Take the Stairs: Fostering a Habit of Creativity
We usher in a new decade with best of/worst of stories, predictive trends, and endless advice on how to make and live up to our New Year’s resolutions. What’s on your list of habits to either embrace or discard? Will you take the stairs?
Time for Creativity
If I had a New Year’s resolution for public education, developing the habit of creative thinking would be at the top of the list. It’s time to demystify creativity and allow students to use their imagination and their whole brain, not only the test-taking part of it. At the heart of creative thinking is the acceptance of failure, the notion of trying and failing and trying again in order to learn something new. Scientists and artists understand this need for experimentation, knowing that knowledge, mastery, expression, and progress are rooted in these habits.
The Studio Thinking Project from Harvard Project Zero provides a framework that describes eight habits of mind used in effective visual arts classes. Since the original research in 2003, Studio Habits has become an anthem for creative teaching and learning. The non-hierarchical habits put the students at the center of their learning. The eight habits are:
- Develop Craft
- Engage and Persist
- Envision
- Express
- Observe
- Reflect
- Stretch and Explore
- Understand Art Worlds
Other teaching strategies that are student-centered and exploratory in nature include inquiry-based learning (think Socrates), Visual Thinking Strategies, (facilitated discussion of art), and project-based learning (solving real world problems through action research, collaboration and discovery). The trend in setting up maker spaces in schools is another example. All have the goals of student engagement and deeper learning.
Too often these effective strategies do not become habitual. Due to time or other constraints, they are short-term projects or units of curriculum that fail to transform teaching and learning on a larger scale.
Take the Stairs
So, then, how do you make it a habit? Shankar Vedantam’s Hidden Brain podcast on Creatures of Habit explores how we make those habits, well, habitual. The short of it is that we will form new habits if there is less friction (struggle) surrounding the choice. For example, we’ll take the stairs if they are right in front of us and if the elevator is a less obvious choice. Thereby making a healthier choice that is also easier and more likely to become a habit. We– educators and advocates– need to ensure the healthy, easy choice by creating a learning environment that is optimal for creative thinking and innovation. How do we put the stairs front and center, so it becomes habit?
The 15% Rule
3M figured it out long before Google. The company that brought us Scotch tape in the 1920s understood that creative insight and innovation aren’t guaranteed by a good work ethic. According to Jonah Lehrer in Imagine: How Creativity Works, the founders at 3M, and the software design companies that followed, understood that people need time for their brains to “doodle.” 3M conceived of the 15% rule, which they call the bootlegging hour, that allows researchers to spend 15% of their time pursuing speculative new ideas. At Google, their Innovation Time Off resulted in the creation of Gmail. At least 50% of new products at Google begin during Innovation Time Off.
The point is that our brains need a break from intensive concentrated effort to be able to achieve greater insights. Think about how you get your best ideas in the shower or by taking a walk. In non-scientific terms, when we are less focused, it allows our brains to loosen up and move past sheer effort. If you want to know more about the brain science behind this, a place to start is with Mr. Lehrer’s book.
The Da Vinci Notebooks
Lauren Cassani Davis describes how Leonardo Da Vinci utilized notebooks filled with elaborate questions, observations, doodles and calculations that fueled his work in science, mathematics and art in a Psych Learning Curve article on Creative Teaching and Teaching Creatively, She and her co-teacher used this technique—essentially a time-out to foster creativity– with their 2ndgrade students, to great benefit.
Whenever a student’s thinking diverged from our lesson objectives, or their question glimmered with the spark of a potential new interest, we sent them to their Da Vinci notebook. “Write it down!”—a refrain chanted countless times a day.
The Da Vinci notebooks weren’t just for students. We teachers kept them too. Joining in on the creative chaos with our students, we logged our own curiosities and passions. As I scribbled poems, sketched the plant on my desk, and recorded questions about who invented the fountain pen, I was re-immersed in the joy of the learning process.
Imagine
Imagine what classrooms could look like if students and teachers take the time to develop the creativity habit.
Imagine if students came to school every day, knowing they could spend part of their day doing something they were curious or passionate about.
Imagine when institutions recognize the arts as a foundation for creativity and place a high value on creative thinking. Students will find motivation and joy in their learning, feel honored as unique thinkers and doers, and will be rewarded for curiosity and perseverance.
I’m ready to start taking the stairs. How about you?
Spiral staircase photo by Dan Freeman on Unsplash
Tape dispenser photo by Crissy Jarvis on Unsplash
