Fostering Creativity in the Classroom: Part 6, Crafting a Creativity Rubric for Educators
Nurturing Creativity in the Classroom: The Essential Guide
The Need for Creativity in 21st Century Education
If you are just joining me, this is the sixth installment in my inquiry into Fostering Creativity. Over the previous posts, I provided my rationale, introduced the creative process, and outlined how creativity is thought about in school settings. I defined the word creativity, fleshing out its components and highlighting the most significant qualities. The fifth piece fully explored the attributes of creativity, providing several models that we might be able to use to assess creativity, which is the subject of this latest article.
Now that I have explored the various models and research supporting creativity, what aspects are most relevant to us, as classroom teachers? Clearly, creativity needs to be more prominently featured. “Creativity is a core component in the 21st century skills framework (4 C’s — critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity) (Abdulla and Runco, 2018).
Yet even more clearly, we aren’t doing a good job of doing so. In my opinion, students couldn’t be more bored at school, finding little that resonates with their interests or needs. This seems to only have been exacerbated by the pandemic.
Teaching Creativity: A Systematic Approach
I think that creativity can/should be taught and nurtured in the classroom. It also can/should be assessed, but I have not yet come across a systematic method that will both encourage the development of the behaviors and mindset, as well as teach the process. The intuitive approach “we know it when we see it” is not a useful instructional guide, nor is it fair and equitable.
On one hand, the guidance needs to be flexible enough to apply to a wide range of activities/assessments and easy for both teachers and students to use. On the other hand, it needs to provide clear guidelines for growth and development of the skills, develop those creative muscles, and agree with the research (be pedagogically sound).
The Core Elements of a Creativity Rubric
The most essential aspects of creativity, as discussed in the past 5 chapters, seem to be:
- Understanding and use of the creative process
- Effective and Engaging Communication with an audience
- Evidence of Fluency, Flexibility, Originality, and Elaboration.
- Meets the criteria of the definition of creativity: new, appropriate to the task, and high quality (adapting to mini-c and/or little-c)
- Encouraging attributes that contribute to fostering creativity, such as risk-taking and tolerance of ambiguity.
- Acknowledging the roles of motivation, affect, and knowledge (insofar as to embrace – or remain open to – intrinsic motivation, positive affect, and deep versatile domain knowledge).
- Understanding that creativity is not innate, but is dynamic, comes in different forms, and can be learned.
How do we integrate all seven of these criteria into a seamless tool that can guide both students and teachers?
A Brief Refresher on the Learning Progression Method
Before I attempt to outline a possible approach to assess creativity, I need to provide a brief overview of the Learning Progression Method (LPM). If you are already familiar with this, please feel free to skip to the next section. The Learning Progression Method, which I mentioned earlier as my approach to learning and assessment, takes each practice and breaks it down into developmentally-appropriate steps that help bring students from Beginning to Expert level.
The language is strengths-based, providing guidance for growth and improvement while being applicable to a wide variety of assignments. In our development of a learning progression, we make sure to have a low floor that encourages participation from those with learning or emotional barriers or obstacles, as well as a high ceiling to challenge those who are ready to excel (Frangiosa and Naramore, 2021). LPM focuses on widely applicable and transferable skills, looks for incremental growth over time, and provides feedback without grades (if possible).
I have been using this approach for 8+ years with great success in the areas of critical thinking skills such as problem solving, creating scientific explanations, and interpreting graphs. However, I have been struggling to incorporate creativity.
After doing the research (as presented in the previous 5 creativity posts), I have a hypothesis that, in retrospect, seems obvious: I did not see students improve their creative skills because I did not overtly teach creativity skills. Students come into my class unable to solve physics problems. I teach them strategies, discussing why those strategies work as well as the domain-relevant knowledge needed. I never did that with creativity, just expected them to know/understand what “creativity” was, or see it on the learning progression and get what I was aiming for. We don’t do that for anything else, not painting, cooking, volleyball, or driving. Why would it work in this context any better than it does in those?
Pathways to Incorporate Creativity in Curriculum
Students will improve their creativity skills when I overtly teach them creativity skills. As a classroom teacher, I see three pathways that need to be incorporated into my program of study:
- overtly teaching about creativity to raise awareness and expectations about the what it means to be creative, including the theories and strategies when developmentally appropriate
- providing opportunities (although constrained by the educational system) for various types of creativity
- assessment of both the creative process and of the creative artifact. These need to happen simultaneously, spiraling throughout the school year.
Students need to understand not only what the creative process is, but how to use it and why it is important. They need to know that audience engagement should be the primary goal of any creative performance, whether “to inform, to describe, to persuade, to impress, to entertain” (Wiggins, 2010.) We need to clearly define creativity, and overtly discuss/explore the various attributes that support it. They need to know what Fluency, Flexibility, Originality, and Elaboration look like in various fields. Most importantly, we need to reinforce that creativity is not innate, but is dynamic, comes in different forms, and can be learned.
