Now imagine you had lots of different Lego bricks of a variety of different sizes and shapes – now you can produce something much more creative!
To quote from the research“ Attempts to teach thinking skills without a strong base of factual knowledge do not promote problem-solving ability or support transfer to new situations”( Bransford et al., 2000, p. 23).
However, it’ s not just about having knowledge, it’ s about being able to connect that knowledge together in different ways. Take the example of the wheeled suitcase. Wheels have been used for thousands of years and the suitcase came onto the scene in the late 19th century. However, it wasn’ t until 1972 that someone had the clever idea to put wheels onto suitcases and create rolling luggage – that’ s after we managed to land a man onto the moon!
As creativity relies on knowledge, everything we know from the science of learning how to support students to build a firm knowledge base is as applicable to developing creativity as it is to any other area of school life. This includes utilising effective learning strategies such as retrieval practice and spacing( Dunlosky et al., 2013).
However, knowledge might be necessary for creativity but it’ s not sufficient. In the literature on expertise, researchers draw a distinction between routine expertise and adaptive expertise( see e. g. Bransford et al., 2000).
Routine expertise occurs where experts have honed their skills to become increasingly efficient at a specific set of tasks. Adaptive expertise, on the other hand, is characterised by interconnected, flexible knowledge, and allows these experts to respond more effectively to novel problems.
As teachers, it can be tempting to focus solely on developing students’ routine expertise, for example by providing scaffolds which enable student success. However, unless we have a plan for removing these scaffolds, students will end up building inflexible knowledge which is only applicable to a narrow set of tasks.
If our aim is to develop creative, curious and independent students, then we need to move them beyond routine into adaptive expertise. To do this, students will need to engage with practice which is both varied and unpredictable and will need to be supported to make connections to prior knowledge and apply their knowledge to novel situations. Specific techniques to use in the classroom include interleaving( Janssen et al., 2023) and variation( Bjork & Bjork, 2023).
In conclusion, schools do not kill creativity. However, it is a commonly held belief and one which is worth pushing back against. Knowledge and creativity are inextricably interlinked and schools are where our young people acquire that knowledge. If we want to improve our students’ creativity, then the best place to start is by assuring they have a strong base of factual knowledge. However, we must not stop there as although knowledge might be necessary for creativity it is not sufficient. To teach for creativity, we need to find opportunities for students to grapple with uncertainty to enable them to build flexible knowledge which can be applied to novel situations.
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