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What is creativity in education?

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Human beings have always been creative. The fact that we have survived on the planet is testament to this. Humans adapted to and then began to modify their environment. We expanded across the planet into a whole range of climates. At some point in time we developed consciousness and then language. We began to question who we are, how we should behave, and how we came into existence in the first place. Part of human questioning was how we became creative.

The myth that creativity is only for a special few has a long, long history. For the Ancient Chinese and the Romans, creativity was a gift from the gods. Fast forward to the mid-nineteenth century and creativity was seen as a gift, but only for the highly talented, romantically indulgent, long-suffering and mentally unstable artist. Fortunately, in the 1920s the field of science began to look at creativity as a series of human processes. Creative problem solving was the initial focus, from idea generation to idea selection and the choice of a final product. The 1950s were a watershed moment for creativity. After the Second World War, the Cold War began and competition for creative solutions to keep a technological advantage was intense. It was at this time that the first calls for STEM in education and its associated creativity were made. Since this time, creativity has been researched across a whole range of human activities, including maths, science, engineering, business and the arts.

The components of creativity

So what exactly is creativity? In the academic field of creativity, there is broad consensus regarding the definition of creativity and the components which make it up. Creativity is the interaction between the learning environment, both physical and social, the attitudes and attributes of both teachers and students, and a clear problem-solving process which produces a perceptible product (that can be an idea or a process as well as a tangible physical object). Creativity is producing something new, relevant and useful to the person or people who created the product within their own social context. The idea of context is very important in education. Something that is very creative to a Year One student – for example, the discovery that a greater incline on a ramp causes objects to roll faster – would not be considered creative in a university student. Creativity can also be used to propose new solutions to problems in different contexts, communities or countries. An example of this is having different schools solve the same problem and share solutions.

Creativity is an inherent part of learning. Whenever we try something new, there is an element of creativity involved. There are different levels of creativity, and creativity develops with both time and experience. A commonly cited model of creativity is the 4Cs [i] . At the mini-c level of creativity, what someone creates might not be revolutionary, but it is new and meaningful to them. For example, a child brings home their first drawing from school. It means something to the child, and they are excited to have produced it. It may show a very low level of skill but create a high level of emotional response which inspires the child to share it with their parents.

The little-c level of creativity is one level up from the mini-c level, in that it involves feedback from others combined with an attempt to build knowledge and skills in a particular area. For example, the painting the child brought home might receive some positive feedback from their parents. They place it on the refrigerator to show that it has value, give their child a sketchbook, and make some suggestions about how to improve their drawing. In high school the student chooses art as an elective and begins to receive explicit instruction and assessed feedback. In terms of students at school, the vast majority of creativity in students is at the mini-c and little-c level.

The Pro-c level of creativity in schools is usually the realm of teachers. The teacher of art in this case finds a variety of pedagogic approaches which enhance the student artist’s knowledge and skills in art as well as building their creative competencies in making works of art. They are a Pro-c teacher. The student will require many years of deliberate practice and training along with professional levels of feedback, including acknowledgement that their work is sufficiently new and novel for them to be considered a creative professional artist at the pro-c level.

The Big-C level of creativity is the rarefied territory of the very few. To take this example to the extreme, the student becomes one of the greatest artists of all time. After they are dead, their work is discussed by experts because their creativity in taking art to new forms of expression is of the highest level. Most of us operate at the mini-c and little-c level with our hobbies and activities. They give us great satisfaction and enjoyment and we enjoy building skills and knowledge over time.  Some of us are at the pro-c level in more than one area.

The value of creativity in education

Creativity is valuable in education because it builds cognitive complexity. Creativity relies on having deep knowledge and being able to use it effectively. Being creative involves using an existing set of knowledge or skills in a particular subject or context to experiment with new possibilities in the pursuit of valued outcomes , thus increasing both knowledge and skills. It develops over time and is more successful if the creative process begins at a point where people have at least some knowledge and skills. To continue the earlier example of the ramp, a student rolling a ball down an incline may notice that the ball goes faster if they increase the incline, and slower if they decrease it. This discovery may lead to other possibilities – the student might then go on to observe how far the ball rolls depending on the angle of the incline, and then develop some sort of target for the ball to reach. What started as play has developed in a way that builds the student’s knowledge, skills and reasoning. It represents the beginning of the scientific method of trial and error in experimentation.

Creativity is not just making things up. For something to meet the definition of creativity, it must not only be new but also relevant and useful. For example, if a student is asked to make a new type of musical instrument, one made of salami slices may be original and interesting, but neither relevant nor useful. (On the other hand, carrots can make excellent recorders). Creativity also works best with constraints, not open-ended tasks. For example, students can be given a limit to the number of lines used when writing a poem, or a set list of ingredients when making a recipe. Constrained limits lead to what cognitive scientists call desirable difficulties as students need to make more complex decisions about what they include and exclude in their final product. A common STEM example is to make a building using drinking straws but no sticky tape or glue. Students need to think more deeply about how the various elements of a building connect in order for the building to stand up.

Creativity must also have a result or an outcome . In some cases the result may be a specific output, such as the correct solution to a maths problem, a poem in the form of a sonnet, or a scientific experiment to demonstrate a particular type of reaction. As noted above, outputs may also be intangible: they might be an idea for a solution or a new way of looking at existing knowledge and ideas. The outcome of creativity may not necessarily be pre-determined and, when working with students, generating a specific number of ideas might be a sufficient creative outcome.

Myths about creativity

It is important that students are aware of the components that make up creativity, but it is also critical that students understand what creativity is not, and that the notion of creativity has been beset by a number of myths. The science of creativity has made great progress over the last 20 years and research has dispelled the following myths:

• Creativity is only for the gifted
• Creativity is only for those with a mental illness
• Creativity only lives in the arts
• Creativity cannot be taught
• Creativity cannot be learned
• Creativity cannot be assessed
• Schools kill creativity in their students
• Teachers do not understand what creativity is
• Teachers do not like creative students

The science of creativity has come a long way from the idea of being bestowed by the gods of ancient Rome and China. We now know that creativity can be taught, learned and assessed in schools. We know that everyone can develop their creative capacities in a wide range of areas, and that creativity can develop from purely experiential play to a body of knowledge and skills that increases with motivation and feedback.

Creativity in education 

The world of education is now committed to creativity. Creativity is central to policy and curriculum documents in education systems from Iceland to Estonia, and of course New Zealand. The origins of this global shift lie in the 1990s, and it was driven predominantly by economics rather than educational philosophy.

There has also been a global trend in education to move from knowledge acquisition to competency development. Creativity often is positioned as a competency or skill within educational frameworks. However, it is important to remember that the incorporation of competencies into a curriculum does not discount the importance of knowledge acquisition. Research in cognitive science demonstrates that students need fundamental knowledge and skills. Indeed, it is the sound acquisition of knowledge that enables students to apply it in creative ways . It is essential that teachers consider both how they will support their students to acquire the necessary knowledge and skills in their learning area as well as the opportunities they will provide for applying this knowledge in ways that support creativity. In fact, creativity requires two different sets of knowledge: knowledge and skills in the learning area, and knowledge of and skills related to the creative process, from idea generation to idea selection, as well as the appropriate attitudes, attributes and environment.

Supporting students to be creative

In order for teachers to support students to be creative, they should attend to four key areas. Firstly, creativity needs an appropriate physical and social environment . Students need to feel a sense of psychological safety when being creative. The role of the teacher is to ensure that all ideas are listened to and given feedback in a respectful manner. In terms of the physical environment, a set of simple changes rather than a complete redesign of classrooms is required: modifying the size and makeup of student groups, working on both desks and on whiteboards, or taking students outside as part of the idea generation process can develop creative capacity. Even something as simple as making students more aware of the objects and affordances which lie within a classroom may help with the creative process.

Secondly, teachers can support students to develop the attitudes and attributes required for creativity , which include persistence, discipline, resilience, and curiosity. Students who are more intellectually curious are open to new experiences and can look at problems from multiple perspectives, which builds creative capacity. In maths, for example, this can mean students being shown three or four different ways to solve a problem and selecting the method that best suits them. In Japan, students are rewarded for offering multiple paths to a solution as well as coming up with the correct answer.

Thirdly, teachers can support the creative process . It begins with problem solving, or problem posing, and moves on to idea generation. There are a number of methods which can be used when generating ideas such as brainstorming, in which as many ideas as possible are generated by the individual or by a group. Another effective method, which has the additional benefit of showing the relationships between the ideas as they are generated, is mind-mapping. For example, rather than looking at possible causes of World War Two as a list, it might be better to categorise them into political, social and economic categories using a mind map or some other form of graphic organiser. This creative visual representation may provide students with new and useful insights into the causes of the war. Students may also realise that there are more categories that need to be considered and added, thus allowing them to move from surface to deep learning as they explore relationships rather than just recalling facts. Remember that creativity is not possible without some knowledge and skills in that subject area. For instance, proposing that World War Two was caused by aliens may be considered imaginative, but it is definitely not creative.

The final element to be considered is that of the outcomes – the product or results – of creativity . However, as with many other elements of education, it may be more useful to formatively assess the process which the students have gone through rather than the final product. By exploring how students generated ideas, whether the method of recording ideas was effective, whether the final solutions were practical, and whether they demonstrated curiosity or resilience can often be more useful than merely grading the final product. Encouraging the students to self-reflect during the creative process also provides students with increased skills in metacognition, as well as having a deeper understanding of the evolution of their creative competencies. It may in fact mean that the final grade for a piece of work may take into account a combination of the creative process as observed by the teacher, the creative process as experienced and reported by the student, and the final product, tangible or intangible.

Collard, P., & Looney, J. (2014). Nurturing creativity in education . European Journal of Education, 49 (3), 348-364.

Craft, A. (2001). An analysis of research and literature on creativity in education : Report prepared for the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority.

Runco, M. (2008). Creativity and education . New Horizons in Education, 56 (1), 96-104.

[i] Kaufman, J. C., & Beghetto, R. A. (2009). Beyond big and little: The four C model of creativity .  Review of General Psychology,  13(1), 1-12.

By Tim Patston

PREPARED FOR THE EDUCATION HUB BY

Dr Tim Patston

Dr Tim Patston is a researcher and educator with more than thirty years’ experience working with Primary, Secondary and Tertiary education providers and currently is the leader of consultancy activities for C reative Actions . He also is a senior adjunct at the University of South Australia in UniSA STEM and a senior fellow at the University of Melbourne in the Graduate School of Education. He publishes widely in the field of Creative Education and the development of creative competencies and is the featured expert on creativity in the documentary Finding Creativity, to be released in 2021. 

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What creativity really is - and why schools need it

Associate Professor of Psychology and Creative Studies, University of British Columbia

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Liane Gabora's research is supported by a grant (62R06523) from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

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Although educators claim to value creativity , they don’t always prioritize it.

Teachers often have biases against creative students , fearing that creativity in the classroom will be disruptive. They devalue creative personality attributes such as risk taking, impulsivity and independence. They inhibit creativity by focusing on the reproduction of knowledge and obedience in class.

Why the disconnect between educators’ official stance toward creativity, and what actually happens in school?

How can teachers nurture creativity in the classroom in an era of rapid technological change, when human innovation is needed more than ever and children are more distracted and hyper-stimulated ?

These are some of the questions we ask in my research lab at the Okanagan campus of the University of British Columbia. We study the creative process , as well as how ideas evolve over time and across societies. I’ve written almost 200 scholarly papers and book chapters on creativity, and lectured on it worldwide. My research involves both computational models and studies with human participants. I also write fiction, compose music for the piano and do freestyle dance.

What is creativity?

Although creativity is often defined in terms of new and useful products, I believe it makes more sense to define it in terms of processes. Specifically, creativity involves cognitive processes that transform one’s understanding of, or relationship to, the world.

There may be adaptive value to the seemingly mixed messages that teachers send about creativity. Creativity is the novelty-generating component of cultural evolution. As in any kind of evolutionary process, novelty must be balanced by preservation.

