.com describes him as someone who “challenges the way we're educating our children and champions a radical rethink of our school systems, to cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types of intelligence”. But I think his perspective has a much wider application in the workplace. If we don’t prepare children for the fast-paced, constantly changing world out there and encourage them to pursue the things they really love, we will end up with a group of drones who are unable to think for themselves and be the kind of leaders we need them to be. Given the current economic climate, we need all the creative thinking we can get, rather than more of the same!

If we want to get the most of our people, we first need to teach them to be creative thinkers. "We are educating people out of their creativity," Robinson says. If you look at the great entrepreneurs of the world, most do not possess high end qualifications, but they do possess creativity in bucketfuls. It is in all of us, but we sometimes need assistance in bringing it out. It is almost like the more analytical someone gets through their scholarly journey, the less risks they take and the more boring they become!

One of my favourite sayings, although I am not sure where I originally heard it, is when a child starts school they have a hundred ways of looking at the world. When they finish schooling, they only have one. I think this illustrates what Robinson is saying about educating the creativity out. As educators, we need to re-engineer the process and get back some of those alternative perspectives, hear some new voices, admit that we don’t have all the answers and recognise that we are all learners and all teachers simultaneously.

I think the next big challenge we face is in accepting the collaborative process which learning has become. We need to gear ourselves for the creativity revolution of many pathways, many platforms, many entry points, but one common goal – the search for “living learning”. This is opposed to what I call “static learning”, which is a linear collection of what others have learned before us. Today, there is a massive blurring of the edges around concepts like authenticity. If we don’t know something we “Google it”, or post a question on twitter or create a wiki, which is edited multiple times but multiple users. Is this learning any less authentic than traditional teacher-centred approaches? Do students have less of a grasp of the concepts through the collaborative approach? Whatever your response, the fact remains, by letting the option in, you are more likely to inspire the students to undertake a creative interaction with the material. This will almost certainly lead to them finding new and interesting ways to apply the content to their lives. Remember, CHEAT is just an anagram of TEACH!