The Creative Classroom: Innovative Teaching for 21st-Century Learners

How do you teach students to be creative? I've studied this question for 30 years, and the good news is we know a lot about how to teach for creativity. In this episode, you'll learn what research has to say about teaching for creativity. This episode is for every teacher, not just the art teachers, because in today's world, students need to be prepared to be creative in everything they do. After all, people are creative in specific subjects and disciplines and art forms. How can we change the way we teach in every subject, so that students learn the kind of knowledge that prepares them to be creative in that subject? This episode shows you how to create a creative classroom. Welcome to the Science of Creativity, your home for insights and inspiration about art, design and invention. I'm your host, Dr. Keith Sawyer. My mission is to inspire you with stories of brilliant creators and world-changing inventions. You'll learn about the latest psychological studies and gain insights about creativity that will help you reach your full creative potential. Now think for a minute back to your own schooling, whether in high school or whether in college, and think about a class where you got an A. Maybe a lot of classes where you got an A, but think about one particular class, think about several classes where you got an A. And I want you to ask yourself this question. Did you ever get an A in a class, and then one month after the semester ended, you had forgotten everything that you learned in class? Now be honest, you got an A in a class, and within a month you'd forgotten everything. Now I've asked this question to many very large audiences, and I asked them to raise their hand, many of these audiences are teachers, and everyone's hand shoots up. Everyone raises their hand. It's so universal that you can get an A in a course and forget everything within a month. Then I asked the next question, and here's my question for you. Did you ever get an A in a course, and you felt like you didn't understand what you were learning? You got an A in a course, but you never really understood it. I asked that question as well to large audiences of teachers, and they all raised their hand, so I'd say more like two thirds of the people raised their hands. And they're looking around at each other, and no one's shy, no one's embarrassed about it. And I think that's because they all know that everyone else is in the same situation. So we all know that you can get an A in a course and forget it within a month. We all know that you can get an A in a course and not really understand anything about it. It's a huge problem, and what is the problem? The problem is that we're teaching with a method that I call instructionism. It's a cultural model of school that's embedded in schools today. The challenge of developing a creative classroom, the challenge of teaching and learning for creativity, is that many people, including teachers and parents and students, told to a cultural model of school that I call instructionism. Now a cultural model is a shared model, a shared understanding of what schooling is. It's a shared understanding of the type of teaching and learning that takes place in school. What we see in most schools is a cultural model that I call instructionism. Now the instructionist cultural model comes with five characteristics, and the central one is knowledge. The type of knowledge that students are learning in an instructionist classroom, and it's the type of knowledge that teachers are teaching, of course. So that's the central component of the cultural model. An instructionism, the type of knowledge that's being taught, is a fairly superficial and shallow type of knowledge, where students learn isolated pieces of knowledge, the sort of tiny chunk of knowledge that you could test with a multiple choice test, maybe even just one question. That's the first component of a cultural model, the knowledge that you're teaching. A second component of the cultural model is the goal of school. Well the goal of school in an instructionist school is to get facts and procedures into students' heads. This shallow conception of knowledge is that knowledge is a set of isolated facts and procedures. So of course the goal of school is to get the facts and procedures into students' heads. Now the third characteristic of cultural model is the role of the teacher. In an instructionist school, the role of the teacher is to be the person who knows that type of knowledge, the shallow and superficial facts and procedures, and their role is to deliver those facts and procedures into students' heads. It's sometimes called the transmission and acquisition model of teaching and learning, or maybe more colloquially it's called the football model where you're passing the knowledge to the student. The teacher is the one who's the expert who has the knowledge and then is transmitting that knowledge to the student. The student acquires the knowledge. But in instructionism we're still talking about a type of knowledge which is isolated in shallow facts and procedures. The fourth component of a cultural model of school is curriculum. How do you sequence the education that you're delivering to the students? Now when you have this type of knowledge, this isolated facts and procedures, the shallow and superficial knowledge, then your conception of curriculum is pretty straightforward. First you teach the simpler facts and procedures and then as you go through the curriculum you teach more and more complex facts and procedures. You have this notion of prerequisites where the smaller, simpler facts and procedures you have to learn first because they're prerequisites for more and more complex knowledge. That's what you get in an instructionist cultural model. And then the fifth component of a cultural model is assessment. In instructionism the way that you assess is to count up the number of facts and procedures that students have memorized. Really