Innovation and technology in schools should be conversatinon that centers around activating human creativity. Creativity when I was growing up was assessments and synthesis of classroom learning presented on cardboard with hand-drawn diagrams, charts, and models made out of tongue depressors, toothpicks, folded paper, and Elmer’s glue. We don’t live in that era anymore. We don’t have to make models by hand; it’s still cool to have kids do that, but the design process, presentations, models, and experimentation can also be accessed on a Chromebook and printed on a 3D printer or Glowforge. As Seymour Papert, a pioneer in educational technology, wrote, “The role of the teacher is to create the conditions for invention rather than provide ready-made knowledge.”

Our students don’t have to know the Dewey Decimal System and stroll through the aisles of the library looking for books on the topic they’re researching; they have Google, they have the world’s collective knowledge at their fingertips. The real question becomes how we teach students to navigate that knowledge responsibly. Albert Einstein famously stated, “Education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think.” How do we teach students how to use this unlimited access to create original content, judge ethical, moral, and social dilemmas with an open mind, and support their thinking with research-backed solutions?

There’s quite a bit of tension between the use of technology to expand creative thinking or as an accelerator of curriculum and compliance. The latter is about speeding up the learning process to get through more curriculum. Creativity happens when we slow things down, break concepts apart, and look at problems from different perspectives and points of view. As Sir Ken Robinson observed, “Creativity is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.” In effect, creativity often requires the opposite of what many of our districts are trying to accomplish.

What if instead of test prep, we opened things up a bit? Let our classrooms breathe? Give our students some open-ended assignments, different ways to present their learning, promote the scientific process, trial and error, and just maybe allow students to have a choice about what they’re learning? John Dewey argued that “Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.” What if they were having fun? I’m having fun thinking about it.

Canva is an easy-to-use tool that promotes creativity and the design process. Students can present different iterations of thinking, prototypes, create vivid personalized visual presentations of their learning, and present what they’ve learned to their peers or a panel of experts. The ISTE Standards emphasize that students should “use a variety of technologies within a design process to identify and solve problems by creating new, useful, or imaginative solutions” (ISTE, 2016).

Making access to 3D printers a priority is an expensive choice, but it’s becoming more cost-effective, and students learn a number of skills in the design process, creating 3D digital models on their devices, and learning how to use modern tech to print 3D models of their designs. As educational researcher Mitchel Resnick notes, “The best learning happens when people are actively designing, creating, and experimenting.” It’s not test prep, it’s life prep—meaningful, relevant skills that can be immediately put to use in the real world of work, college, and building a business.

Technology is a tool; it’s not inherently creative, it’s 1’s and 0’s being processed through algorithms to create the images and platforms we manipulate on a screen. Creativity happens when the human brain has access to a diverse set of tools to work on a problem towards a proposed solution. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote that “Creativity is any act, idea, or product that changes an existing domain or transforms an existing domain into a new one.” It’s not about whether the solution is right or wrong, or what was produced as the end product; it’s about the process—connecting new neural pathways, missing the mark, and trying again.

We often harken back to the good ole’ days, back when most humans were factory workers or sitting in cubicles all day long. That’s not life; that subjugation is a prison sentence. Machines have taken over many of our repetitive manual labor jobs, as they should; the human potential is not reached in such environments. As futurist Alvin Toffler warned, “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” Our students are currently punching the clock at the learning factory every morning. They deserve better, we all do. Creativity is at the very heart of being human; it’s where we flourish, where we learn to work together and unite through shared problem-solving. This metric will never be measured by a standardized test or standardized systems of assessing teachers, schools, and districts.

 

References

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1996). Creativity: Flow and the psychology of discovery and invention. HarperCollins.

Dewey, J. (1938). Experience and education. Macmillan.

International Society for Technology in Education. (2016). ISTE standards for students. https://www.iste.org/standards

Papert, S. (1980). Mindstorms: Children, computers, and powerful ideas. Basic Books.

Resnick, M. (2017). Lifelong kindergarten: Cultivating creativity through projects, passion, peers, and play. MIT Press.

Robinson, K. (2011). Out of our minds: Learning to be creative (2nd ed.). Capstone.

Toffler, A. (1970). Future shock. Random House.