In biological evolution, the novelty-generating components are genetic mutation and recombination, and the novelty-preserving components include the survival and reproduction of “fit” individuals. In cultural evolution , the novelty-generating component is creativity, and the novelty-preserving components include imitation and other forms of social learning.

It isn’t actually necessary for everyone to be creative for the benefits of creativity to be felt by all. We can reap the rewards of the creative person’s ideas by copying them, buying from them or simply admiring them. Few of us can build a computer or write a symphony, but they are ours to use and enjoy nevertheless.

Inventor or imitator?

There are also drawbacks to creativity . Sure, creative people solve problems, crack jokes, invent stuff; they make the world pretty and interesting and fun. But generating creative ideas is time-consuming. A creative solution to one problem often generates other problems, or has unexpected negative side effects.

Creativity is correlated with rule bending, law breaking, social unrest, aggression, group conflict and dishonesty. Creative people often direct their nurturing energy towards ideas rather than relationships, and may be viewed as aloof, arrogant, competitive, hostile, independent or unfriendly.

Also, if I’m wrapped up in my own creative reverie, I may fail to notice that someone else has already solved the problem I’m working on. In an agent-based computational model of cultural evolution , in which artificial neural network-based agents invent and imitate ideas, the society’s ideas evolve most quickly when there is a good mix of creative “inventors” and conforming “imitators.” Too many creative agents and the collective suffers. They are like holes in the fabric of society, fixated on their own (potentially inferior) ideas, rather than propagating proven effective ideas.

Of course, a computational model of this sort is highly artificial. The results of such simulations must be taken with a grain of salt. However, they suggest an adaptive value to the mixed signals teachers send about creativity. A society thrives when some individuals create and others preserve their best ideas.

This also makes sense given how creative people encode and process information. Creative people tend to encode episodes of experience in much more detail than is actually needed. This has drawbacks: Each episode takes up more memory space and has a richer network of associations. Some of these associations will be spurious. On the bright side, some may lead to new ideas that are useful or aesthetically pleasing.

So, there’s a trade-off to peppering the world with creative minds. They may fail to see the forest for the trees but they may produce the next Mona Lisa.

Innovation might keep us afloat

So will society naturally self-organize into creators and conformers? Should we avoid trying to enhance creativity in the classroom?

The answer is: No! The pace of cultural change is accelerating more quickly than ever before. In some biological systems, when the environment is changing quickly, the mutation rate goes up. Similarly, in times of change we need to bump up creativity levels — to generate the innovative ideas that will keep us afloat.

This is particularly important now. In our high-stimulation environment, children spend so much time processing new stimuli that there is less time to “go deep” with the stimuli they’ve already encountered. There is less time for thinking about ideas and situations from different perspectives, such that their ideas become more interconnected and their mental models of understanding become more integrated.

This “going deep” process has been modeled computationally using a program called Deep Dream , a variation on the machine learning technique “Deep Learning” and used to generate images such as the ones in the figure below.

The images show how an input is subjected to different kinds of processing at different levels, in the same way that our minds gain a deeper understanding of something by looking at it from different perspectives. It is this kind of deep processing and the resulting integrated webs of understanding that make the crucial connections that lead to important advances and innovations.

Cultivating creativity in the classroom

So the obvious next question is: How can creativity be cultivated in the classroom? It turns out there are lots of ways ! Here are three key ways in which teachers can begin:

Focus less on the reproduction of information and more on critical thinking and problem solving .

Curate activities that transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries, such as by painting murals that depict biological food chains, or acting out plays about historical events, or writing poems about the cosmos. After all, the world doesn’t come carved up into different subject areas. Our culture tells us these disciplinary boundaries are real and our thinking becomes trapped in them.

Pose questions and challenges, and follow up with opportunities for solitude and reflection. This provides time and space to foster the forging of new connections that is so vital to creativity.

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Article contents

Creativity in education.

• Anne Harris Anne Harris RMIT University
•  and  Leon De Bruin Leon De Bruin RMIT University
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.383
• Published online: 26 April 2018

Creativity is an essential aspect of teaching and learning that is influencing worldwide educational policy and teacher practice, and is shaping the possibilities of 21st-century learners. The way creativity is understood, nurtured, and linked with real-world problems for emerging workforces is significantly changing the ways contemporary scholars and educators are now approaching creativity in schools. Creativity discourses commonly attend to creative ability, influence, and assessment along three broad themes: the physical environment, pedagogical practices and learner traits, and the role of partnerships in and beyond the school. This overview of research on creativity education explores recent scholarship examining environments, practices, and organizational structures that both facilitate and impede creativity. Reviewing global trends pertaining to creativity research in this second decade of the 21st century, this article stresses for practicing and preservice teachers, schools, and policy makers the need to educationally innovate within experiential dimensions, priorities, possibilities, and new kinds of partnerships in creativity education.

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5 Reasons Why It Is More Important Than Ever to Teach Creativity

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On the laundry list of skills and content areas teachers have to cover, creativity doesn’t traditionally get top billing. It’s usually lumped together with other soft skills like communication and collaboration: Great to have, though not as important as reading or long division.

But research is showing that creativity isn’t just great to have. It’s an essential human skill — perhaps even an evolutionary imperative in our technology-driven world.

“The pace of cultural change is accelerating more quickly than ever before,” says Liane Gabora , associate professor of psychology and creative studies at the University of British Columbia. “In some biological systems, when the environment is changing quickly, the mutation rate goes up. Similarly, in times of change we need to bump up creativity levels — to generate the innovative ideas that will keep us afloat.”

From standardized tests to one-size-fits-all curriculum, public education often leaves little room for creativity, says EdNews Daily founder Robyn D. Shulman . This puts many schools out of sync with both global demand and societal needs, leaving students poorly prepared for future success.

What can education leaders do about it? For starters, they can make teaching creativity a priority. Here are five reasons to encourage teachers to bring more creativity into the classroom:

1. Creativity motivates kids to learn.

Decades of research link creativity with the intrinsic motivation to learn. When students are focused on a creative goal, they become more absorbed in their learning and more driven to acquire the skills they need to accomplish it.

As proof, education leader Ryan Imbriale cites his young daughter, who loves making TikTok videos showcasing her gymnastics skills. “She spends countless hours on her mat, working over and over again to try to get her gymnastics moves correct so she can share her TikTok video of her success,” says the executive director of innovative learning for Baltimore County Public Schools.

Students are most motivated to learn when certain factors are present: They’re able to tie their learning to their personal interests, they have a sense of autonomy and control over their task, and they feel competent in the work they’re doing. Creative projects can easily meet all three conditions.

2. Creativity lights up the brain.

Teachers who frequently assign classwork involving creativity are more likely to observe higher-order cognitive skills — problem solving, critical thinking, making connections between subjects — in their students. And when teachers combine creativity with transformative technology use, they see even better outcomes.

Creative work helps students connect new information to their prior knowledge, says Wanda Terral, director of technology for Lakeland School System outside of Memphis. That makes the learning stickier.

“Unless there’s a place to ‘stick’ the knowledge to what they already know, it’s hard for students to make it a part of themselves moving forward,” she says. “It comes down to time. There’s not enough time to give them the flexibility to find out where the learning fits in their life and in their brain.”

3. Creativity spurs emotional development.

The creative process involves a lot of trial and error. Productive struggle — a gentler term for failure — builds resilience, teaching students to push through difficulty to reach success. That’s fertile soil for emotional growth.

“Allowing students to experience the journey, regardless of the end result, is important,” says Terral, a presenter at  ISTE Creative Constructor Lab .

Creativity gives students the freedom to explore and learn new things from each other, Imbriale adds. As they overcome challenges and bring their creative ideas to fruition, “students begin to see that they have limitless boundaries,” he says. “That, in turn, creates confidence. It helps with self-esteem and emotional development.”

4. Creativity can ignite those hard-to-reach students.

Many educators have at least one story about a student who was struggling until the teacher assigned a creative project. When academically disinclined students are permitted to unleash their creativity or explore a topic of personal interest, the transformation can be startling.

“Some students don’t do well on tests or don’t do well grade-wise, but they’re super-creative kids,” Terral says. “It may be that the structure of school is not good for them. But put that canvas in front of them or give them tools so they can sculpt, and their creativity just oozes out of them.”

5. Creativity is an essential job skill of the future.

Actually, it’s an essential job skill right now.

According to an Adobe study , 85% of college-educated professionals say creative thinking is critical for problem solving in their careers. And an analysis of LinkedIn data found that creativity is the second most in-demand job skill (after cloud computing), topping the list of soft skills companies need most. As automation continues to swallow up routine jobs, those who rely on soft skills like creativity will see the most growth.

“We can’t exist without the creative thinker. It’s the idea generation and the opportunity to collaborate with others that moves work,” Imbriale says.

“It’s one thing to be able to sit in front of computer screen and program something. But it’s another to have the conversations and engage in learning about what somebody wants out of a program to be written in order to be able to deliver on that. That all comes from a creative mindset.”

Nicole Krueger is a freelance writer and journalist with a passion for finding out what makes learners tick.

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Cultivating creativity in classroom learning

Expanding beyond acquisition of knowledge

In today’s knowledge societies, schools need to teach content knowledge in a way that prepares students to use that knowledge creatively; and, they need to impart thinking skills, 21 st  century skills, to students. Most schools have not yet become creative learning environments. There are many challenges ahead for schools that hope to foster creative learning.

Contemporary research suggests that achieving creative learning will require us to transform teaching in all subjects. The learning sciences are providing us with an increasingly rich knowledge base for how to do that (Sawyer, 2012b). Unfortunately, schools today are designed around common-sense assumptions that are opposed to creative learning. The first among these assumptions reduces knowledge to a collection of  facts  about the world and  procedures  for how to solve problems. Facts are statements like “The earth is tilted on its axis by 23.45 degrees,” and procedures are step-by-step instructions like how to do multi-digit addition by carrying to the next column. A second problematic assumption is that the goal of schooling is to get these facts and procedures into the student’s head. People are considered to be educated when they possess a large collection of these facts and procedures. A third assumption guiding traditional learning environments is that teachers know these facts and procedures, and their job is to transmit them to students. It follows that, fourth, simpler facts and procedures should be learned first, followed by progressively more complex facts and procedures. The definitions of “simplicity” and “complexity” and the proper sequencing of material were determined either by teachers, by textbook authors, or by asking expert adults like mathematicians, scientists, or historians—not by studying how children actually learn. A final assumption of non-creative learning environments is that the way to determine the success of schooling is to test students to see how many of these facts and procedures they have acquired.

This traditional vision of schooling is known as  transmission and acquisition  (Rogoff, 1990), the  standard model  of schooling (OECD, 2008), or  instructionism  (Papert, 1993). Instructionism emerged in the industrialized economy of the early 20 th  century. Most schools continue to be largely based on an instructionist model of teaching and learning.

But the world today is much more technologically complex and economically competitive, and instructionism is increasingly failing to educate our students to participate in this new kind of society. Economists and organizational theorists have reached a consensus that today we are living in a knowledge economy, an economy which is built on knowledge work (Bereiter, 2002; Drucker, 1993).

In the knowledge economy, memorization of facts and procedures is not enough for success. Educated graduates need a deep conceptual understanding of complex concepts, and the ability to work with them creatively to generate new ideas, new theories, new products, and new knowledge. They need to be able to critically evaluate what they read, to be able to express themselves clearly both verbally and in writing, and to be able to understand scientific and mathematical thinking. They need to learn integrated and usable knowledge, rather than the sets of compartmentalized and decontextualized facts emphasized by instructionism. They need to be able to take responsibility for their own continuing, life-long learning.

Instructionism is particularly ill-suited to the education of creative professionals who can develop new knowledge and continually further their own understanding; instructionism is an anachronism in the modern innovation economy.

Characteristics of effective learning environments

The research emerging from the new sciences of learning is in direct contrast to instructionism; this research suggests that effective learning occurs in learning environments that share the following characteristics:

An emphasis on deeper conceptual understanding.