you're just assessing memorization. The more rigorous tests you might assume are the ones that assess for more stuff, more facts and procedures. So this is the cultural model of teaching and learning that I call instructionism. Where the central component is knowledge, the type of knowledge that you're learning which is shallow and superficial, the goal of school is for students to acquire those facts and procedures. The role of the teacher is to be the expert who knows the facts and procedures and then transmits them to the students. The way you structure the curriculum is to go from simpler and smaller facts and procedures to more and more complex ones. And then the function of assessment is to count up how many facts and procedures that you've learned. Well, the problem with this is that it's a horrible model of teaching and learning. It's not aligned with the science of how people learn. We know for decades of research that when you try to teach this type of knowledge, the superficial facts and procedure knowledge, that students develop a very shallow and superficial understanding of the material. Retention of the material is horrible. People learn knowledge, they do well on the test and then they forget right away what they've learned. Understanding is shallow. So you don't have a deeper understanding of the material. You can get an A in a class and you don't really know what you learn, you don't understand what you've learned. So you don't get retention and you don't get understanding and you don't develop the ability to go beyond what you've learned. You don't develop an adaptive understanding. And after all that's the whole purpose of creative teaching is you want students to be able to take what they've learned and be creative with that knowledge. And then there's a lot of different learning sciences. New knowledge. Not to teach them knowledge that already exists. So they memorize it, but to prepare them to build new knowledge. Now the third component of the cultural model is the teachers. Teachers are the people who scaffold and facilitate collaborative knowledge building among their students. As opposed to an instructionism where the role of the teachers is, as I said, the football metaphor to transmit the facts and procedures that they know to the students. But in a creative classroom, the role of teachers is to scaffold and facilitate students as they build their own knowledge. The fourth component of the cultural model of the creative classroom is the curriculum. Now remember an instructionism, the curriculum was pretty straightforward and linear. You would start with simpler facts and procedures than you gradually would build up to more and more complex facts and procedures. In a creative classroom, you start learning integrated and contextualized knowledge from the beginning. You don't have to wait until toward the end of the semester to get that more advanced conceptual understanding. You need to get the integrated and contextualized knowledge right from the beginning. And then the fifth component of a cultural model of teaching and learning is assessment. An instructionism, remember, you just count up the number of facts and procedures that students have learned. But we know retention is horrible. You don't get to understanding if that's the kind of knowledge that you're learning. So assessment in a creative classroom is more of an authentic form of assessment. Researchers are still spending a lot of time trying to approach this problem of assessment. Because it's quite challenging. It's easy to assess for superficial and shallow knowledge. It's much harder to assess for this type of deeper conceptual understanding. So if we're going to contrast creative knowledge with the type of knowledge you learn in instructionism, creative knowledge is deep knowledge, deep conceptual understanding. Instructionist understandings are shallow, shallow knowledge. Creative knowledge is big, meaning that each chunk of stuff that you learn is richer and more complex. In instructionism, each chunk of stuff you learn is very small and tiny. You learn how to add two digit numbers. You develop an understanding of what addition is fundamentally as a concept. Creative knowledge is connected knowledge where everything that you're learning is connected to everything else that you're learning. But instructionist knowledge is compartmentalized. Each thing you learn as an isolated understanding, but you don't learn how to connect it to other things that you're learning. And then finally, creative knowledge is a flexible and adaptive sort of knowledge. Whereas instructionist knowledge is static. It's brittle. You can't modify it. You can't adapt it. You've just memorized it as it is. So this is the contrast between creative knowledge and instructionism. Creative knowledge is deep, big, connected, and flexible. And this is the type of knowledge that prepares students to be creative. When they learn in an instructionist manner, they learn the kind of shallow, small, compartmentalized and static knowledge that does not prepare you to be creative with that knowledge. [Music] A lot of educators are familiar with what's called blooms pyramid or blooms taxonomy. And this is meant to be a taxonomy of different kinds of knowledge, like exactly what we're talking about, right? What sorts of knowledge are schools designed to teach and what are students learning. And it's also a model of all of us, how our knowledge is organized in our heads. It's from cognitive psychology. The reason why it's called a pyramid is that it has layers or levels. At the lowest level of the pyramid is the shallowest, most superficial knowledge. I'm saying this is the type of knowledge that comes from instructionism. In blooms pyramid, it's often referred to as remembering or recognizing or recalling. It's basic memorizing. That's what you get in instructionism. In blooms pyramid, that's the lowest level. And then there are six levels total. And as you go up the pyramid, gradually you get up to the