Creativity

After watching the presentation by SIr Ken Robinson, I was able to see the importance of creativity in schools. We easily forget that creativity is as important as literacy. Instead schools reward left-brain thinking instead of whole brain thinkers. Society does, as Robinson says, reward people who achieve greatness academically, such as good grades on standardized tests, along with a high GPA. However, does this really show who will be successful in life; no. More often than not we push our kids and students to get good grades, take AP classes, attend a prestigious college. Is this the answer? I’m afraid not.

Sir Ken Robinson is right with promoting creativity in our classrooms. Schools who have pulled the arts to implement more literacy and math time are doing their students a disservice. “You were probably steered benignly away from things at school when you were a kid — things you liked — on the grounds that you would never get a job doing that." Well guess what? We should encourage students to dive into art and chase their dreams because you can’t judge intelligence or future success on grades in school. Sir Ken Robinson sheds some insight into our definitions of what human intelligence is, which he sees more as a hypothetical construct rather than something you can actually measure, along with creativity. We must build on these passions and allow our students to foster creativity in their learning.

Children have extraordinary capacities for innovation", says Sir Ken Robinson, "All kids have tremendous talents and we squander them, pretty ruthlessly." The squandering comes from the hierarchy of our outdated education establishments worldwide with math and languages holding firmly to the top, followed by all humanistic, leaving the arts at the bottom. There is even a hierarchy among the arts, according to Robinson, music and painting are more valued, always, than drama and dance in schools.

Picasso says "All children are born artists, the problem is to remain an artist as we grow up." With this in mind, we must find ways to support creativity in the classroom through the arts as we mesh the standards of Common Core into our daily routines. Through the use of mobile technology and the iPad, our role as facilitators of learning and creativity has become more accessible. Looking toward the Partnership for 21st Century Learning, educators have guidance to support students in age appropriate technology based learning. When paired with tools like Educreations, iMovie, Prezi, Nearpod, Voicethread and Google Drive, students have opportunities to embody creativity in their learning each and every day.

http://www.p21.org/our-work/p21-framework

Partnership for 21st Century Learning:

Think Creatively

• Use a wide range of idea creation techniques (such as brainstorming)
• Create new and worthwhile ideas (both incremental and radical concepts)
• Elaborate, refine, analyze and evaluate their own ideas in order to improve and
• maximize creative efforts

Work Creatively with Others

• Develop, implement and communicate new ideas to others effectively
• Be open and responsive to new and diverse perspectives; incorporate group input and feedback into the work
• Demonstrate originality and inventiveness in work and understand the real world limits to adopting new ideas
• View failure as an opportunity to learn; understand that creativity and innovation is a long-term, cyclical process of small successes and frequent mistakes

Implement Innovations

• Act on creative ideas to make a tangible and useful contribution to the field in which the innovation will occur (Partnership for 21st Century Skills, 2013)

In addition to this material, SIr Ken Robinson has stated that teaching is an art form and standardized testing has demeaned that position. In a link from Sir Ken’s Twitter feed back in April, he links an article titled, “What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland’s Schools Success.” This article not only talks about the importance of cooperation, not competition, but of creative play in the classroom. Not only a great follow-up to the TED Talk, but food for thought on our future as educators in the United States. 

References- 

Partnership for 21st Century Skills. (2013). Creativity and innovation. Retrieved from http://www.p21.org/about-us/p21-framework/262