Creativity Problems

We don’t know about you, but we are starting to see a major decline in our students collective ability to be creative. We are trying to rack our brains as to why. Is it because of technology, the Common Core State Standards, lack of unstructured play time? Maybe all of the above.

To help combat these obstacles to creativity, we try to bolster divergent thinking by creating open ended projects where there is no one way of completing the assignment. We also find that showing examples of past student work where creativity is required only hinders our students’ creative capabilities rather than offer ideas for inspiration. So, we find that it is best to be rather vague when dealing with lessons where the end result focuses on a student’s ability to be creative. Our students come to us used to having only one way to complete classwork, that they become frustrated when we ask them to use creativity to showcase their understanding of a lesson. They often would just prefer to copy or emulate another’s students work. There is growth in that frustration and the trick is to help students harness that frustration into creative intelligence. Here’s the secret, it takes time and patience, but the biggest results are in the struggle.