How exactly this is to be done will be a topic for further exploration. Suffice to say here that this is not a single lesson, nor one distinct from content. It is a collection of lessons that spiral throughout the year, each time delving deeper. The most essential aspect is to present it overtly, as in “one of the goals for this year is to develop your creative muscles.”
Implementing and Assessing the Creative Process
If it is important, then we must assess it. Once we have taught the steps and made clear the expectations to use the Creative Process, then the educator can assess it using a learning progression. “Presentation” and “documentation” would be fully described in the assignment itself. For example, a painting teacher can ask for a video journal documenting the evolution of a painting and the decisions made along the way. An ELA teacher may ask for a portfolio with a verbal or written explanation of changes made in each draft. As for myself, I request a journal that includes pictures, video, and reflection throughout the project timeline. I allow students to use an e-portfolio, a video, or any other format that pleases them. Figure 1 is a draft that we may be able to use to assess the CREATIVE PROCESS.
This learning progression helps students move from using the Creative Process at the Beginning level to providing irrefutable evidence of understanding it at the Expert level. This would, in the end, help students develop the mindset, routines and strategies that would foster creativity in a variety of settings.
Implementing and Assessing the Creative Product
Closed problems push students into one “right” solution. To encourage a creative product, we first of all need to provide open problems. Once we do that, then we seek evidence of the dimensions outlined by Guilford and, later, Runco. In Figure 2, I have color coded the 3 dimensions so you can see the progression more clearly. Appropriateness to the task is highlighted in yellow, “High quality” is highlighted in pink and Originality is highlighted in Green.
We can easily expect relevance (appropriateness to the task) early on, as described in Developing and Proficient levels, but once met, then there is nothing further to assess here. “High quality” can be difficult to assess, because we have such constraints on time, students’ levels of relevant expertise, and resources. I weave these expectations in, but focus on refinement and attention to detail more than aesthetics. Regardless, each teacher would have to clearly show what “polish”, “attention to detail”, and “high level of skill” looks like by providing examples. We cannot assume that students know what high quality looks like, and high quality is different in different classes.
Challenges in Assessing Creativity
As an aside, you cannot grade what you do not teach unless you KNOW that every student has acquired that skill. So if your assignment is to create a slideshow on PowerPoint or GoogleSlides, you must instruct how to use that application, provide exemplars of high quality, etc. If my assignment is a drawing, I cannot expect students to know how to draw well or give weight to those skills. That is inequitable. I know that all of my students know how to record and upload a basic video; however, only a few have taken a video production class. It would not be equitable to expect all students to craft a film using editing software. The “high level of skill” must relate to those skills that I have taught them or know that they have mastered.
There are major obstacles when assessing originality. As noted by ___, originality is difficult to expect from school age children. They do not have the domain-relevant knowledge to produce objectively original work. But how do we ascertain if the ideas are new to that student? What about the great idea that a group comes up with and the rest of the class loves and incorporates into their own? Similar to the issues described with high quality, to truly produce original work, students also need time and resources that most classrooms cannot supply.
Tailoring Learning Progressions to Creative Disciplines
As you can see, I am struggling with finding language that is generic enough to apply to all creative assignments yet specific enough to guide students gradually towards success. Perhaps the learning progression needs to be more tailored to the TYPE of product that students are asked to make in that class. Since I ask my students to design and build working models that can “move the farthest down the hall”, “launch the highest”, or “generate the most voltage”, I can create a learning progression that is specific to those types of projects.
In the Proficient, Advanced, and Expert levels, I was able to revise the “high quality” descriptors to better reflect what high quality means in the context of building a model. Since I don’t teach carpentry or architecture, I cannot expect that students will be very good at the cutting, gluing, design aspects of the assignment. However, I would expect them to make revisions, make changes based on performance, and use resources efficiently, in that order. What might a Creative Writing teacher look for? What might a Sewing teacher look for? I don’t know… but I’d like to.
Thoughts and Next Steps
This post represents the furthest extent of my current thinking on this topic. In the future, I would like to pursue this further:
- conducting pre- and post- activity surveys about creativity.
- designing curricular materials to teach the content outlined above.
- interview teachers of other content areas to answer my questions about what they look for in creative artifacts.
This deep dive into creativity has been very helpful for my approach to the engineering design process in particular. I will explore the possibilities of integrating more of this into my classes in the future.
As educators, we possess the unique opportunity to cultivate a generation of thinkers and innovators by embedding creativity at the heart of our teaching practices. The journey involves overtly teaching creative theories, providing a diverse array of creative opportunities, and thoughtfully assessing both the process and the products of creativity. These pathways, intertwined and recurring throughout the academic year, are our tools to unlock the boundless potential within each student.
I encourage fellow educators to embrace this challenge, to reimagine our classrooms as incubators of creativity and innovation. Let us commit to this transformative journey, not just as a response to the changing demands of the 21st century, but as a foundational pillar in shaping future-ready learners.
Your feedback, insights, and experiences are invaluable in this collective endeavor. Share your stories, engage in dialogue with peers, and let us collaboratively refine our approaches to foster an education system where creativity thrives!
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