very top, which in blooms taxonomy is called creativity, generating, planning and producing. But the problem with this is that it implies that you need to learn the lower levels of the pyramid first. Before you can move up the pyramid and get to creativity. This gets us back to the kind of curriculum associated with instructionism with this notion of prerequisites. Where you have to learn the boring stuff first. You have to memorize the facts and procedures. And then gradually toward the end of the semester, let's say you learn how to be creative. Well, all teachers know that the problem is you never get to the point where you're teaching them to be creative. You get to stuck at this lower level and all you end up teaching are the isolated facts and procedures. But students do need to memorize a lot of facts and procedures in many subjects. So how are we going to take care of that? If you're learning a second language, you have to memorize a lot of words. You have to memorize the procedures associated with verb conjugations. Maybe you need to memorize 500 or 1,000 words. And you really can't just construct that understanding all by yourself. You have to do the memorizing. So what are you going to do about that? We can't only teach creativity, right? We have to teach some stuff that is shallow. That's what we get this notion of knowledge or this taxonomy called blooms taxonomy or blooms pyramid. So yes, it's important to learn at all of these different levels from the most complex sorts of knowledge that I'm talking about at the top of the pyramid to the kind of shallow and superficial knowledge down at the bottom, which generally is associated just with remembering. The problem with many schools and many classrooms is that they try to go from the bottom up. And that ends up being instructionism. You end up teaching all this stuff that students have to memorize. And then they get an A in the class and the next semester they've already forgotten it. So how are you going to build on that and move up the pyramid if they've already forgotten it all? You can't. It's too late. They've forgotten it. So you can't go from bottom to top in blooms taxonomy if you want students to learn to be creative. So the other way you might think of would be to start at the top and go down where, let's say, you learn to be creative first. And then in the context of that deeper conceptual understanding, then you learn to remember all the isolated facts and procedures. But this time you can learn them in the context. Let's say of the broader conceptual framework that you learned first. It turns out that doesn't work either. And we have a lot of cognitive psychology research showing that neither of these approaches work. If you try to go from the bottom up, you end up with instructionism. Retention is bad. Understanding is bad. You never get to the top of the pyramid. But teaching from the top down doesn't work either. You can't have that deeper conceptual understanding if you don't learn some of the shallow and superficial knowledge. So researchers have concluded that the way you need to teach for students to be creative is that you have to teach across all of these levels of blooms taxonomy, all of the levels of the pyramid at the same time. You're teaching what's called higher level knowledge and lower level knowledge together so that as you're learning the facts and procedures, you're learning how they fit into a broader conceptual framework. And as you're learning the conceptual framework, that learning is being supported by the facts and procedures that you're developing. This is the type of knowledge that's associated with creative performance. And this is the type of knowledge and the type of pedagogy we need to be looking for in a creative classroom. The reason why the creative classroom requires a different type of pedagogy is something that creativity researchers discovered quite some time ago that creativity is what we call domain specific as opposed to creativity being domain general. So think about it this way. Domain general creativity would be something like a personality trait where if you have more of it, then you'll be more creative at anything you do. So it works across domains or domains could be disciplines or school subjects. Domain general creativity is something like magic. You can sprinkle it onto anything that you do. Well, it turns out that most research suggests that you have creativity is not exactly right because most creativity is domain specific people are creative in a specific area. So you can be a creative poet and you might not be a creative computer programmer, right? It's common sense people are creative in specific domains of life. They may be creative in some general way that would apply to everything everyone could be measured in some general level of creativity, but what we need to focus on even more is this domain specific creativity. So think back to the types of knowledge I've been talking about in the two different cultural models. Cultural model of instructionism has a very shallow and superficial conception of knowledge. The cultural model of a creative classroom has a deeper conceptual understanding where knowledge is connected together and the way that you deliver the way you teach students is that you teach these higher level and lower level knowledge together. So in domain specific creativity what we're talking about is teaching knowledge in a subject area, right? We're teaching knowledge in a discipline. I'm talking about changing the way you teach in a physics class so that you develop a kind of knowledge in physics that prepares you to be creative in that domain. So that's domain specific creativity and you need to develop the higher level and the lower level knowledge together before you can be creative in a domain. Domain specific creativity requires this kind of creative knowledge that I've been talking about. And it doesn't matter how creative you are in some domain general way. If you have experienced instructionism in a