What conditions are necessary to unlock creativity?
Comedian John Cleese speaks about creativity at the World Creativity Forum and describes his process. (via Clay Burrell’s Does the Web Kill Creativity?)
I love what Cleese has to say about his creative process and I think there are a couple of key messages both for educators and our students to foster creativity.
1- sleep on it. Cleese contends that the most creative ideas come to you after a period of “down time” for your brain as the unconscious continues to work out the problem in the absence of other noise. The most effective thing to do if you’re wrestling with a problem that you can’t solve is to take a nap. Often, the solution will reveal itself upon waking. This happens to me all the time, so much so that during periods when I’ve got a lot of problems piled up I have to keep a notepad next to my bed to take notes immediately upon waking. (Notepad has been replaced by iPhone and iPad) Sometimes, it takes days or weeks for a solution to reveal itself, but the point is you need to know when to “pull the plug” and stop stressing about a problem. Sleep is important.
2- avoid interruption. A lot has been written recently about multitasking and the way it’s possibly affecting us. (Your Brain on Computers series – New York Times) One of the biggest distractions to my creativity is the pace of information and communication exchange as instant notifications of tweets, Facebook profile updates, emails all can interrupt the creative flow. We need a place where we can be free from distraction as long as necessary.
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Often, sparks to light my creative fire come from a nugget that I’ll get from my PLN. However, Cleese says:
“We don’t know where we get our ideas from. What we do know is that we don’t get them from our laptops.”
I don’t agree. Ideas can a do come from our laptops. In fact, that’s how I found Cleese’s video to begin with. People share their ideas, problems they’re wrestling with, opinions, and solutions. All of this comes at me mostly via Twitter and the great people I follow. When I find something that is “sticky”, I’ll take it further. Sometimes this takes a lot of “sleeps” as recently happened with a post by Jeff Utecht on QR codes.
Another thing that Cleese contends is that the problem with creativity in education is that the teachers are not creative to begin with, they fear it. I think this is flat out wrong. Sure, you’ll find examples in any school of teachers who have developed a “system” and don’t deviate from it, but as whole I think teachers are very creative people with a lot of potential.
The problem is that we don’t provide teachers with the two conditions they need for creativity to thrive: physical separation and temporal separation… how often do we create these conditions for teachers? We fill any down time they have with duties, supervisions, and meetings. How many teachers have private offices where they can shut the door and avoid interuptions when they’re in the creative flow?
If we want to see creativity flourish, we need to make it a priority. That means setting up creative conditions for our teachers and our students.
What percentage of teachers that you have encountered in your career are creative? I’d say maybe 50%. As you correctly point out, the system doesn’t foster creativity in teachers nor students. Students, too, are not allowed down time. Every minute of their day is more regimented than a teacher’s. If you haven’t, be sure to check out Dan Pink via TED. This falls right in his “20% time” ideas.
Brad, thanks for the comment. I’d say that it’s more like 2/3 but it’s debatable. I was recently talking about the whole issue of teacher quality with a colleague who was previously faculty at universities involved in training preservice teachers and his opinion on teacher creativity, like yours, is quite a bit lower than mine. I guess I’m an optimist.
This whole thing can quickly degenerate into a discussion of the “cycle” of exposure to quality teaching as a student, quality of teacher training, lack of financial gain to attract the best students to the field, etc.
How can we fix the problem? What’s the first step?
no doubt the universities need to do either a better job of teacher prep or a better job of selecting and credentialing quality. I’m ready to try some of the drastic models out there…dump the legacy contracts, dump the old union model, allow alternative pathways into teaching. However, we mustn’t overlook the dearth of funding and stop treating all teachers and teaching jobs as the same.