Open Course in Education Futures

I enjoyed Elizabeth Gilbert's take on nurturing creativity and think it's a healthy viewpoint that applies to all levels of education. Instead of classifying learners as those who have it (i.e., creativity) and those who don't, educators might instead treat each individual as having creativity potential and then design a learning environment that fosters such creativity.

As we typically think of Bloom's taxonomy (and it's later version ) as being hierarchical in nature, I see creativity potential from a more emergent standpoint. That is, through the performance task that the learners are involved in, different performance verbs emerge. Certain performance tasks will result in a more natural way while others will require levels of facilitative interaction from others (i.e., teacher, other students, content, objects, artifacts, etc.). Thus, the goals of the learning event are articulated in terms of expressive outcomes as opposed to behavioral outcomes, and can provide evidence of a learner's understanding by pursuing the following facets: interpretation, application, perspective, empathy, and self-knowledge (Wiggins and McTighe, 2005). Since a list of performance verbs can apply to each facet - involving different levels of creativity for each - creativity in and of itself does not necessary occur only after a number of other lower-order thinking skills have been accomplished.

Educators can find those teachable moments when spurts of creativity present themselves in ways that encourage learners to recognize their own creative talents and then guide them in ways that put the learner's creativity to use. Gilbert's approach to avoiding the "creative genius" stereotype works well in the classroom since we should instead create sound performance tasks that engage the learners first then welcome the "creative genie" when she decides to present herself.