particular subject and the only type of knowledge you have in that subject is memorized facts and procedures, most of which you've forgotten already anyway doesn't matter how generally creative you are. You have the wrong kind of knowledge in physics, right? Or in poetry writing so you're not prepared to be creative with that knowledge. To be creative, to have a creative classroom you need to be teaching students in a different way to prepare them to be domain specific creative in your subject. And the way they get that kind of domain specific creativity is with a different kind of pedagogy that focuses on creative knowledge. Because creativity is domain specific, it means that to teach for creativity teachers in all subjects need to teach for creative knowledge. You can't think for example that you're the math teacher so you don't need to worry about creativity because the type of knowledge you're creating, the type of knowledge you're delivering is a different kind of knowledge. Maybe you think of it as something that really is about memorization and then you might think creativity. Yeah, that's for the arts teacher. My students are going to get creativity in another class. In my class, it's not about creativity. It turns out that doesn't work. Teachers have to teach in every subject for creative knowledge if they want their students to be creative in that subject. So how do we get to that type of classroom? We use a pedagogy that I call guided improvisation where the teacher is guiding the students in the classroom in a sort of improvisational learning activity. Some of you may have heard of constructivism or a constructivist type of pedagogy and guided improvisation is absolutely as related to this. Where in guided improvisation, which is a pedagogy associated with the creative classroom, in guided improvisation, students are active learners. They're not sitting there impassively receiving, catching the football right. They are actively involved in their learning. And they have the freedom to construct their own knowledge and they're each going to take a different path through all the conceptual material and all the facts and procedures that are available in that subject. Students have the freedom to construct their own path through this knowledge, but it's going to be a huge mess if the students don't have some sort of guidance. Students are more effectively with guidance. All the research shows this. So an extreme form of constructivism is not effective. Students waste their time. They go all over the place. You learn more effectively if you're an active learner and your active learning is guided. A lot of education researchers refer to the most effective forms of guidance as scaffolding. You are as a teacher scaffolding students. And what are you scaffolding them? You're developing a structure that guides the students most effectively toward the intended learning outcome, which in a creative classroom is a deeper conceptual understanding. You can't do that by lecturing at them because that gives you instructionism. You can't learn a deeper conceptual understanding by sitting there and listening to a lecture. You can't get there. You have to go through a different kind of pedagogy, guided improvisation, where the students are active learners. But you still have an intended learning outcome. Teachers are responsible for students learning some specific things. So there is an endpoint in guided improvisation in a creative classroom. Students can't just do whatever they want and then not learn physics, or not learn math, or not learn this second language that you're attempting to teach them. The way learning sciences researchers think about this process is as a learning trajectory, which you could think of as a river with river banks. And the children, all of the learners, are going down the river, but the river is wide and broad and different children, let's say they're in canoes, maybe going all over the place along the river. Some of them may be going down the left side, on the left river bank, some may be going down the right side, some may be going back and forth in a zigzag fashion down the river. So the river is the conceptual material in that subject. That's appropriate for that age level. It's sixth grade physics, or force and motion, let's say. And in creative classroom, students can take different pathways through the learning trajectory. The role of the teacher is to essentially build the river bank, right, in such a way that it guides all of those learners most effectively toward the intended learning outcome, even though all of them may be taking different paths. So each child, in a canoe, let's say, is taking an essentially improvisational zigzagging path down the river, but they all by the end of the day get down river to the same river bank. And that's the magic of creative teaching and learning. That's the magic of guided improvisation, where each learner is learning through active construction of their own knowledge, but they're all also being guided down the learning trajectory down the river to the intended learning outcome, which is a form of deeper conceptual understanding. The way you develop a creative classroom with effective guided improvisation is that you use a curriculum that's based on open-ended problems. Students are presented with complex problems. It's sometimes called project-based learning or problem-based learning, where the key components of this kind of teaching are that you give the students a problem or a design challenge of some sort. And it's open-ended where students have to explore the problem, and they may all explore the problem in different ways, or take different pathways toward a solution. So that's how you start in project-based learning and guided improvisation in a creative classroom. It's starting with a problem where a design challenge, and then students explore the problem. That's where they're active participants in their learning. They're engaging in exploration, and they're trying to find solutions