Scientific studies of expertise demonstrate that expert knowledge includes facts and procedures, but simply acquiring those facts and procedures does not prepare a person to work creatively with that knowledge. Factual and procedural knowledge is only useful when a person knows which situations to apply it in, and exactly how to modify it for each new situation. Instructionism results in a kind of learning that is very difficult to use outside of the classroom. When students gain a deeper conceptual understanding, they learn facts and procedures in a much more useful and profound way that have much higher likelihood of transferring to real-world settings.

The importance of building on a learner’s prior knowledge.

Learners are not empty vessels waiting to be filled. They come to the classroom with preconceptions about how the world works; some of them are basically correct, and some of them are misconceptions or naïve conceptions. The best way for children to learn is in an environment that builds on their existing knowledge; if teaching does not engage their prior knowledge, students often learn information just well enough to pass the test, and then revert back to their misconceptions outside of the classroom.

The importance of reflection.

Students learn better when they express their developing knowledge – either through conversation or by creating papers, reports, or other artifacts – and then are provided with opportunities to reflectively analyze their state of knowledge.

In instructionism, creativity is not necessary for learning, because learning is equated with mastery of what is already known. But within the newer understanding of how students learn that is emerging from the learning sciences, the conceptual understanding that underlies creative behavior emerges from environments in which students build their own knowledge (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2006), through exploratory talk (Mercer, 2000), and sustained argumentation (Andriessen, 2006). The constructivist view emerging from learning sciences research is that learning is always a creative process (Sawyer, 2003a).

Toward embracing and releasing disciplined improvisation

There are many challenges ahead for schools that hope to foster creative learning. Many educational leaders and policy makers have focused on the institutional, administrative, and political challenges that make it difficult for schools to explore more innovative organizational forms. These are  external  forces that make creative teaching and learning difficult. In contrast, I present  internal  forces that make creative teaching and learning difficult.

My research shows that: (1) creative learning requires that students create their own knowledge, a constructivist process that involves  emergence ; (2) creative learning requires  collaborative emergence , with teacher and students working together to build new knowledge; (3) collaborative emergence occurs in the presence of unavoidable tensions that I have called  the teaching paradox ; (4) negotiating the teaching paradox requires that teachers and classrooms engage in  disciplined improvisation ; (5) disciplined improvisation allows for the creative benefits of collaborative emergence, yet guided by teacher practices, curricular structures, and learning goals that guide and aid students in their own process of creative learning.

The effectiveness of disciplined improvisation is not easy to achieve, because it’s inherently a tension between two forces, both of which are necessary and both effective when in combination. I referred to this tension above as “the teaching paradox.”

Embracing the ‘teaching paradox’

The teaching paradox faces all educators who hope to design creative learning environments. Whereas instructionist classrooms are almost completely top down, with no room for emergence or creativity to occur, creative classrooms will be much more bottom up. The creative schools of the future are strongest in teaching what instructionism cannot: Creative learning requires collaborative emergence and creativity on the part of the student.

Creative learning is more effective learning if the process is guided appropriately. The best way to foster creative learning is  not —as many might intuitively assume or often advocate—to allow learners complete freedom to improvise their own path through disciplinary knowledge; it is, rather, to guide them in a process of disciplined improvisation. A caution: Schools are complex organizations with many structures and constraints; these structures serve important functions and cannot simply be abandoned.

Effective creative learning involves teachers and students improvising together, collaboratively, within the structures provided by the curriculum and the teachers. But this collaborative emergence, a bottom up group process, must be guided effectively by (at least) four top-down structures: (1) curriculum, (2) assessments, (3) learning goals, and (4) teacher practices. In too many schools today, these top-down structures are overly constraining, and do not provide room for the disciplined improvisation that results in collaborative emergence. And yet, effective learning environments will always need curricula, assessments, learning goals, and teacher practices.

To transform schools to foster greater creativity in students, these four top-down structures need to change: (1) The curriculum should provide opportunities for multiple learning trajectories that could result from a creative inquiry process; (2) Assessments should incorporate and reward the sort of deeper conceptual understanding that results from creative learning, and they should accommodate potential differences in learning sequence and outcome; (3) Learning goals should explicitly incorporate creative learning. Schools and districts should ensure that the expected learning outcomes do not emphasize breadth over depth; and (4) Teacher professional development should be based in creativity research, and in research in the content areas—for example, science education research that explores the appropriate role of guiding scaffolds in the unavoidably unpredictable and emergent process of creative learning.

Directions for further research

Modifying schools away from instructionism toward disciplined improvisation leads directly to the teaching paradox. Fortunately learning sciences research provides guidance to educators for how to design solutions. Education researchers should work to provide research and practical recommendations for how to teach for creativity. We need research efforts that can help teachers, administrators, and curricular developers negotiate the teaching paradox.

Potential research questions include: What is the optimal balance between scripts, routines, and activities on the one hand, and creative improvisation on the other? What is the best way to educate preservice teachers to prepare them to optimally negotiate the teaching paradox?

Decades of research on constructivism in education have demonstrated that the most effective learning occurs when the learners’ discovery and exploration are guided by scaffolds – structures put in place by the teacher. What is the right degree and type of scaffolds, that result in the most effective creative learning? Answering this question will require substantial research in the content areas, because the appropriate scaffolds will change with the nature of the content knowledge and with the level of the learner.

What is the optimal balance of general creativity education, and domain-specific creative learning?

What role can the arts play in domain general and domain specific creative teaching and learning?

Designed instruction always has a desired learning outcome. The term “curriculum” represents the structures that are designed to ensure that learners reach those learning outcomes – whether textbooks, lists of learning objectives, or lesson plans. What lesson plans and curricula will guide learners in the most optimal way, while allowing space for creative improvisation?

These research questions are becoming increasingly central to the interdisciplinary field known as the learning sciences (Sawyer, 2012b), a group of education researchers that are exploring the fundamentally constructivist observation that effective learning requires the learner to create and recreate their own knowledge. Constructivist learning theory has always presented a challenge to educators: What learning environment can best support learners as they engage in their own creative and constructivist process of learning? In this sense, the teaching paradox is not new; it has always been at the core of attempts to work out the implications of constructivism for teachers and curriculum developers.

Creative learning is the core of all effective learning. The cognitive processes underlying creativity and learning are essentially identical – they both involve the emergence of the new in the mind of the individual. Creative learning environments are those that foster collaborative emergence, improvisational group processes where the outcome cannot be predicted from the individual mental states and goals of the participants, and where all members of the group – teacher and students alike – participate in the unfolding flow of the encounter.

Aspiring to create creative schools

The school of the future will be filled with creative learning environments that result in deeper mastery of content knowledge, and the ability to think and act creatively using that knowledge.

In those creative schools, students learn content knowledge; but in contrast to the superficial learning that results from instructionism, they learn a deeper conceptual understanding that prepares them to go beyond and build new knowledge. They learn collaboratively, in ways that help them externalize their developing understandings and fosters metacognition. They learn to participate in creative activities based on their developing knowledge – how to identify good problems, how to ask good questions, how to gather relevant information, how to propose new solutions and hypotheses, and how to use domain-specific skills to express those ideas and make them a reality.

All schools want students to learn as much as possible, as effectively as possible. To accomplish this goal, schools should be designed based on learning sciences research. This research is beginning to provide suggestions for how to foster creativity in the face of the teaching paradox (e.g., Sawyer, 2011a).

Education researchers and funding agencies should invest more resources in the study of creative teaching and learning. Teacher professional development should build on this research, to help teachers understand how to foster creative learning through disciplined improvisation.

• Andriessen, J. (2006). Arguing to learn. In R. K. Sawyer (Ed.),  Cambridge handbook of the learning sciences  (pp. 443-459). New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Bereiter, C. (2002).  Education and mind in the knowledge age . Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
• Drucker, P. F. (1993).  Post-capitalist society . New York: HarperBusiness.
• Mercer, N. (2000).  Words and minds: How we use language to think together . London: Routledge.
• Papert, S. (1993).  The children’s machine: Rethinking school in the age of the computer . New York: BasicBooks.
• Rogoff, B. (1990).  Apprenticeship in thinking: Cognitive development in social context . New York: Oxford University Press.
• Sawyer, R. K.  (2003). Emergence in creativity and development. In R. K. Sawyer, V. John-Steiner, S. Moran, R. Sternberg, D. H. Feldman, M. Csikszentmihalyi & J. Nakamura (Eds.),  Creativity and development  (pp. 12-60). New York: Oxford.
• Sawyer, R. K.  (2012). Explaining creativity: The science of human innovation (second edition). New York: Oxford University Press.
• Sawyer, R. K.  (2011). What makes good teachers great? The artful balance of structure and improvisation. In R. K. Sawyer (Ed.),  Structure and improvisation in creative teaching  (pp. 1-24). New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Scardamalia, M., & Bereiter, C. (2006). Knowledge building. In R. K. Sawyer (Ed.),  Cambridge handbook of the learning sciences  (pp. 97-115). New York: Cambridge University Press.

April 15, 2018

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Creative Pedagogy

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Creative teaching methodologies ; System of creative teaching

Creative pedagogy is the science and art of creative teaching.

Introduction

If pedagogy in general is defined as the study of the process of teaching, then creative pedagogy is defined as the science and art of creative teaching (Aleinikov 1989 ). Creative pedagogy is a branch of pedagogy that emphasizes the leading role of creativity for successful learning. In its essence, creative pedagogy teaches learners how to learn creatively and become creators of themselves and creators of their future.

The functional definition of creative pedagogy is longer and more complex. The founding work on creative pedagogy gives a definition in the form of a formula of invention – a strict word pattern used to describe inventions for patenting:

Creative pedagogy that includes educational influence on the learner for acquisition of certain study material (subject) [as pedagogy in general] and differing from the above by the...

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Aleinikov, A.G. (2013). Creative Pedagogy. In: Carayannis, E.G. (eds) Encyclopedia of Creativity, Invention, Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-3858-8_13

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Is creativity a superpower in early education?

Karen D'Souza

September 4, 2024.

Singing the ABC song. Learning the days of the week from a nursery rhyme. Making a finger-painted collage of little handprints. 

Arts education has always been center stage in early education because little children are naturally creative, filled with wonder and the burning desire to express themselves. Arts and crafts not only help nurture a child’s natural imagination, they also boost small motor skills, sharpen hand-eye coordination and feed the insatiable need to play. 

“Children don’t just play, they learn fundamental skills through play,” said Daniel Mendoza, a Placer County-based visual artist and specialist in early childhood education art practices. “Children are in a creative mindset all the time.”

While this may well be as true for teenagers as it is for toddlers, there is far more time and space allotted for playfulness in the early grades, when the crucial role of play in particular and creativity in general has long been a matter of common sense.

“Really, I’m just a common-sense professor, and somehow it became rogue,” said Kathryn Hirsh-Pasek, a professor of psychology at Temple University and an expert in the key role of play in learning. “What if we taught children the way we know the brain learns?”

Bringing joy back into the classroom is also what motivates Cindy Hoisington, an early childhood expert who specializes in reaching out to children from historically marginalized communities at the Education Development Center (EDC), a national education nonprofit.

“This is not anything new, knowing that play is so critical to children, whether it’s dramatic play, building play, creative arts play or physical play,” said Hoisington, a STEM expert who taught preschool for decades . “ But as soon as they hit kindergarten and first grade, there’s this dichotomy that sets in. Play is something you get to do after you do the learning when, in fact, we know that play is an incredible vehicle for learning.”

Play, some experts suggest, may be the superpower of the young. A growing body of research suggests that play may even be a way to help close achievement gaps. One report , analyzing 26 studies from 18 countries, found that in communities from Rwanda to Ethiopia, children got higher learning boosts in literacy, motor skills and social-emotional development when attending child care centers that use a mix of instruction and free play as opposed to those focused solely on academics.

“Children are so naturally, intuitively ready with their curiosity, their motivation to explore the world and everything in it, to the point where that’s why the twos are so terrible, because you’re constantly chasing after them,”  said Hoisington, who helps evaluate digital media for PBS. “Science, for instance, tends to have a bad rap as this dry body of knowledge that we have to learn, but really it’s a process of exploration that is very much integral with play.”

