My Musings: Creativity & Innovation

I stumbled upon an online article last week called “We are born creative geniuses and the education system dumbs us down, according to NASA scientists.” The post shares results from a NASA study in which 98% of 4-5 year olds fell into the genius category on creativity and innovation. Needless to say, as the study followed the children, that percentage dramatically declined. The post linked to this Tedx talk, which you should absolutely take thirteen minutes to watch.

A few thoughts–not necessarily in order of importance.

• Instructional Strategy for Building Conceptual Understanding of Large Numbers In the first few minutes, George Land gives a fascinating timeline, condensing two million years of human history and development into one calendar year. Thinking about giant numbers by reducing them proportionally to more familiar and deeply understood measurements is such a valuable strategy for developing understanding. There are a couple of authors who have done that really well in picture books: David Schwartz did it with If You Hopped Like a Frog and If Dogs Were Dinosaurs  to illustrate relative measurements; David J. Smith did it with If America Were a Village and If the World Were a Village to illustrate demographic trends. The first three minutes or so would be great to show students to build an understanding of how slowly humans have developed and how that could be represented on a timeline. (Note: just a warning that at 3:08 he says, “All h*** broke loose,” so you may choose to stop the video before then or mute it for a couple of seconds).
• Developing Our Own Divergent Thinking How can we model and teach innovation, curiosity, and creativity to children if our own has been eroded? We must carve out time to nurture our own wondering, our own what ifs. Keep a notepad and record any questions you have. Notice how few you probably have and open your mind to developing them more regularly. Pretend and imagine. Play with your students during recess. Just try it. Dance. Even if you’re bad at it. Especially if you’re bad at it. Have you ever heard of Matt Harding? He crowdfunded his international travels by making a video of himself dancing a jig in snippets all over the world. It’ll make you laugh and cry and want to dance. Go to his site, Where the Heck is Matt?, and tell me that this guy hasn’t fed his inner child, hasn’t nurtured the five year old inside of him, and found all of the rewards. Put it on your calendar, make it part of every day, to find a way to feed the creative child inside of you.
• Nurturing Divergent Thinking in Our Children The first part of this video is depressing. The study cited illustrates pretty clearly that something happens in our society that inhibits and stifles the natural inventiveness of children. As a teacher I know that much of that happens within our schools. Some of that is a good thing, right? We want children to have convergent thinking about some values and behaviors–we want them to learn that they have responsibilities as students and citizens; we want them to value compassion and fairness; we want them to consider the safety of others instead of racing to the lunchline shoving others out of the way.  We have to teach them some self-evaluation and critical thinking. But clearly we have cultivated conformity to the detriment of innovation, creativity, imagination, celebration of wonder and what-ifs. So we must be intentional and develop routines and structures that celebrate those things and un-teach judgement, censoring, and criticism. If we believe innovation and creativity are essential for children, we must put our money time where our mouth is! Where is there time for play in our children’s day? Unstructured, imaginative play is necessary. Where is there time for questioning–deep, wondering, no easy answer, feeding of curiosity? What are structures and routines we can develop and implement in order to support them? We can start with asking questions like the one George Land poses about the fork, carving time for innovation without criticism, and with playing. This article, “How to Encourage Innovative Thinking in Your Kids”has some great ideas. I’ll be revisiting this idea as I add pages to this site and working on some structures and routines both within and without academic areas to ensure that I’m prioritizing this time for and with my students.