After hearing Sir Ken Robbins speak about creativity in schools and reading Daniel Pink's book A Whole New World, I have spent a great deal of time reflecting on the idea of creativity in schools. In my research, I found that Adobe recently published a study entitled Creativity and Education: Why it Matters? See the infographic at the bottom of this post for key findings from this study.
One finding of the study found that 88% of participants agree creativity should be built into education curriculum. Many educators point to our country's over emphasis on standardized testing as the cause of a decreased focus on creativity. However, with a growing interest in a more constructivist approach to education through inquiry based instruction structures such as Project Based Learning or Problem Based Learning, there has been a renewed dialogue in the importance of creativity in schools. One aspect of this debate that I struggle with is if educators truly believe that meaningful and relevant work not only provides opportunity for creativity but leads to profound learning, why then do we allow our instruction to be boxed in by state testing? If we truly believe creativity requires higher level thinking skills, wouldn't our students do well on standardized tests? So, my question is do we truly believe creativity matters? If so, what are we going to do about it?
How do you provide opportunities for creativity in your classroom?
No comments:
Post a Comment