to the problem. There may be multiple different solutions to the problem, right? There's no one right answer. It's more effective if students, as they go down this learning trajectory, it's more effective if they create tangible products along the way. Something that everyone can see that addresses the problem or that solves or works towards, let's say, one part of the potential solution. You bring this into the classroom, they share it with the teacher, and with the other students, and having this tangible product there serves the function of mediating the conversations between the teachers and the students in a way that researchers know actually enhances their learning of this deeper conceptual understanding. So these tangible products, you could think of as prototypes, perhaps, and they are presented frequently for a kind of critique, let's say. Of course, constructive feedback, and that's also the role of the teacher in the creative classroom. You are acting as a guide through this process, and many educators will have heard this famous saying, which you need to move from being a sage on the stage to a guide on the side. And that's exactly what we've been talking about, right? The sage on the stage is instructionism, and the guide on the side is guided improvisation. So guided improvisation really does require these open-ended problems. Now, contrast to the open-ended problem with a well-structured problem. Well-structured problems are often used in classrooms by teachers, because they fit pretty well into an instructionist's school. In a well-structured problem, there really is only one pathway to the solution, and there's only one correct answer. When students solve that type of problem, they do not develop creative knowledge, they do not develop the ability to be creative. So I'm going to contrast now the well-structured problems, which don't lead to creativity with the kinds of open-ended problems that do allow students to actively construct an improvisational pathway down this learning trajectory. In a well-structured problem, students are given all the facts that they need at the beginning, right when you give them the problem, you say, here's all the information you need to solve the problem. In a well-structured problem, some things are unknown or uncertain. Students don't have all the knowledge at the beginning, and in fact they don't know which knowledge exactly they're going to need to know to get to the solution. So part of what they're going to be doing is seeking out knowledge. In a well-structured problem, the goal is clearly stated. Everyone knows exactly where they're going, and what it's going to look like when they're successful. In an open-ended problem, the goal is vaguely defined. Students don't know exactly what it's going to look like, and by the way that can be very frustrating. For students, students like everybody else don't like ambiguity, they are going to ask for more specifics, I don't know what you want me to learn, I don't know what you want me to do. Teachers are going to hear that when you're trying to teach in this way, but it's important that in an open-ended problem, the goal is vaguely defined. In a well-structured problem, you give the students all of the relevant parameters ahead of time. In an open-ended problem, some of the important parameters have to be discovered along the way. And by parameters, I mean the sort of constraints of the problem or the characteristics of the solution that have to be met. You don't know them all at the beginning, and again this can be frustrating for students. In a well-structured problem, the rules and the principles that you need to solve the problem are presented ahead of time. You might even get a handout, right? Here's everything you need to know to solve this problem. That's a well-structured problem, and that gets you back to instructionism. In contrast, in an open-ended problem, students need to figure out what is going to be necessary to solve the problem, what information, what techniques, what methodologies, they don't know ahead of time. A well-structured problem there is one correct solution, and everyone needs to get to that one solution. In an open-ended problem, there are multiple possible solutions. So different students, or let's say student groups, if you have them working in groups, they're going to come to different solutions to the open-ended problem. And in a well-structured problem, there's a linear path to the solution. You're basically going straight down the learning trajectory, and that does not get you to creative knowledge. In an open-ended problem, there are many possible solution paths. You take this improvisational, wandering zigzag path through the learning trajectory. Everyone ends up down the river at the end point of your journey and your canoes, but you get there in different ways. You need open-ended problems for this type of pedagogy. The challenge for teachers, I mean this is really hard to do. It's very hard to teach this way, especially when you contrast it with instructionism. I mean it's hard teaching it in any way, getting up in front of a classroom with 20 or 30 students, but I believe it's harder to do guided improvisation. And the challenges include it's difficult to identify a good problem or a good design challenge. You can come up with a problem that you think is open-ended, but then once you start teaching with it, it turns out that it's pretty obvious how you get to the end point, and then all of the students take the same linear path. And you go back and say, "Oh my gosh, I thought I was developing an open-ended problem and it turns out it was actually a well-structured problem." Sometimes it's hard to know that when you start teaching, so you have to iterate from one time teaching the class to the next time. It's very hard to identify a good problem or a design challenge. And teachers who teach this way say that it takes them years to get effective at it, and that they hand craft their problems, their design challenges