“If creativity is vital to entrepreneurship and our ability to compete in the global future that lies in front of our kids, what are the implications for educators?”
Welcome to Vanguard Gifted Academy’s educational blog. This is entry number two in our series Educating Children for the Future. I’m Dr. Judy Jankowski, and I’m delighted to be with you today. Just a little about me first — I’m a long-time special educator and a mom of a gifted daughter, which set me on the path to serving gifted kids in 1998. I wrote my dissertation on the overidentification of ADHD in highly gifted kids because the lack of understanding of gifted children by mainstream educators was glaringly apparent. Today, I’ll be talking about creativity as a skill for 21st-century learners.
The State of Creativity in America’s Schools
It’s unusual to think of creativity as a skill, yet it’s viewed that way by many educational philosophers. Personally, I view creativity as a talent that can be developed or, conversely, can be squashed. While creativity and thinking outside the box were once a hallmark of American entrepreneurship, when the No Child Left Behind Act came into vogue, conformity to testing norms became the standard by which we measured all children’s success. The emphasis in education shifted to canned curriculum and teaching to a test. This exercise was completely counter to what we know about cultivating creativity.
Getting to Know the Torrance Test
Dr. E. Paul Torrance is known as the father of creativity. He developed the grandfather of all assessments used to measure creativity: The Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT). The TTCT is a nonverbal tool that schools sometimes use in the identification of kids for gifted programs. The Torrance looks at four elements of creativity: fluency, the number of ideas a child has; flexibility, the variety of ideas that an individual might have; originality, which — if you have a gifted child, you know — there are many unique ideas that they have; and elaboration, the details around an idea or a concept.
Educating the Creativity Out of Our Kids
About one decade ago, I decided that I’d like to better understand the development of creativity by exploring this measure, and I signed up for a day-long training on the administration of the test. As the trainer started the day, she shared some context that I found pretty startling. In the development of the test, students of many ages were assessed to develop the scoring norms; this is known as the standardization process. The results of the normative samples collected in the standardization process formed a pattern — while young kids were wildly creative and over 90 percent of those students at five years old were identified as gifted, by the time they reached 18 years old, only the top two percent fell into that category. In fact, the older students were and the more years of school they had behind them, the less creative they were found to be. The logical conclusion that emerged was that we were educating the creativity out of our kids.
Rethinking Education to Promote Creativity
Clearly, we need to rethink the educational process. Teaching our students how to score better on international testing measures is an inappropriate focus for education. I believe that allowing kids to direct their education, focus on their gifts, and develop their talents is paramount, both in terms of creating meaningful educational outcomes and developing our economic strength as a country. New and exciting education models are emerging all across the world, and parents are starting to explore them along with educators through charter schools, homeschooling and independent schools. With the freedom to develop their own mission and chart a new path, American education has the ability to cultivate the creativity of our children rather than stunt it, moving us boldly into the 21st century.
As the first speaker in this podcast, Yong Zhao, says in his most recent book, “All children have the potential and the need to become great. To help each child achieve his or her full potential, we need an education that starts from the child’s passions and strengths, instead of prescribed skills and content (Reach for Greatness: Personalizable Education for All Children). As we continue this blog series, we’ll explore more of the skills and mindsets that will feed the evolutionary process of education in the 21st century.
Thanks for reading. We hope that Vanguard Gifted Academy’s educational blog will continue to be a resource for you. To dig into Dr. Yong Zhao’s thoughts on changing the education paradigm, check out our previous blog, and if you have comments or questions about what we discussed here, please visit our website, or call us at (224) 213-0087.
Please join us next time as Elizabeth Blaetz discusses critical thinking and how technology has changed the role of education in our schools.