Inspiring Creativity and Innovation in K-12. Douglas Reeves

      Douglas Reeves is a partner with Creative Leadership Solutions, serving education systems around the world. The author of more than thirty books and eighty articles on leadership and education, he has been named twice to the Harvard University Distinguished Author Series, received the Contribution to the Field Award from the National Staff Development Council (now Learning Forward), and was named the Brock International Laureate for his contributions to education. He is the founding publisher of the SNAFU Review, a literary and artistic project supporting disabled veterans whose writing and art inspire others struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder.

      To learn more about Doug’s work, visit http://creativeleadership.net or follow him on Twitter @DouglasReeves.

      To book Douglas Reeves for professional development, contact [email protected].

Chapter 1

      Why Creativity Is Vital

      Sir Ken Robinson’s writing (2014) and wildly popular YouTube videos (thirty million hits and counting) make clear the importance of creativity for the future of the planet. Creativity is the first priority in talent selection by the Global CEO Study (Lombardo & Roddy, 2010), finishing higher in that survey than integrity and global thinking. Creativity is foundational to human progress, scientific endeavors, and educational success. In the best synthesis of the international evidence, Heather Hammond and colleagues (2013) and John Hattie (2012) find durable positive relationships between creativity and student achievement and conclude that successful nurturing of creativity depends on feedback that is accurate and active.

      The fundamental question is this: Why do so many people enthusiastically watch a Ken Robinson video and devour research about creativity and achievement and then do absolutely nothing about what they learned? This book explores the challenges of creativity and offers practical advice for educators, school leaders, and policymakers. It is not enough to acknowledge that creativity is important; we must first understand why creativity presents such a challenge, particularly in an educational environment.

      The quest for creativity presents four central challenges to education professionals and students. First, creativity is risky and uncomfortable. Second, creativity fails to offer the immediate positive feedback to which generations of students have become accustomed. Few students persist in the face of failure—the inevitable result of creative efforts. Third, the abdication of authority by teachers is worrisome to teachers, students, parents, and administrators. Fourth is the challenge of disciplinary silos. Despite abundant evidence that the development of creativity depends on interdisciplinary efforts, faculty members, particularly at secondary and collegiate levels, find the greatest professional and psychological security within the academic disciplines where their expertise is unchallenged.

Creative Discomfort

      Risk, failure, and ambiguity—these are among the essential ingredients of creativity. Yet while there is nearly unanimous praise for the concept of creativity, there is little enthusiasm for the difficult, challenging, and sometimes embarrassing steps required to achieve the goal. Prolific inventor James Dyson (2000) estimates that he experienced more than five thousand failures before developing the eponymous vacuum cleaner that now dominates the industry. Stories of successful ideas go back centuries to the time of Archimedes, who is credited with the original “Eureka!” moment, sitting in his bathtub pondering a challenge from the king. But it’s a good bet that Archimedes took a lot of baths before yelling “Eureka!” as he ran naked through the town, proclaiming his discovery of water displacement by irregularly shaped objects.

      Discomfort is not, however, part of most school environments, where students and teachers are encouraged to “get it right the first time.” The common use of the average—the default of most computerized evaluation systems when summarizing a set of scores—means that the risk, experimentation, and discomfort experienced during the first days of school are part of final student and teacher evaluations. Even the Global CEO Study finds that while 60 percent of leaders claim to value creativity as one of the primary attributes of leaders they hire, more than 70 percent admit that they do a poor job of assessing and encouraging it (Lombardo & Roddy, 2010). In the business world, it’s difficult to engage in creative discomfort when your bonus as well as your mortgage payment depend on tomorrow’s results.

      In education, creative ways of engaging students give way to the exigencies of tomorrow’s test. For example, one of the best ways to encourage creativity is with an environment of debate and dissent (Rogers & Simms, 2014). Yet this promising instructional strategy is often doomed by a culture of congeniality in which respecting one’s classmates and colleagues is interpreted by some students and teachers as never engaging in open disagreement, dissent, or criticism.

Delayed Feedback

      Compare the following profiles of the performance of two students. Each student submitted ten projects, assignments, or other assessments for teacher evaluation. Both students finished the class doing A work, but there the similarity ends.

      Student 1: A, A, A, A, A, A, A, B, A, A—Final grade of A

      Student 2: F, F, F, A, F, F, F, A, F, A—Final grade?

      The first student knows the game of school well. As close to failure and risk taking as the first student comes is to receive a B—a rare occurrence that may lead to challenges for the teacher from both student and parents. The language of the grade doesn’t matter—whether the mark is B or “meets expectations”—the perception, at least in many affluent homes, is that a score less than perfection is a dagger in the heart of a student who is accustomed to only receiving the highest marks available.

      The second student swings for the fences, alternating between spectacular failure and success. With a rare degree of resilience, the second student willingly persists in the face of failure after failure, rewarded by the occasional success. Colleges, graduate schools, and employers insist that they value creativity and risk taking, but which student are they more likely to accept or hire? It’s tempting to be cynical about grade inflation among students. However, the same issue presents itself when superintendents routinely meet or exceed the expectations of the boards that hired them and, even in an environment of renewed evaluation and accountability, the vast majority of teachers receive high ratings.

Abdication of Authority