Creativity, Robinson, and Thinking Differently
As many pay tribute to Sir Ken Robinson, it is fitting to reflect on his ideas and what he brought to education, and to myself and eventually River Road.
Like most, I first discovered Sir Ken Robinson via his famous Ted Talk, seeing and hearing him passionately dissecting and lobbying for education reform, identifying students as individuals, with individual skills, talents, and forms of creativity. It allowed many of us in education to reflect on our assessment models and too, the importance of not placing students into a box, but rather, provide frameworks for exploration and growth in ways that aligned to their personality, and cognitive abilities.
At the time, it allowed me to think about course design as a vehicle, essentially driven by the student - where we as teachers provide the roads, rivers, obstacles for them to overcome. This meant that we stopped assessing students on whether they followed the directions, but rather on their thought processes and ability to navigate problems with innovative solutions. This is sometimes referred to as Agile Learning - but prefer to think of it as Agile Growth and Development.
By approaching education and assessment as a focus on growth and development, we immediately remove the sense that success is based on meeting a benchmark or more dangerously, the actual project outcomes (e.g. Music track, film). The Eureka moment came for me many years ago as a head of department at a Higher education creative arts provider, when I was called in to moderate a panel of teachers assessing a 3rd year creative arts project. Two teachers said it was a HD, one teacher said it should barely pass. I listened and viewed the work. It was indeed a very high quality piece of work, and so asked the ‘Barely Pass’ teacher what were their concerns, they said “the student hasn't learned anything”. It was evident that the student had been submitting the same high quality of work each trimester, but had hit a ceiling in regard to growth and development. Their creativity and use of imagination had stalled, or as Sir Ken Robinson has noted "I think of creativity as putting your imagination to work”. I had begun to understand the importance of evaluating a student's growth, over the student's outcome.
The above is easier said than done - with many disciplines struggling to adopt creative vehicles within their courses, but it’s also not about having a loose framework, or free-for-all education system. I noted a strong connection between what Robinson was saying to prof Pamela Burnards research on creative learning, where she defined the five steps of creative learning as:
Asking Questions
Making Connections
Imagining what might be
Exploring Options
Reflecting Critically
This thinking allows for disciplines beyond creative arts, to consider the importance in evaluating students' growth over outcome. I leave you with the following conflict to consider: the potential for a student receiving a HD for a failed project where the learning was immense, compared to a successful project where the learning is minimal. What would you prefer?