Alina BigJohny
EDUC 440
Creativity Crisis Reflection
Mountain climbing up the “rocks” in my closet, firefighting the fire “monsters” in my living room, and swimming across the “ocean” in my kitchen details my adventurous days as a child. Growing up, I was challenged, or even forced, to use my imagination daily in order to entertain myself. I did not spend my time playing video games or texting friends; if I wanted to have fun, I had to create it. Today children have the luxury of partaking in activities where the creativity production already exists such as in video games where the child’s job is to figure out how to beat the game. While these activities do allow children to use parts of their brain such as memory and critical thinking, creativity and imagination are thrown out the window. “The Creativity Crisis” by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, shows the devastating records of American’s creativity scores dropping over the last few decades. This article brings home the fact that students are struggling in new ways, because they no longer know how to think outside the box and create new ideas on their own. This fact is devastating to someone like me who can still create an hour long “snake” game out of a piece of piece of string and a friend, and as a teacher, it will be my job to try to rejuvenate the imagination in my students.
Bronson and Merryman’s studies of Torrance’s tests showed that American creativity scores are decreasing. Creativity is not simply something used to entertain a child but much more important than that. As said in Bronson and Merryman’s article, “A recent IBM poll of 1,500 CEOs identified creativity as the No. 1 “leadership competency” of the future” (45). Creativity consists of making new ideas and using these ideas to produce new things or products. Without creativity, how would the world continually produce new products and ideas such as the iPad or texting? I was shocked to read, “Around the world, though, other countries are making creative development a national priority” (45) while the United States is stifling creativity with its new technological advances and classroom testing mandates. To me, it seems as if other nations are using research and critical thinking to promote an important tool in their students- creativity!
It is important to recognize this difference in children today versus children in the past, because stifled creativity can be a major problem as far as the promotion of our nation goes. As teachers, knowing this information can help us realize the significance of creativity and we can then do our best to change the problem. While Bronson and Merryman conclude, “It’s too early to determine conclusively why U.S. creativity scores are declining,” (45) I can think of a few reasons that stand out quite prominently. At home, technology such as advanced video game systems, computers, and cell phones, do most of the thinking for children and therefore, they spend hours entertained by these technological devices instead of real playtime where they use their imaginations. However, the decline of creative outlets has even decreased in schools. With the rise of the standards movement and standardized testing, teachers no longer think they have as much time to allow students to create projects and ideas, whichentice creativity, but according to Bronson and Merryman, this is not true.
Being creative does not have to mean producing arts and crafts projects or doing elaborate research projects about interesting topics. Something as simple as analyzing a problem and producing solutions is creative, because it forces students to think outside of the box and come up with original ideas. Today, schools that revolve around project-based simulation, such as New Tech schools, are beginning to pop up. The National InventorsHall of Fame School, a middle school in Ohio, is one of these schools. This type of learning allows students to work together in order to find solutions to different problems and situations. The National Inventors Hall of Fame has seen much success, even “with as much as three-fourths of each day spent in project-based learning, Principal Buckner and her team actually work through required curricula” (47). The standards curriculum does not mean that we no longer have time to be creative with our students; it means that we, as teachers, have to get creative and find outlets for these students to learn and to create at the same time.
In my English classes, I find creative projects, collaborative work, and student choice vital. Because there are so many components within the writing and reading realm, mixing convergent with divergent thinking skills will be very plausible in my classroom. Activities such as having students come up with alternate endings to stories (divergent) and then working together to come up with the best ending and explaining why it is the best (convergent), will allow my students opportunities to use their creativity in useful and productive ways which still cover standards. Another idea is to stop in the middle of a conflict in a novel and have the students brainstorm all the different ways that the character could resolve the conflict. After reading which way the author chose, students would then decide which conflict resolution method would be best. Simple activities such as these still fit the curriculum, allow students to use convergent and divergent thinking, and have real-life significance.
While I do not agree with the hours upon hours that students today tend to spend in front of televisions, playing video games, and using computers, since there is nothing I can do about what students do with their home time, the least I can do is foster creativity inside my classroom. By reading Bronson and Merryman’s article, I realize not only the importance of creativity but also the fact that it is indeed declining in today’s youth. By allowing my students choice in the classroom along with problems to solve and solutions to find, they can not only learn new material and retain it longer through self-invention but they can also find creative outlets to reawaken their repressed creativity.