MacGyverizing Teaching - How Did We Kill Creativity?

I am always amazed at my lovely wife's natural ability to create a speech lesson out of most anything, MacGyverizing (remember the show, he could fix a bulldozer with gum and duct tape).

As I work with educational teams and listen to the opportunities and challenges of continuously improving student success through instruction, it makes me wonder how we (society) have killed or at least wounded the creativity in our approach to teaching and learning. Research does say that 95% of our creativity is dead by the age of 13, how sad. For those folks attending college and starting new in a teaching career, I wonder how long it takes before the other 5% is squashed. I am playing devil's advocate a bit, there is still a ton of great teachers out there tapping their creativity to meet student needs, but I bet they work hard to do it.

As I worked with an educational team defining the schools values that resulted from a school culture values survey we completed, one of the teachers on the team challenged the reality of making creativity a priority value that would be defined and then action items would be incorporated into the school improvement plan to increase creativity as well as results. I knew he was a top-notch teacher (one reason he was on the team), so I asked him this:

If you life depended on making sure all your students pass the upcoming state exam and you were sent off with your class to live in the middle of the forest with no outside contact, no technology (blackberry stays at home), no text books, no worksheets, etc., could you make it happen?

You can guess, his answer was, "it would be a challenge but yes". I asked why do you say that? His response, "I would use what was available to me to help the kids learn - even if it is my own experience, sticks and stones". I said, you would get "wildly" creative in your approach to teaching.

So my question, how do we help make sure all educators embrace their creativity and put it to work for the students as well as for their own mental health? Creativity has the potential to eliminate excuses related to available resources, turf battles, teaching to tests, differentiated learning, etc. How can you and your teaching teams crank-up the creativity meter starting right now?

A quick exercise: the "walk about". At your next teaching team meeting, select your challenge/opportunity (for example literacy lesson -- new approach to instructing), then have everyone get up and take a 3min walk around the school. They should walk alone without talking with anyone else and simply note the things that catch their eye - maybe the one thing that resonates most upon their return. Have all team members write down what caught their eyes on a flip chart paper, get it all down. Then ask each person to individually select one item from the list and come up with an idea on how it applies to the challenge/opportunity. It may apply directly or it may have spurred an idea related to the challenge/opportunity. Have team members share their thoughts (be sure to make the ground rule that no ideas will be viewed as dumb ideas and everyone will respect everyone's input).

Remember if you are educating our young people, you may be someone's everyday hero as they share stories later in life. Have a great week! Coach Bob.