Tapping into that spirit of discovery with hands-on experiences is often best, experts say. Curiosity burns brightest in the early years, so letting kids loose to investigate the world is part of building a rich, play-based learning environment.

“Where young children are free to investigate by observing, touching and acting on the objects in their world,” said Deborah Stipek, an expert in early childhood at Stanford University.  “This is how they learn about the world — for example, that some objects float and some sink. Through their own experimentation and observation, they may even arrive at hypotheses about the qualities that differentiate the two.” 

From “The Wheels on the Bus” to “Baby Shark,” kiddos love to sing and love to learn, so why not teach through music? Singing the “Old MacDonald had a Farm” song can be educational, experts say, as well as a ritual for community building. Children can take turns deciding on which animal to pick, which builds vocabulary as well as sharing skills.

“Young children learn best by doing,” said Stipek. “Counting objects is better than counting dots on a worksheet because they can move the objects to help them keep track of how many they have counted. Worksheets are not all bad. They can provide opportunities to practice and consolidate skills. But children don’t develop new skills doing worksheets, and they are typically not nearly as engaging and fun.”

Tracing the alphabet in shaving cream or making tin-foil sculptures may seem like basic exercises, but they often teach sophisticated concepts. Playing make-believe games can teach numerous skills at once. Pretend restaurants need someone to write a menu, calculate a bill and greet diners, fostering literacy, numeracy and special-emotional learning all in one game, Hoisington notes.

Songs are a clever way to remember stuff because they make memorization easy and fun for littles ones. Melodies and rhymes make the most of our limited working memory to help children embed basic facts into their long-term memory, bolstering depth of cognition. 

“I still sing the ABC song in my head sometimes, if I want to know which letter comes before which letter,” admits Hoisington.

What’s often missed in the discussion of the role of play is that older children also need time for creativity and free play, as well as the arts. While there is much talk about the need to engage students, there is little focus on low-hanging fruit like increasing time for arts, sports and recess. Putting too much emphasis on academic skills in isolation undercuts the love of learning, some warn.

“Kids try to buck it, but certainly by first grade we’ve started to ruin them,” said Hirsh-Pasek. “We pound the curiosity right out of kids.”

Mendoza firmly believes teachers should be guides to adventure instead of taskmasters. 

“You don’t have to be a dictator,” as he puts it, “you can be a Sherpa.”

So, why doesn’t the role of play get more respect in education? Why do we emphasize test scores over deep learning?

“We got to this place because people are scared,” said Hirsh-Pasek. “They’re feeling like they’re losing control, and they want to make sure their kid is ahead. We push it younger and younger and younger, and as we do that, we’re creating a situation where our kids are anxious wrecks and the parents are anxious wrecks.”

Too few teachers and parents are aware that play helps build the architecture of the growing brain, experts say.

“Play is not frivolous; it enhances brain structure and function and promotes executive function (i.e., the process of learning, rather than the content), which allow us to pursue goals and ignore distractions,” as an American Academy of Pediatrics report put it. “When play and safe, stable, nurturing relationships are missing in a child’s life, toxic stress can disrupt the development of executive function and the learning of prosocial behavior; in the presence of childhood adversity, play becomes even more important.”

Some experts fear that the laser focus on falling test scores in recent years has led to a decrease in playful learning. They suggest that children need more time for play in the wake of the pandemic, not less. Amid the crisis of chronic absenteeism, engaging students on a compelling level may be more vital than ever.

Creativity is the secret formula, experts say, in a world where machines will always compute faster than humans. Drill and kill won’t help children master high-level intellectual inquiry and conceptual analysis.

“You have to ask yourself, what’s it going to take to outsmart the robots?” as Hirsh-Pasek put it. “We need kids who don’t just memorize and take tests well, which AI will do better than our kids ever will. We need kids to be explorers and problem solvers.”

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Bob Capriles 3 days ago 3 days ago

As I read this article, I was reminded of the Pixar movie, Monsters, Inc. Initially, the “monsters” scare to capture energy. Later they discover that laughter creates much more energy. Perhaps play, more so than academic skills, is what will move our world forward.

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Spark creativity in your students – and boost their employability

Thinking creatively is a crucial skill for the future workplace. But how can we instil it in today’s students?

Sarah Montano

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In today’s rapidly evolving job market, innovation and creativity have become crucial skills for graduates .  Our research has shown that employers are looking for employees who can think outside the box, adapt to change and devise innovative solutions to complex problems. As educators, we play a vital role in preparing students for these challenges by  enabling creativity within curricula . Here, we will explore the importance of innovation and creativity in graduate jobs and discuss how educators can facilitate creativity through innovative teaching and assessment techniques.

Innovation and creativity go hand in hand with problem-solving. When faced with challenges, individuals who can think creatively are more likely to come up with effective solutions and be better at adapting to changing circumstances. Employers in industries such as services, retailing, technology, design, marketing and entrepreneurship highly value the ability to think creatively and come up with innovative ideas. This approach also instils a sense of  responsibility and accountability .

• How to embed creativity more fully into university curricula
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But how can educators foster creativity in their students? Traditional teaching methods often prioritise theoretical learning and standardised assessments, generally geared towards certain answers and leaving little room for creativity to flourish. 

In our authentic assessment , students are expected to develop a competitive and innovative product as the outcome of their theoretical learning, which is applied to a real-life challenge. We argue that an experiential learning approach enables students to  gain future skills and help them develop confidence, autonomy, self-governance and  better learning opportunities . Experiential learning is different from theoretical learning as it focuses on behavioural changes through experiencing real-world challenges, rather than  theoretical cognition . Students can be given the opportunity to design new shops, create adverts and solve challenges, such as designing sustainable packaging. Using the various media, students can also demonstrate their creative work and innovations to potential employers . 

We often see that this task can be daunting to our students from non-marketing academic backgrounds. Taking this on board, we offer a supportive environment to scaffold student learning, helping them to feel comfortable to “think outside the box” and demonstrate their creativity. 

Our process has a few simple elements. We use small-group dynamics to allow students to build on their strengths, offering constructive formative feedback while taking turns to give them different perspectives, and we use innovative digital tools that they can adopt. 

Here are three ideas that have helped us spark creativity in our lessons:

• Embrace AI: Today’s students will need to work in AI-induced environments . Bringing AI platforms to the classroom will help students learn how to use them while showcasing their experience in authentic assessments. By incorporating AI into the curriculum, educators can create a dynamic and engaging learning environment that  encourages students to think  critically and creatively .
• Introduce Lego Serious Play : This methodology uses Lego bricks as a tool for creative thinking and problem-solving. It’s particularly successful at the start of the creative process as Lego breaks down barriers and, by being fun and enjoyable, enables students to communicate their ideas in a simple visual format. Students are encouraged to build models that represent their ideas and concepts, allowing them to explore different perspectives. Lego Serious Play promotes collaboration, communication and creativity, making it an effective tool for fostering innovation in business schools. Through hands-on activities and group discussions, students learn to work together, share ideas and build upon each other’s creativity. This collaborative approach prepares them for the teamwork and interdisciplinary collaboration required in the modern workplace. 
• Focus on the product: Authentic assessments not only foster creativity by focusing on the final product, but also boost learner motivation by enhancing student engagement with the subject . Students enjoy the work and prefer these assessments as they better reflect their learning and enable skill development, according to research. 

In our module at Birmingham, we combine all three elements to stimulate creativity and offer students an exciting way to engage with module content. By offering a visual and creative assessment, we allow students complete freedom to design their own retail or service places, offering innovative elements to stand out in a competitive marketplace. Our motto is: “If they can think it, they can design it.” Unencumbered from traditional format restrictions, students can use a variety of digital tools to bring their visions to life. The assignment concludes with a video portfolio, showcasing their work. The students involved report increased engagement, improved problem-solving skills and a greater sense of creativity, and gain skills that they can showcase to their future employers. 

Educators have a crucial role to play in fostering creativity at business schools. By integrating an innovative experiential learning approach and combing techniques such as AI, Lego Serious Play and digitalisation, educators can prepare students for future jobs and boost their employability. 

Sarah Montano is professor of retail marketing and Inci Toral is associate professor at Birmingham Business School, University of Birmingham.

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Do schools kill creativity?

The science behind creativity

Psychologists and neuroscientists are exploring where creativity comes from and how to increase your own

Vol. 53 No. 3 Print version: page 40

• Neuropsychology
• Creativity and Innovation

Paul Seli, PhD, is falling asleep. As he nods off, a sleep-tracking glove called Dormio, developed by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, detects his nascent sleep state and jars him awake. Pulled back from the brink, he jots down the artistic ideas that came to him during those semilucid moments.

Seli is an assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences and also an artist. He uses Dormio to tap into the world of hypnagogia, the transitional state that exists at the boundary between wakefulness and sleep. In a mini-experiment, he created a series of paintings inspired by ideas plucked from his hypnagogic state and another series from ideas that came to him during waking hours. Then he asked friends to rate how creative the paintings were, without telling them which were which. They judged the hypnagogic paintings as significantly more creative. “In dream states, we seem to be able to link things together that we normally wouldn’t connect,” Seli said. “It’s like there’s an artist in my brain that I get to know through hypnagogia.”

The experiment is one of many novel—and, yes, creative—ways that psychologists are studying the science of creativity. At an individual level, creativity can lead to personal fulfillment and positive academic and professional outcomes, and even be therapeutic. People take pleasure in creative thoughts, research suggests—even if they don’t think of themselves as especially creative. Beyond those individual benefits, creativity is an endeavor with implications for society, said Jonathan Schooler, PhD, a professor of psychological and brain sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “Creativity is at the core of innovation. We rely on innovation for advancing humanity, as well as for pleasure and entertainment,” he said. “Creativity underlies so much of what humans value.”

In 1950, J. P. Guilford, PhD, then president of APA, laid out his vision for the psychological study of creativity ( American Psychologist , Vol. 5, No. 9, 1950). For half a century, researchers added to the scientific understanding of creativity incrementally, said John Kounios, PhD, an experimental psychologist who studies creativity and insight at Drexel University in Philadelphia. Much of that research focused on the personality traits linked to creativity and the cognitive aspects of the creative process.

But in the 21st century, the field has blossomed thanks to new advances in neuroimaging. “It’s become a tsunami of people studying creativity,” Kounios said. Psychologists and neuroscientists are uncovering new details about what it means to be creative and how to nurture that skill. “Creativity is of incredible real-world value,” Kounios said. “The ultimate goal is to figure out how to enhance it in a systematic way.”

Creativity in the brain

What, exactly, is creativity? The standard definition used by researchers characterizes creative ideas as those that are original and effective, as described by psychologist Mark A. Runco, PhD, director of creativity research and programming at Southern Oregon University ( Creativity Research Journal , Vol. 24, No. 1, 2012). But effectiveness, also called utility, is a slippery concept. Is a poem useful? What makes a sculpture effective? “Most researchers use some form of this definition, but most of us are also dissatisfied with it,” Kounios said.

Runco is working on an updated definition and has considered at least a dozen suggestions from colleagues for new components to consider. One frequently suggested feature is authenticity. “Creativity involves an honest expression,” he said.

Meanwhile, scientists are also struggling with the best way to measure the concept. As a marker of creativity, researchers often measure divergent thinking—the ability to generate a lot of possible solutions to a problem or question. The standard test of divergent thinking came from Guilford himself. Known as the alternate-uses test, the task asks participants to come up with novel uses for a common object such as a brick. But measures of divergent thinking haven’t been found to correlate well with real-world creativity. Does coming up with new uses for a brick imply a person will be good at abstract art or composing music or devising new methods for studying the brain? “It strikes me as using way too broad a brush,” Seli said. “I don’t think we measure creativity in the standard way that people think about creativity. As researchers, we need to be very clear about what we mean.”

