Week 6: Schools Kill Creativity

I have seen this video several times before, and each time I am still floored by the points Robinson makes.  His criticizes are entirely true and seem almost commonsensical when he points them out, yet I have never considered them in my own reflections both about my current career as well as my own educational experiences.  Perhaps this is because I have become so normalized and accustomed to the ideology surrounding what traditional schooling should be.

"If you're not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original." It is by making mistakes that we learn new things.  By feeling comfortable to step out on a whim and try, we are able to come up with new things.  My boyfriend has a three-year-old at home who likes to "read" books.  I am constantly amazed by her ability to make up the story by looking at the pictures and drawing on what she remembers from having the story read to her in the past.  She "fills in the gaps" as Ken Robinson would say.  I agree that somewhere along the way, this willingness to innovate is lost in children.  I teach 10th and 12th grade, and regularly I experience students' unwillingness to be incorrect, to take a risk, or to make a mistake.

I agree that schools entirely stifle creativity, when they should be cultivating it.  As my prior blog entry points out, creativity is a skill essential for success in the 21st Century workplace.  As Robinson highlights, we value one type of thinking and one way of reasoning in schools, when we for all intents and purposes should be honoring diversity, multi-vocality, and different opinions in the classroom.  There is not one correct to solve a problem, therefore there should not be one way of learning and demonstrating that learning in the classroom.  It blows my mind to think about how many talented individuals have been stripped of their unique talents by the educational system.

I work in a magnet school for the Arts, so I can say that I have seen some of this creativity being celebrated and cultivated within the walls of my school.  However, it is not on the level as it should be.  I believe that teachers need to constantly tap in to their students own interests and what they are good at in order to best educate them.  We have to relate to our students on a personal level in order to determine the best way to help them learn.  In my own classroom, I could definitely take some of what Robinson points out and put it in to better practice.  I think that allowing students to have options in assignments is a good way to do this.  For example, I will give students a set of criteria for an assignment, but then allow them to choose how they would like to demonstrate their understanding.    Some of these options include allowing students to write, to demonstrate through a skit, to make a song or dance, or to give a presentation about the subject matter.

When I went to school, there was one way of learning and demonstrating learning.  That was by sitting, listening and taking notes and then reproducing them on the chapter test.  In today's day and age, where content is instantly accessible at the click of a mouse, it is not entirely necessary nor helpful to know every step in the Kreb's Cycle of photosynthesis or to be able to do long division by hand.  Ken Robinson's challenge to teachers is one that I agree with and hope to honor throughout my career.  Cultivating creativity and ingenuity in our students and supporting them in what it is they are talented at is something that should be at the top of our list.