over the years. Another challenge is, "Okay, now you have a good design challenge, but now you need to, let's say, design the banks of the river, which I'm going to call "project constraints." These are the scaffolds that are going to guide the learner as they work on solving the design challenge. And it's very difficult to design the right kinds of project constraints. The difficulties are, one way you can make a mistake is that you have too many constraints. If you have too many constraints and all of the students again, end up taking this linear path down the river, down the learning trajectory. So that's too many constraints, and another way you can develop an ineffective project assignment is that you don't have enough constraints. And students, instead of going down a river, they're trying to cross a huge lake. They just don't know where to go over what they're doing. That's too few constraints. It's very hard to know before you teach a project the first time, whether you have too many or too few. So again, this requires a kind of iteration from semester to semester. It's difficult to support the creation of shared artifacts. Now remember, I said it's more effective if the learners come in with intermediate prototypes or something physical that they can show. It could be on a computer screen as well, but something external to their minds that they are showing or sharing with the class and the teacher. It's very hard to develop those kinds of assignments, like exactly what are the constraints of the interim assignment that I want my students to bring in. And then fourth, it's hard to guide students to give effective critiques of these interim projects or prototypes. I mean, that's a big part of this pedagogy is the kind of collaboration that's that come from open conversation about these intermediate artifacts. And that forms a type of scaffolding that guides students towards a successful completion of the project. The teacher is the one that has to guide students in how to do that. It's not easy to give effective critiques. So these are four huge challenges for teachers. The first one is identifying a good problem or design challenge. The second one is designing effective project constraints. The third one is supporting the creation of shared artifacts. And the fourth one is guiding students to give effective critiques. All of these are very difficult. It's almost impossible that you're going to get it right the first time. The teachers who teach in this way really do customize and hand craft these projects over the years. If you talk to a teacher like this who's been doing it for 10 years, they're going to have these hand crafted assignments that just took for, I mean really these are works of art, pedagogical art, right? These project assignments. This is what you need for guided improvisation. It is a challenge. The teaching paradox is the challenge of developing a project assignment that leads students down the learning trajectory in the optimal way. So that everyone has the chance to experience this improvisational open-ended process, but with the least inefficient, wandering or confusion. And that's a real challenge. That's why I call it the teaching paradox. There really is no one right answer. There are different ways to balance, structure and improvisation. And for me, that's the bottom line of solving the teaching paradox. We're really talking about students that are improvising as they go through our learning trajectory and then we're talking about the world of the teacher as the person who structures that improvisation. So what is the best way to structure the pathway? Students always are going to need this kind of improvisational freedom to construct their knowledge through an active learning process, but they also are going to need that structure that we're calling scaffolding, that guides them through the process. It's very difficult to come up with exactly the right balance. A second challenge is how and when should the balance change? Research shows that it's not effective if you keep exactly the right, the same amount of structure all the way through the process. The most effective way to develop a project assignment is that as students work on the assignment, you gradually release the amount of structure. You reduce the amount of structure from step to step. Now a lot of education researchers call this fading, fading the scaffold. So you start with a lot of structure as students start to work through the process. You gradually remove some of those constraints in parameters. So first of all, it's difficult to come up with the right balance of structure and improvisation. But now you have to think about changing that balance from day to day and from week to week as the students go through this process. So that's your second challenge. How do you balance that change? And then a third challenge is how do you help students manage this ambiguity? You have to have ambiguity in the assignment where students aren't going to have that opportunity to improvise their own path through the process. So you have to help students manage this ambiguity and this uncertainty. And that requires a certain type of classroom culture where students aren't afraid that they might be doing the wrong thing, or that they might be making a mistake. Or that they're going to get a bad grade because they're not doing what your expectations are. So you need to help students manage this ambiguity and this uncertainty. And this can be a challenge for teachers especially because it is also ambiguous for the teacher. You don't know exactly what's going to happen because each student and each student group are going to be taking different paths. You don't know when is the right time to fade the scaffold to reduce the amount of structure. So it's an ambiguous situation for the students but also for the teacher. And we know from psychological research that when you're in an ambiguous in an uncertain situation, what that leads to is anxiety. And for the students it can lead