One way to do that may be to move away from defining creativity based on a person’s creative output and focus instead on what’s going on in the brain, said Adam Green, PhD, a cognitive neuroscientist at Georgetown University and founder of the Society for the Neuroscience of Creativity . “The standard definition, that creativity is novel and useful, is a description of a product,” he noted. “By looking inward, we can see the process in action and start to identify the characteristics of creative thought. Neuroimaging is helping to shift the focus from creative product to creative process.”

That process seems to involve the coupling of disparate brain regions. Specifically, creativity often involves coordination between the cognitive control network, which is involved in executive functions such as planning and problem-solving, and the default mode network, which is most active during mind-wandering or daydreaming (Beaty, R. E., et al., Cerebral Cortex , Vol. 31, No. 10, 2021). The cooperation of those networks may be a unique feature of creativity, Green said. “These two systems are usually antagonistic. They rarely work together, but creativity seems to be one instance where they do.”

Green has also found evidence that an area called the frontopolar cortex, in the brain’s frontal lobes, is associated with creative thinking. And stimulating the area seems to boost creative abilities. He and his colleagues used transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to stimulate the frontopolar cortex of participants as they tried to come up with novel analogies. Stimulating the area led participants to make analogies that were more semantically distant from one another—in other words, more creative ( Cerebral Cortex , Vol. 27, No. 4, 2017).

Green’s work suggests that targeting specific areas in the brain, either with neuromodulation or cognitive interventions, could enhance creativity. Yet no one is suggesting that a single brain region, or even a single neural network, is responsible for creative thought. “Creativity is not one system but many different mechanisms that, under ideal circumstances, work together in a seamless way,” Kounios said.

In search of the eureka moment

Creativity looks different from person to person. And even within one brain, there are different routes to a creative spark, Kounios explained. One involves what cognitive scientists call “System 1” (also called “Type 1”) processes: quick, unconscious thoughts—aha moments—that burst into consciousness. A second route involves “System 2” processes: thinking that is slow, deliberate, and conscious. “Creativity can use one or the other or a combination of the two,” he said. “You might use Type 1 thinking to generate ideas and Type 2 to critique and refine them.”

Which pathway a person uses might depend, in part, on their expertise. Kounios and his colleagues used electroencephalography (EEG) to examine what was happening in jazz musicians’ brains as they improvised on the piano. Then skilled jazz instructors rated those improvisations for creativity, and the researchers compared each musician’s most creative compositions. They found that for highly experienced musicians, the mechanisms used to generate creative ideas were largely automatic and unconscious, and they came from the left posterior part of the brain. Less-experienced pianists drew on more analytical, deliberative brain processes in the right frontal region to devise creative melodies, as Kounios and colleagues described in a special issue of NeuroImage on the neuroscience of creativity (Vol. 213, 2020). “It seems there are at least two pathways to get from where you are to a creative idea,” he said.

Coming up with an idea is only one part of the creative process. A painter needs to translate their vision to canvas. An inventor has to tinker with their concept to make a prototype that actually works. Still, the aha moment is an undeniably important component of the creative process. And science is beginning to illuminate those “lightbulb moments.”

Kounios examined the relationship between creative insight and the brain’s reward system by asking participants to solve anagrams in the lab. In people who were highly sensitive to rewards, a creative insight led to a burst of brain activity in the orbitofrontal cortex, the area of the brain that responds to basic pleasures like delicious food or addictive drugs ( NeuroImage , Vol. 214, 2020). That neural reward may explain, from an evolutionary standpoint, why humans seem driven to create, he said. “We seem wired to take pleasure in creative thoughts. There are neural rewards for thinking in a creative fashion, and that may be adaptive for our species.”

The rush you get from an aha moment might also signal that you’re onto something good, Schooler said. He and his colleagues studied these flashes of insight among creative writers and physicists. They surveyed the participants daily for two weeks, asking them to note their creative ideas and when they occurred. Participants reported that about a fifth of the most important ideas of the day happened when they were mind-wandering and not working on a task at hand ( Psychological Science , Vol. 30, No. 3, 2019). “These solutions were more likely to be associated with an aha moment and often overcoming an impasse of some sort,” Schooler said.

Six months later, the participants revisited those ideas and rated them for creative importance. This time, they rated their previous ideas as creative, but less important than they’d initially thought. That suggests that the spark of a eureka moment may not be a reliable clue that an idea has legs. “It seems like the aha experience may be a visceral marker of an important idea. But the aha experience can also inflate the meaningfulness of an idea that doesn’t have merit,” Schooler said. “We have to be careful of false ahas.”

Boosting your creativity

Much of the research in this realm has focused on creativity as a trait. Indeed, some people are naturally more creative than others. Creative individuals are more likely than others to possess the personality trait of openness. “Across different age groups, the best predictor of creativity is openness to new experiences,” said Anna Abraham, PhD, the E. Paul Torrance Professor and director of the Torrance Center for Creativity and Talent Development at the University of Georgia. “Creative people have the kind of curiosity that draws them toward learning new things and experiencing the world in new ways,” she said.

We can’t all be Thomas Edison or Maya Angelou. But creativity is also a state, and anyone can push themselves to be more creative. “Creativity is human capacity, and there’s always room for growth,” Runco said. A tolerant environment is often a necessary ingredient, he added. “Tolerant societies allow individuals to express themselves and explore new things. And as a parent or a teacher, you can model that creativity is valued and be open-minded when your child gives an answer you didn’t expect.”

One way to let your own creativity flow may be by tapping into your untethered mind. Seli is attempting to do so through his studies on hypnagogia. After pilot testing the idea on himself, he’s now working on a study that uses the sleep-tracking glove to explore creativity in a group of Duke undergrads. “In dream states, there seems to be connectivity between disparate ideas. You tend to link things together you normally wouldn’t, and this should lead to novel outcomes,” he said. “Neurally speaking, the idea is to increase connectivity between different areas of the brain.”

You don’t have to be asleep to forge those creative connections. Mind-wandering can also let the ideas flow. “Letting yourself daydream with a purpose, on a regular basis, might allow brain networks that don’t usually cooperate to literally form stronger connections,” Green said.

However, not all types of daydreams will get you there. Schooler found that people who engage in more personally meaningful daydreams (such as fantasizing about a future vacation or career change) report greater artistic achievement and more daily inspiration. People who are prone to fantastical daydreaming (such as inventing alternate realities or imaginary worlds) produced higher-quality creative writing in the lab and reported more daily creative behavior. But daydreams devoted to planning or problem-solving were not associated with creative behaviors ( Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts , Vol. 15, No. 4, 2021).

It’s not just what you think about when you daydream, but where you are when you do it. Some research suggests spending time in nature can enhance creativity. That may be because of the natural world’s ability to restore attention, or perhaps it’s due to the tendency to let your mind wander when you’re in the great outdoors (Williams, K. J. H., et al., Journal of Environmental Psychology , Vol. 59, 2018). “A lot of creative figures go on walks in big, expansive environments. In a large space, your perceptual attention expands and your scope of thought also expands,” Kounios said. “That’s why working in a cubicle is bad for creativity. But working near a window can help.”

Wherever you choose to do it, fostering creativity requires time and effort. “People want the booster shot for creativity. But creativity isn’t something that comes magically. It’s a skill, and as with any new skill, the more you practice, the better you get,” Abraham said. In a not-yet-published study, she found three factors predicted peak originality in teenagers: openness to experience, intelligence, and, importantly, time spent engaged in creative hobbies. That is, taking the time to work on creative pursuits makes a difference. And the same is true for adults, she said. “Carve out time for yourself, figure out the conditions that are conducive to your creativity, and recognize that you need to keep pushing yourself. You won’t get to where you want to go if you don’t try.”

Those efforts can benefit your own sense of creative fulfillment and perhaps lead to rewards on an even grander scale. “I think everyday creativity is the most important kind,” Runco said. “If we can support the creativity of each and every individual, we’ll change the world.”

How to become more creative

1. Put in the work: People often think of creativity as a bolt of inspiration, like a lightbulb clicking on. But being creative in a particular domain—whether in the arts, in your work, or in your day-to-day life—is a skill. Carve out time to learn and practice.

2. Let your mind wander: Experts recommend “daydreaming with purpose.” Make opportunities to let your daydreams flow, while gently nudging them toward the creative challenge at hand. Some research suggests meditation may help people develop the habit of purposeful daydreaming.

3. Practice remote associations: Brainstorm ideas, jotting down whatever thoughts or notions come to you, no matter how wild. You can always edit later.

4. Go outside: Spending time in nature and wide-open spaces can expand your attention, enhance beneficial mind-wandering, and boost creativity.

5. Revisit your creative ideas: Aha moments can give you a high—but that rush might make you overestimate the merit of a creative idea. Don’t be afraid to revisit ideas to critique and tweak them later.

Further reading

Creativity: An introduction Kaufman, J. C., and Sternberg, R. J. (Eds.), Cambridge University Press, 2021

The eureka factor: Aha moments, creative insight, and the brain Kounios, J., & Beeman, M., Random House, 2015

Creativity anxiety: Evidence for anxiety that is specific to creative thinking, from STEM to the arts Daker, R. J., et al., Journal of Experimental Psychology: General , 2020

Predictors of creativity in young people: Using frequentist and Bayesian approaches in estimating the importance of individual and contextual factors Asquith, S. L., et al., Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts , 2020

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Supporting the Development of Creativity

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By: Laurel Bongiorno

A three year old sits at the kitchen table extremely focused on his art.

He’s gathered white paper, a glue bottle, scissors, small bits of colored paper, tissue paper, and finger paint from his own special art box. He chooses which paper to cut and which to tear. He intently glues each small item to the white paper, creating a collage. He then finger paints bright red all around his gluing, creating a framed-effect.  With delight, he shows his sister his creation, and begins to make another piece of art.

A four-year-old waits for instructions while her mother gathers materials for her to create a flower basket.

Her mom places a piece of large white paper, a glue bottle, a pair of scissors and small pieces of tissue paper on the table and says, “Okay, you can make this however you want --- BUT the basket is the base and I cut that for you, and then the tissue papers pieces are the flowers.  Let me show you how to tear the tissue paper.”  The four-year-old pastes the basket in place and glues the flowers, creating the basket of flowers as planned.  She shows her mother what she’s made and says, “Is this right?”

These examples show two very different types of art experiences.  In the first, a process art experience, the child has many opportunities to explore the materials, think, express himself, and create. The second is a product focused art experience where the child follows directions given to her to make a predetermined end product.

These two types of art experiences don’t support children’s development in the same ways. It's important to know the difference in order to offer children art experiences that support their creativity, enjoyment of art, thinking skills, and healthy development.

Process Art Experiences Support Many Aspects of Children’s Development

Physical Development:  Your child’s small motor skills develop as he glues, draws, paints, and plays with clay or homemade dough.  Small motor skills are important for future writing.

Language & Literacy Development:  As you talk with your child her vocabulary expands when you name new art materials, tools, and concepts such as  scissors ,  collage ,  purple ,  wide ,  sticky , and  smooth . Your child often tells you about the ideas she’s expressing through the art and this type of conversation supports literacy development.

Social and Emotional Development:   There is joy and self-exploration in self-expression. Art supports the development of self-regulation and self-control as your child focuses, makes choices, and feels successful.  The ability to focus is important to future school success.

Product Art Experiences Do Not Support Rich Learning

Product art offers children a few learning opportunities (following directions and developing small motor control) but does not offer the rich opportunities for cognitive, language, and social and emotional development open ended art experiences offer.

Clues To Identifying Product and Process Art

Product Art:

• Your child follows a sample, pattern, or model and follows instructions
• Adults know in advance what the artwork will look like
• There's a right way and a wrong way
• Adults feel the need to "fix" the art
• Patterns and cut-outs are easily available online

Process Art:

• There's no sample, pattern, or model
• Your child explores lots of interesting materials
• Adults have no idea what children will create
• There's no right or wrong way to do the art
• Children are relaxed and focused
• Your child wants to do more
• The art is truly an "original" every time

In addition,  children react differently  to these two types of art experiences.

Children doing  product art  might say:

• "Can I be done now?"
• "Is this right?"
• "Mine doesn't look right."
• "I can't do this!"

Children doing  process art  might say:

• "Can I have more time?"
• "Can I have more paper?
• "Is there any yellow?"
• "I want to make another one"

Parents Can Offer Exploratory Process Art Experiences:

• Provide a place for art materials such as a special bin or drawer
• Save recycled materials (like magazines) children can later use to create collages
• Include watercolor paints, finger paints, and offer brushes and interesting painting tools such as toothbrushes and potato mashers 
• Offer many drawing materials like markers, crayons, and colored pencils of different sizes
• Have lots of blank paper (rather than coloring books)
• Include tape, glue, and scissors
• Make homemade dough and offer clay
• Try art outside – use natural materials like leaves in art projects or paint outside for a change of setting

Dr. Laurel Bongiorno , Dean of the Division of Education and Human Studies at Champlain College, writes and presents on a variety of early care and education topics -- play as learning, parents' and teachers' understanding of play, process art, and early childhood leadership.  She is a past president of the Vermont Association for the Education of Young Children.

Creative Arts and Music

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Cultural and educational environment in the development of younger schoolchildren’s creative potential

Vera yu. khotinets.

1 Department of General Psychology, Institute of Pedagogy, Psychology and Social Technologies, Udmurt State University, Izhevsk, Russia

Evgeniya O. Shishova

2 Department of Educational Psychology, Institute of Psychology and Education, Kazan (Volga Region) Federal University, Kazan, Russia

Associated Data

The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/ Supplementary material , further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.

The purpose of our research is to study the creative potential as psychological capacities for younger schoolchildren’s creative self-realization and self-development in various conditions of the educational environment. The methodological basis of this work is Vygotsky’s conceptual provisions according to which the human psyche is culturally determined, and a sociocultural environment is considered to be the main source and condition for the child’s mental development. The study involved younger schoolchildren (a total of 160 children from the 4th grade aged 9–10 years, n  = 160, M  = 9.5 years, SD = 2.6; 49% boys) from schools in Kazan (Russian Federation). We used a test of verbal creativity when studying the creative potential of younger schoolchildren, the proposed method is a Russian-language adapted version of the RAT test (remote association test) by Mednik. The Johnson Creativity Inventory was used as adapted by Tunick. To study the level of communicative control, the test “Diagnostics of communicative control” by Schneider was used. To assess the personal qualities of younger students, we used a modified version of the children’s personality questionnaire intended for 8–12 year-old children and developed by Cattell and Koan. As a result of a comprehensive expert assessment, we identified four types of schools with different severity degrees of essential characteristics of educational environments: serene, dogmatic, career and creative. According to the analysis of variance (one-dimensional one-factor ANOVA), the younger schoolchildren’s creative potential was revealed in the context of the educational environment variability and the contingency of the educational environment parameters with the personal characteristics of the children. We have empirically confirmed that in a creative educational environment with cultural content based on ethno-cultural values, patterns and norms, the development of the child is actively supported largely, with the disclosure of his creative potential. Younger schoolchildren are characterized by greater subjective agency and the capability to gain unique achievements in educational and cognitive activity.

1. Introduction

Research problem. One of the focuses in current research is the problem of creating a system of conditions for the personality formation. This system provides positive opportunities and various options for choosing the optimal trajectory of the personality development, which places the concept of “cultural and educational environment” among the basic ones in a modern developmental education. An educational environment is studied as a component of the social situation of the child mental development and as a condition for its personal development ( Leontyev, 1975 ; Vygotsky, 1999 , 2005 ; Yasvin, 2010 ; Veraksa, 2018 ; Veraksa et al., 2019 ; Rubtsov and Ulanovskaya, 2022 and others). However, the research into the influence that educational systems exert on the child’s intellectual, emotional and personal development primarily focuses on the consideration of theoretical aspects, there are very few empirical studies of the educational environment developing potential, which is specific to each educational institution. Existing studies, devoted to this problem, are very contradictory, they do not take into account the current reforms in the field of education ( Rubtsov and Ulanovskaya, 2022 ). In this regard, of primary importance for educational psychology is the problem of assessing the quality of education in educational institutions that provide specific conditions and development opportunities for the subjects of education. This accounts for the significance of the research into the creative potential of a growing person, the need to further explore the social situation of development and the conditions for the ontogenesis of creativity, potentially contributing to its formation. By a cultural and educational environment we mean a system of conditions and opportunities for the development of subjects of education with cultural content ( Khotinets and Medvedeva, 2021 ). Creative potential at primary school age is understood as an integrative quality, reflecting the measure of the younger schoolchild’s creative self-realization and self-development ability ( Veraksa, 1990 ). Primary school age is the period most open to various changes. A change in the leading activity promotes “the erasure” of past experiences, laying a new foundation for the child’s personality. During this period, the younger schoolchild is most sensitive to the formation of a cognitive attitude to the world, the manifestation of free personal expression, the development of creative abilities, and communicative creativity, which ensures the creative nature of communication and communicative activity of the child ( Runco and Acar, 2012 ; Runco et al., 2020 ; Khotinets et al., 2022 ; Shishova and Akhatova, 2022 etc.). According to Vygotsky’s theoretical provisions concerning the systemic nature of the higher mental functions’ development, at the early school age, thinking becomes a “system-forming” function moving from the visual-figurative to its verbal-logical type, which undoubtedly affects other mental functions seeking to occupy the center of consciousness. The change in the system of internal relationships allows the central function to become more differentiated and developed. At this time, other mental processes function as processes serving the formation of the central function. Thus, the complexity of interfunctional relationships and the differentiation of mental functions gradually increase. To acquire higher mental functions, it is necessary to transfer and assimilate knowledge about their structures in an organized educational environment through specially organized training ( Vygotsky, 1999 ).

In the context of studying a growing person’s creative potential, the problems identified by Vygotsky remain relevant today: “the relationship between learning and development at school age,” “the social situation of development,” “mechanisms for the practical mastery of reality.” According to Vygotsky, it is “learning that creates the zone of proximal development, that is, it brings up the child’s interest in life, awakens and sets in motion a whole series of internal development processes that are so far possible for the child only in the sphere of its relationships with others and through its cooperation with peers, but which, performing the internal course of development, later become the child’s own internal property” ( Vygotsky, 1935 , p. 16). The “social situation of development” is understood as “a completely peculiar, specific for a given age, exclusive, unique and inimitable relationship between the child and the reality surrounding it, primarily the social one” ( Vygotsky, 1984 , p. 258). This social reality is “the main source of development” when the social becomes the individual.

1.1. Literature review

According to Vygotsky, “in the child’s development, the outcomes that we are to achieve at the end of the development, as a result of this development, are already given in the environment from the very beginning” ( Vygotsky, 2001 , p. 83). “The greatest feature of the child’s development is that this development takes place in such conditions of interaction with the environment, when the ideal form, the final (cultural) form that should appear at the end of development, not only exists in the environment and comes into contact with the child from the very beginning, but also actually interacts with it, influencing the primary (natural) form, the first steps of the child’s development, i.e., something that should take shape at the very end of the development somehow influences the very first stages of this development” ( Vygotsky, 2001 , pp. 83–84).

Answering to the question about the role of the educational environment in the mental and personal development of the child, Vygotsky said that “in relation to the development of higher human-specific properties and forms of activity, the environment acts as a source of this development, i.e., it is the interaction with the environment that is the source generating these properties in the child” ( Vygotsky, 2001 , p. 88).

According to Vygotsky, “the best stimulus for children’s creativity is the organization of their life and environment in such a way that it creates the needs and opportunities for children’s creativity” ( Vygotsky, 2004 , pp. 57–58). The meaning and significance of children’s creativity lies in the fact that it allows the child to overcome that tough challenge in the development of creative imagination, which gives a new and lifelong direction to his fantasy. The meaning of children’s creativity is its effect of deepening, expanding and cleansing of the child’s emotional life. The significance of children’s creativity is its ability to allow the child, by exercising its creative aspirations and skills, to master human speech - the most subtle and complex instrument for the formation and transmission of human thoughts, human feelings, human inner world ( Vygotsky, 2004 , pp. 60–61).

Vygotsky highlights the importance of cultivating creativity at school age. A person can comprehend his whole future with the help of creative imagination. His orientation in the future, his behavior, based on the future and proceeding from this future, is the main function of the imagination. And since pedagogical work is mainly oriented toward preparing the students’ behavior for the future, the development and exercise of their imagination are the main driving forces in realizing this goal. The shaping of a creative personality, aspiring to the future, is prepared by creative imagination embodied in the present ( Vygotsky, 2004 , p. 78).

This report argues that a national strategy for creative and cultural education is essential to that process. We put the case for developing creative and cultural education; we consider what is involved; we look at current provision and assess the opportunities and obstacles; and we set out a national strategy. By creative education we mean forms of education that develop young peopleʻs capacities for original ideas and action: by cultural education we mean forms of education that enable them to engage positively with the growing complexity and diversity of social values and ways of life. We argue that there are important relationships between creative and cultural education, and significant implications for methods of teaching and assessment, the balance of the school curriculum and for partnerships between schools and the wider world ( The National Advisory Committee on Creative and Cultural Education (NACCCE), 1999 ).

This report argues that a national strategy for creative and cultural education is essential to that process. We put the case for developing creative and cultural education; we consider what is involved; we look at current provision and assess the opportunities and obstacles; and we set out a national strategy. By creative education we mean forms of education that develop young peopleʻs capacities for original ideas and action: by cultural education we mean forms of education that enable them to engage positively with the growing complexity and diversity of social values and ways of life. We argue that there are important relationships between creative and cultural education, and significant implications for methods of teaching and assessment, the balance of the school curriculum and for partnerships between schools and the wider world.

In modern educational theory, creativity, as the ability to build a unique product, create new, unique solutions to complex problems and approaches to challenging tasks, is a students’ priority competence ( Rotherham and Willingham, 2010 ; Donovan et al., 2014 ). Based on the results of a review of modern publications on creativity in education, we identify a number of research areas, which include the study of trends in the development of creative potential, creative abilities and cognitive styles; environmental conditions that promote or hinder creativity; links between creativity and learning models; development of techniques teaching creativity (creative learning’, teaching for creativity) and technologies aiming to increase creativity and unlock creative potential ( Runco, 2007 ; Newton and Beverton, 2012 ; Newton and Newton, 2014 ; Gruszka and Tang, 2017 ; Runco et al., 2020 ). The most important factors that determine the child’s creativity ( Lebuda et al., 2021 ) are creative potential and creative abilities ( Kim, 2005 ), general cognitive abilities ( Zabelina and Ganis, 2018 ; Gerwig et al., 2021 ), specific skills in a particular subject area ( Simonton, 2009 ; Szen-Ziemiańska et al., 2017 ; Ahmed and Feist, 2021 ); learning ( Kaufman and Kaufman, 2007 ; Agoguéa et al., 2014 ) in an enriched cultural and educational environment ( Vygotsky, 2001 ).

At the same time, experts in the field of modern education and educational policy are faced with a certain kind of contradiction. On the one hand, the research highlights the important role of education in encouraging and developing children’s creativity ( Thurlings et al., 2015 ). On the other hand, due to diversification (variability of educational services and educational curricula, types and kinds of educational institutions, teaching methods and techniques) and standardized testing of basic skills, children’s creativity actually decreases as they move along their educational trajectory ( Robinson, 2011 ; Kupers et al., 2019 ).

We believe that by finding answers to our research questions we will be able to resolve the identified contradictions.

In our research, Vygotsky’s theory is implemented by means of fundamentally important theoretical provisions:

• A creative cultural and educational environment, as an accumulator of psychological tools, is the source of the child’s mental and personal development.
• Higher mental functions, as a result of the internalization of psychological tools, are formed in learning by assimilating historically developed methods and forms of activity, both as a way of the student’s interaction with the educational environment, and as a form of the student’s cooperation with others.
• In order to create a zone of proximal development and to give rise to a number of internal development processes, we need a properly constructed school education and a properly organized educational environment.