to anxiety and frustration because they're not getting to the answer right away. And they're not sure if they're getting closer to the answer or if they're taking the right path way through. It's also ambiguous for the teacher. So this requires a pretty strong, pretty confident teacher but it also requires a lot of experience and practice. This is the sort of teaching that really needs to be learned on the job with the very effective mentoring from more senior teachers who have become successful at doing this themselves. But this is the teaching paradox. There really is no one way to resolve it. That's why it's a paradox. But this is the challenge of guided improvisation. It's basically how do you balance structure and improvisation in the classroom. Well here's my take home message. We've learned that students need to develop creative knowledge to be creative in a discipline. So creativity is domain specific. And that means you have to teach differently in every subject. Creativity is the responsibility of everyone in a school. It's not only something that the arts teacher takes care of or the theater teacher. But every subject has to be taught differently. You can't use instructionism and teach shallow knowledge and expect students to be creative in your discipline. It doesn't matter how much art education you get. It's still not going to overcome the wrong kind of knowledge that you've been learning in instructionism. So take home messages. First of all, that teachers need to teach deep knowledge in every subject. It's physics, it's math, it's history, it's a second language. You need deep knowledge in every subject. The shallow and superficial knowledge we know from my questions at the beginning of the episode, you forget it right away. Retention is horrible. And you never develop that kind of understanding that's at the top of Bloom's pyramid. You never develop that kind of understanding the deeper conceptual understanding. So you are never prepared to be creative. So that's my second lesson is that you need to teach all levels of Bloom's taxonomy together. You can't just teach the lowest level of the facts and procedures and then gradually work up the pyramid towards the creative knowledge. What happens is you never get to the top of the pyramid. Everyone ends up only teaching facts and procedures. And then you get to the assessment and multiple choice at the end of the year. The students may do well on it because that assessment isn't assessing the things at the top of the pyramid. So you need to teach all levels of Bloom's taxonomy together on top to bottom. The third lesson, the third take home message is the way you plan for the classroom. Teachers need to do planning less than planning and of course that's something you learn when you go to your teacher preparation program that you need to have a plan before you go into the classroom. A lot of teacher education programs really focus on what I view as overly structuring the plan in a way that removes all ambiguity and uncertainty. And especially if you're a beginning teacher you like this. It's a difficult job. You don't know exactly what you're doing yet. So ambiguity is stressful for you the same way it is for the students. You need to learn how to plan of course. Lesson plans are absolutely important because those are the scaffolds. Those are the scaffolds that guide those are the structures that guide the improvisation of the students. But it's a different conception of less than planning because what you're doing is you're planning for improvisation. You're developing a plan for your classroom and within that plan you have anticipated room for the students improvisation. So in a way your lesson plan is the banks of the river right it's the structure that's guiding the improvisational process. And then the fourth take home message is that when you come into the classroom that you teach using guided improvisation as your pedagogy where instead of the sage on the stage you are the guide on the side. So you're teaching in a different way in the classroom to make it a creative classroom. So those are the four take home messages. First you need to teach deep knowledge in every subject. You can't leave creativity just for the arts. The second take home message is that you need to teach all levels of Blooms taxonomy together from the lowest simplest knowledge to the highest most complex knowledge. The third take home message is that you think about planning for a lesson in a different way. Lesson planning you develop a structure for your class but your structure has room in it for improvisation. And the fourth take home message is that your classroom practice is different. You are now using guided improvisation where you create a classroom where students have that freedom to improvise different pathways through the learning trajectory to their deeper conceptual understanding. It requires really a different set of interpersonal skills, different ways of talking with the students. And again it's one of those things. In part you can't learn that by sitting in a lecture hall. Teacher education program, it's one of those things that you really have to learn by doing. Guided improvisation gives students the deep knowledge they need to realize their creative potential. To foster creativity in students we need to teach every subject in ways that give them creative knowledge. The kind of deep knowledge that prepares them to think, to adapt, to make connections, to use that knowledge to solve real world problems. Creativity is based in a special kind of knowledge that I call creative knowledge. And a student won't get that knowledge if the classroom is instructionist. You can't lecture at students, you can't lecture creative knowledge and expect them to learn it. Every teacher in every classroom should aim to teach in ways that lead to creative knowledge. This is how you build the creative classroom. Thank you for listening to the science of creativity. 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