1.2. Aims and objectives of the research

The purpose of our research is to study the creative potential as psychological capacities for younger schoolchildren’s creative self-realization and self-development in various conditions of the educational environment.

1.3. Research objectives

• Conduct a comprehensive expert assessment of the educational environment qualitative parameters, identifying four types of schools with different severity of characteristics: serene, dogmatic, career and creative.
• Identify indicators of younger schoolchildren’s creative potential and personal qualities in accordance with the variable parameters of the educational environment.

2. Materials and methods

The methodological basis of this work is the conceptual provisions of Vygotsky’s cultural-historical psychology. We distinguish both external determinants (a specially organized educational environment) and internal factors, whose actions explain such phenomena as the zones of actual, proximal and further development.

2.1. Schools and participants

Our study of junior schoolchildren’s creative potential was conducted on the basis of Kazan state schools corresponding to various pedagogical models of organizing education (a gymnasium with in-depth study of individual subjects - English, biology, mathematics and physics; “Specialized Olympiad and Scientific Center ‘Sun’,” a general education boarding school; two schools with a general education curricula).

Nine experts assessed the school educational environment using Yasvin’s method of vector modeling: psychologists and teachers of educational institutions, university professors and master students of Kazan. All diagnostic procedures were carried out in full accordance with the diagnostic standard: using uniform forms, instructions and stimulus materials. The reliability of the study results was ensured by the preliminary training of experts in a series of workshops that were devoted to the development of a consensus assessment. We revealed a high degree of consistency in observations found in the experts’ assessments.

Our empirical study included 160 4th grade students without developmental delays or disabilities, aged 9–10 years ( n  = 160, M  = 9.5 years, SD = 2.6; 49% boys), with written parental consent; among them 40 children were from the gymnasium with in-depth study of individual subjects - English, biology, mathematics and physics (17 boys, 23 girls), their parents’ education: 78% - higher, 22% - secondary vocational, the family social status: 45% - workers, 15% - engineers, employees, 40% - entrepreneurs, businessmen; 40 children were from the general education boarding school “Specialized Olympiad-Scientific Center ‘Sun’” (21 boys, 19 girls), their parents’ education: 83% - higher, 17% - specialized secondary; the family social status: 70% - workers, 13% - engineers, employees, 17% - entrepreneurs, businessmen; 80 children studied according to the general education curriculum (40 boys, 40 girls), their parents’ education: 58% - higher, 42% - specialized secondary; the family social status: 87% - workers, 3% - engineers, employees, 10% - entrepreneurs, businessmen.

2.2. Measures

2.2.1. assessment of the schools’ educational environment.

To study the features of the educational environment, Yasvin identifies 11 parameters (five ‘main’ characteristics: breadth, intensity, modality, degree of awareness and stability, and six ‘secondary’ characteristics: emotionality, generality, dominance, coherence, mobility and agency). This method is characterized by the construction of a vector that corresponds to a certain type of educational environment. This operation is carried out after counting up the answers to diagnostic questions: three of them aim to determine the opportunities for the student’s free development in the educational environment, and three more show the availability of opportunities for the development of the child’s agency. Further, in the coordinate system (agency-inaction, freedom-dependence), a vector is built showing the type of environment, which constitutes modality as a feature of the educational environment.

Diagnostic questions and interpretation of the answers.

For the “freedom-dependency” axis:

1. Whose interests and values come first in this educational environment?

(a) personality; (b) society (group).

The priority of personal interests and values over the interests and values of society is interpreted as an opportunity for free development, and a score is accordingly marked on the “freedom” scale; in case of the priority of public interests, a score is marked on the scale “dependence.”

2. Who usually adjusts to whom in the process of interaction?

(a) the teacher to the students; (b) the students to the teacher.

If it is noted that in the given educational environment, the situation when the teacher adjusts to the students (or at least the teacher strives for this situation) dominates, this is interpreted as an opportunity for the students’ free development, respectively, a score is marked on the “freedom” scale; if it is stated that students are constantly forced to obey their teachers, a score is marked on the “dependence” scale.

3. What form of education is predominantly carried out in this educational environment?

(a) individual; (b) collective (team).

The educational environment with individual-oriented forms of learning is interpreted as the environment possessing additional opportunities for the free development of a self-directed student, and a score is given on the “freedom” scale; in the case when teamwork has priority in the educational environment, a score is marked on the “dependency” scale.

For the “Agency –Inaction” axis:

4. Is punishment of the child practiced in this educational environment?

(a) yes; (b) no.

The absence of punishment is considered as a condition conducive to the development of agency; thus, a score is given on the “agency” scale; in the case when punishments are practiced (both directly and indirectly) in this learning environment, a score is given on the “inaction” scale.

5. Does the given educational environment stimulate the manifestation of any children’s initiative?

(a) more often yes; (b) usually not.

If in this learning environment, positive reinforcement of student initiatives is observed, then this is interpreted as an additional opportunity for the development of students’ agency and a score is given on the “agency” scale; if the initiative demonstrated by the child is usually ignored or can lead to all sorts of troubles, then a score is marked on the “inaction” scale.

6. Do certain children’s creative manifestations find any positive response in this educational environment?

In the case when the learning environment encourages or appreciates creativity, such an environment is considered as conducive to the development of agency, a score is marked on the “agency” scale; if the children’s creative self-expression is ignored and goes unnoticed and underestimated, a score is marked on the “inaction” scale.

The author proposes four basic types of educational environment: “dogmatic” (contributes to the development of passive behavior and dependence of the child); “career” (contributes to the development of agency and the dependence of the child at the same time); “serene” (promotes the free development, but causes the formation of the child’s passive behavior); “creative” (contributes to the free development of an active child). Based on the answers to the diagnostic questions, corresponding vector, which allows one to assess the learning environment, is constructed in the coordinate system ( Figure 1 ); an example of the possible construction options of a vector model of the environment based on the answer to diagnostic questions). The studies of Yasvin provide a detailed description of the methodology for examining a school educational environment and the typology of educational environments at schools ( Yasvin et al., 2015 ; Yasvin, 2020 ).

An example of the possible construction options of a vector model of the environment based on the answers to diagnostic questions. Reproduced from Yasvin et al. (2015) , licenced under CC BY 4.0.

2.2.2. Creative potential

We used a test of verbal creativity when studying the creative potential of younger schoolchildren. It includes two qualitative characteristics: “originality index” and “uniqueness index.” The technique aims to identify and assess the teste’s often hidden, blocked creative potential. The proposed method is a Russian-language adapted version of the RAT test (remote association test) by Mednik (2006) . The Remote Associates Test (RAT) is a creativity test used to determine a human’s creative potential. The test typically lasts 40 min and consists of thirty to forty questions each of which consists of three common stimulus words that appear to be unrelated. The subject must think of a fourth word that is somehow related to each of the first three words. Scores are calculated based on the number of correct questions. 1 The technique was adapted by Alekseeva and Galkina in the Druzhinin’s Laboratory of the Abilities Psychology at the Institute of Psychology, the Russian Academy of Sciences, based on a sample of schoolchildren; Voronin based his study on a sample of managers aged 23 to 35 years. For the Russian version Cronbach’s coefficient is α = 0.87 ( Ushakov, 2011 ; Druzhinin, 2019 ).

The Johnson Creativity Inventory was used as adapted by Tunik (1997a , 1998) , based on two approaches:

• according to Torrens, creativity manifests itself with a lack of knowledge; in the process of incorporating information into new structures and relationships; in the process of identifying missing information; in the process of finding new solutions and testing them; in the process of reporting results;
• according to Johnson (1979) , creativity manifests itself as an unexpected productive act performed spontaneously by the performer in a certain environment of social interaction. In this case, the performer relies on his/her own knowledge and capabilities.

This creativity questionnaire focuses on the elements that are associated with creative self-expression. The Creativity Inventory is an objective, eight-item checklist of creative thinking and behavior characteristics, designed specifically to identify externally observable manifestations of creativity.

Each statement of the questionnaire is evaluated on a scale containing five gradations (possible rating points: 1 - never, 2 - rarely, 3 - sometimes, 4 - often, 5 - always). The overall creativity score is the sum of scores for eight items (the minimum score - 8, the maximum score - 40 points). The Table 1 shows the correspondence of the sum of points to the levels of creativity. The internal consistency of the Russian version of the scale was Cronbach’s alpha α = 0.79. To assess the retest reliability, the correlation coefficient of Spearman ranks was calculated (interval - three months), which turned out to be 0.78 (sample size - 80 children). To compare the data of various experts (the experts were three teachers teaching different subjects), Spearman’s correlation coefficients were found. For a sample of 8-year-old children, the value of the correlation coefficient ranged from 0.51 to 0.71, for a sample of 10-year-old children - from 0.49 to 0.78, for a sample of 14-year-old children - from 0.58 to 0.79. It should also be noted that with the increase in the age of children, the consistency of the data of various experts among themselves increases ( Tunik, 1997b , 1998 , 2000 ).

Levels of Creativity adapted from Tunik (1997b) .

To study the level of communicative control, the test “Diagnostics of communicative control” by Schneider was used ( Schneider, 2002 ). The test consists of 10 statements reflecting reactions to some communication situations. The internal consistency of the Russian version of the test is α = 0.85.

To assess the personal qualities of younger students, we used a modified version of the children’s personality questionnaire intended for 8-12 year-old children and developed by Cattell and Koan (Children Personality Questionnaire – CPQ). The internal consistency of the Russian version of the test is α = 0.88 ( Alexandrovskaya and Gilyashev, 1978, 1995 ).

2.3. Research results

In the course of solving the first task, we performed a comprehensive expert assessment of the qualitative parameters of the educational environment based on the parameters formulated by Yasvin (2020) . As a result, we identified four types of schools with different severity degrees of the essential characteristics of educational environments: serene, dogmatic, career and creative (see Figure 2 ). In the course of the study, we found that the general education spaces of Kazan schools are more consistent with the dogmatic and serene environment, a career type of modality characterizes one of the gymnasiums, and the “Specialized Olympiad and Scientific Center ‘Sun’ has a creative development environment. The histogram shows that dogmatic schools are characterized by high stability and the ability to quickly adapt to external pressure, by a clear internal organization of the system, respect for traditions and order. However, it should be noted that this educational environment shows low agency and emotionality, demonstrated by the subjects of educational relations.

Severity of the essential characteristics of educational environments based on vector modeling (V. Yasvin).

As can be seen from the histogram, a serene-type general education school is characterized by high dominance, the significance of this local environment in the system of values of the subjects of the educational process. A distinctive feature of a serene environment is relatively low stability, manifested in the precariousness of its system, low rates of awareness, intensity, generalization and mobility of the educational process. “There is no perseverance either in the desire to preserve, hold out, or in the desire to achieve, find. The child lives in an atmosphere of internal well-being and lazy, conservative habits, condescension to modern trends, among attractive simplicity” ( Korchak, 1980 ).

According to the data obtained on a multidisciplinary career-type gymnasium, we have found that the features of this environment are characterized by a high level of intensity and awareness due to a deeper study of individual subjects and the focus of all activities on achieving the set goals. This environment shows high agency, which indicates the ability to produce socially significant results with a beneficial impact on society.

Specialized Olympiad and Scientific Center ‘Sun’ is distinguished by a creative environment with cultural content based on ethno-cultural samples and norms with bright national color, mobility and emotional richness of the educational process. Teachers have the ability to creatively approach the organization of the educational process, namely, to use new methodological developments, to conduct lessons in the context of certain events taking place in the environment; they vary the lesson plan depending on the specific situation, get acquainted with the work of psychologists and, accordingly, restructure the nature of their pedagogical communication with their students, etc.

While solving the second empirical problem, we subjected the obtained empirical data to a one-way analysis of variance (see Tables 2 , ​ ,3). 3 ). Data processing methods were carried out using the IBM SPSS Statistics 23 for Windows statistical package: descriptive statistics and the analysis of variance (univariate one-way ANOVA). The Scheffe a posteriori method of paired comparisons (Scheffe test) made it possible to carry out pairwise multiple comparisons of mean values while obtaining a statistically significant result.

Mean values and standard deviations for indicators of younger schoolchildren’s creative potential in terms of variability of educational environments (univariate one-way ANOVA).

The main effects of the “types of educational environments” factor: originality index F (2, 69) =  12.03 , p  ≤ 0.01; uniqueness index F (2, 69) =  12.15 , p  ≤ 0.01; creativity F (2, 69) = 2.07, p  ≥ 0.05; Communicative control F (2, 69) = 2.60, p  ≥ 0.05 (significant differences are given in bold). An asterisk (*) marks the groups that significantly differ from each other in terms of the Scheffe correction results.

The main effects of the “types of educational environments” factor: sociability F (2, 69) = 1.68, p  ≥ 0.05; verbal intelligence F (2, 69) =  21.36 , p  ≤ 0.01; self-confidence F (2, 69) =  9.13 , p  ≤ 0.01; excitability F (2, 69) =  19.78, p  ≤ 0.01; tendency for self-assertion F (2, 69) =  23.04 , p  ≤ 0.01; propensity to take risks F (2, 69) =  5.68 , p  ≤ 0.01; responsibility F (2, 69) = 2.09, p  ≥ 0.05; social courage F (2, 69) =  16.84 , p  ≤ 0.01; sensitivity F (2, 69) =  11.85 , p  ≤ 0.01; anxiety F (2, 69) =  26.49 , p  ≤ 0.01; self-control F (2, 69) = 2.35, p  ≥ 0.05; nervous tension F (2, 69) =  33.16 , p  ≤ 0.01 (significant differences are given in bold). An asterisk (*) marks the groups that differ significantly from each other in terms of the Scheffe correction results.

Table 1 illustrates the data on the severity of the creative potential of the schoolchildren (see Table 1 ), who received higher scores according to the “Originality index” (the ability to express themselves in unusual activities and situations), and the “Uniqueness index” (the ability to make unconventional judgments and perform unusual actions) from the creative educational environment.

As can be seen in Table 2 , there are statistically confirmed differences in the manifestation of such qualities as verbal intelligence, self-confidence, a tendency for self-affirmation, propensity to take risks, social courage, sensitivity, excitability, anxiety and nervous tension in younger schoolchildren from different educational environments.

We have established that younger schoolchildren from creative and career environments have the highest rates of verbal intelligence. They master new knowledge and develop abstract thinking faster. Schoolchildren from the creative environment are characterized by risk-taking and high social courage to a greater degree. These children are distinguished by dynamism and agency; when faced with non-standard situations, they do not get lost and quickly find a different way to solve the problems that have arisen. Moreover, we recorded low levels of anxiety and nervous tension, which ensures emotional stability in educational and cognitive activities. Career-type schoolchildren have a tendency to self-affirmation, a desire for leadership and dominance with excessive motivation, practicality and realism in resolving problem situations. They are characterized by low sensitivity, increased excitability and nervous tension with the need for practical relaxation in the process of activity. The characteristic features of younger schoolchildren from a dogmatic environment are: being better prepared to successfully meet school requirements, however demonstrating low social courage. These schoolchildren more often use standard approaches to solving problems, producing elementary forms of thinking, which is accompanied by variability in mood and a change in mental states. The younger schoolchildren from a serene environment are largely exposed to the influences of the external environment, they are distinguished by the absence of strong motives and intentions in achieving goals, low rates of risky behavior combined with a need for support from others.

3. Conclusion

The paper analyzes various types of educational environments in terms of culturally-appropriate components. Based on the results of the dispersion analysis, the study revealed younger schoolchildren’s creative potential in the context of educational environment variability, and the relationships between the parameters of the educational environment and the personal characteristics of children.

Thus, in a creative educational environment, to a greater extent than in other environments, the subjects of the educational system provide and actively support the individual development of the child and the disclosure of its creative potential. The priority of the creative educational environment is not only to develop the child’s agency and creativity, but also to boost its own need for creativity and self-development as the creation of the self and the formation of the ability to independently set goals and realize its own ideas. The discovered empirical regularity is not a heuristic one in science, it is an independent trend in pedagogical practices. Pedagogical intervention is aimed not so much at meeting the requirements of the teacher, but rather at satisfying the need for creativity by involving schoolchildren in mental, intellectual and communicative activities.

Our study statistically confirmed significant differences between educational environments in terms of younger schoolchildren’s creative potential. Thus, in a creative educational environment , younger schoolchildren demonstrate higher subjective activity with the possibility of unique achievements in educational and cognitive sphere, the desire for unusual actions and unconventional judgments due to verbal intelligence. In a career educational environment , learners are more prone to self-affirmation, the desire for leadership and dominance. In a dogmatic educational environment , schoolchildren most often use standard approaches to solving assigned problems, generating elementary forms of thinking. In a serene educational environment , schoolchildren do not have strong motivations and intentions to achieve goals, risk-taking behavior is not typical, and they demonstrate a high need for support from the outside world.

Thus, pedagogical conditions, as components of the educational system, reflect the totality of the educational environment possibilities expressed in the capabilities of the educational process subjects. Vygotsky’s ideas not only complement modern ideas about the relationship between learning and the psyche development, but also reveal the problems of the experimental evidence base in other modern approaches. This, in particular, concerns the clarification of the mechanisms in the relationship between learning and mental development in the context of controlled initiation from the outside of the self-organization processes of the cognitive system elements in the subject of education in accordance with the system self-development potential ( Pogozhina, 2016 ).

The limitations of the study apply to the choice of: (1) the subject of the study, in particular, the creative potential was studied in connection with the parameters of the educational environment in different types of primary schools; the effects of external and internal factors in determining the creative potential were not considered; (2) strategies for building groups (arranging a sample) involving 160 junior schoolchildren; it is necessary to increase the sample to prevent internal threats to the validity of the study.

Research prospects concern the clarification of the mechanisms of the relationship between learning and the mental development of schoolchildren of different ages in the context of controlled initiation from the outside of the processes of self-organization of elements of creativity in accordance with the potential for self-development of a complex self-organizing system of higher mental functions ( Vygotsky, 1999 , 2005 ).

Practical value. The results of the study can be used by specialists in the design and evaluation of educational environments; by school psychologists, working with younger schoolchildren in the course of implementation of differentiated, individual approaches in the education system.

Data availability statement

Ethics statement.

The studies involving human participants were reviewed and approved by the Committee of the Institute of Psychology and Education of Kazan (Volga Region) Federal University. Written informed consent to participate in this study was provided by the participants’ legal guardian/next of kin.

Author contributions

VK designed and directed the project, and developed the theoretical framework. ES performed the research and conducted a mathematical analysis of the data, performed the analysis, drafted the manuscript, and aided in interpreting the results and worked on the manuscript. All authors discussed the results and contributed to the final manuscript.

This work was supported by the Kazan Federal University Strategic Academic Leadership Program (PRIORITY-2030).

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher’s note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

1 RAT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_Associates_Test .

Supplementary material

The Supplementary material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1178535/full#supplementary-material

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• A. in Education: Special Education for someone looking to enter a career teaching special education students.
• A. in ECE: Organizational Leadership and Management for those interested in a management position in an education setting.
• A. in ECE: Trauma Studies for students looking to be able to identify and address behavioral challenges in students due to childhood trauma.
• Online Transitional Kindergarten Certificate for those who are looking to transition into a leadership role out of the classroom.
• D. in Early Childhood Education for anyone looking to advance their education career and work in an administrative and leadership role.
• Online California Preliminary Multiple Subject Teaching Credential for students looking for a K-12 teaching credential that follows California Commission on Teacher Credentialing standards .
• In-person ECE Certificate in STEAM for those looking to add valuable education skills such as enhanced analytical skills, cooperation, problem-solving, hypothesizing, and creativity to their classroom.

Learn about the differences between the ECE programs to explore your options at Pacific Oaks.

Fostering Creativity and Lifelong Learning

In early childhood education, creativity is not just encouraged; it is essential. Educators learn to develop and apply innovative teaching methods that captivate young minds. Numerous studies, such as this by the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) , demonstrate that creativity builds critical thinking skills that are needed for academic and lifelong success.

The rewards of teaching in such a creatively rich environment extend far beyond the classroom. Creativity is contagious, and being surrounded by imaginative children can inspire educators to think outside the box, both professionally and personally. Seeing the creative minds at work can help them break down the barriers they set for themselves and approach problems with fresh, innovative perspectives.

Witnessing these developmental milestones and fostering the growth of the next generation’s leaders is one of the greatest rewards of teaching. Read our blog if you’re looking for resources on how to incorporate creative interactive teaching into your lesson plans.

Join Our Community of Change-Makers

If you are passionate about making a difference and want to take on one of the many rewarding careers working with children, consider Pacific Oaks College’s Early Childhood Education program s . Here, we are dedicated to fostering an educational environment that prioritizes both child development and professional growth.

For more information about our programs and how you can start your journey in this field, visit our website or contact our admissions office . Take the first step toward transforming lives—both yours and those of the children you will teach.

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San Antonio Report

Nonprofit journalism for an informed community

Unique pathways to higher education could ease looming workforce shortage

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Starved for skilled labor, employers across Texas are looking to higher education institutions to produce more workers — who also are better-prepared.

At the same time a projected “demographic cliff” is expected to decrease the number of students graduating college, and entering the workforce, by up to 15% in the next five years — raising the stakes for increasing educational attainment.

But higher education leaders from across the state have some ideas and optimism about their abilities to level up educational attainment to meet the needs. Leaders from multiple universities spoke Friday on a panel at the 2024 Texas Tribune Festival. 

Harrison Keller, who served as the commissioner of the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board for years and recently became president of the University of North Texas, pointed to the shifting necessity of a college degree.

“It used to be that higher ed is something you did to advance your standard of living, and [now] it’s more and more existential,” he said. “If you want to get a good job, if you want to have a productive career and live a healthy and productive life, you’ve got to have education training beyond a high school diploma.”

Currently, however, only about half of working age Texans have degrees and certificates, and only slightly more have workforce credentials, he said. 

“That’s not sustainable if we’re going to be competitive,” he added.

The rapid disruption and automation made possible by artificial intelligence is also accelerating the need for specialized workers in skilled fields, like computer science and engineering, Keller said — with current graduates filling only a fraction of that need. 

“We need many, many more people educated to higher standards than we’ve ever achieved before,” he said during the panel. 

Amy Bosley, who has been the president of Northwest Vista College in San Antonio for just over a year, said the rising cost of higher education paired with an antiquated view of workforce preparation keep some first generation students and their hesitant parents from even considering higher education.

Coincidentally, that misconception exacerbates their situation, keeping them from higher paying jobs and more opportunities and adding to the skilled worker shortage. 

Bosley said overcoming those misconceptions will be key to helping more families obtain college degrees or credentials — which have become a necessity to obtain most jobs in the modern workforce. 

“You don’t have to go into debt to get a high quality education,” she said. “You could do that right in your backyard, with high quality faculty.” 

The lines between workforce preparation and a classic liberal arts education have also been blurred, she said — with employers looking for well-rounded individuals with foundational critical thinking skills as well as job-specific training. Getting that message out could be key to getting students into the classroom. 

“All jobs need [us] to both educate people liberally so that they can be good, informed, engaged citizens and provide them the skills necessary to go to work,” she said. “I don’t think that’s a choice anymore.” 

With that in mind, the higher education experience doesn’t always start with a degree program, she said, pointing to the approach taken by the Alamo Colleges District. 

“Doubling our workforce programs looks like adding credentials of value that are incremental in nature, so students can come in, get a credential, get to work [and] earn a better wage,” she said. “Then the employer will pay for the next level of the credential.”

Looking to the future, she sees that cycle moving the needle on educational attainment in San Antonio and across the state.

“This becomes a really wonderful kind of a nurturing cycle where we can continue to help people achieve higher levels of education,” she said.

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