What is Creativity?

Last week, during the “cold day” our administrative team got together and discuss the 4-C’s – Critical Thinking, Collaboration, Creativity and Communication.  They got into 4 groups and each one generated a blog post about what their “C” meant for Saline Area Schools.  Here is the post about Creativity produced by: Joe Palka, David Raft, Betty Rosen-Leacher, and Marie Schluter. 

What is Creativity?  How do you know if you are Creative ?  Why is Creativity important? As the four of us sit here and ponder those questions, we realize maybe we could be a little more creative ourselves.  Sure, we all have the ability to be creative in our specific venues of our life, but is that enough anymore?  Author Daniel H. Pink in Forbes Magazine had some interesting thoughts. Pink foresees a power shift between left-hemisphere leaders and right-hemisphere leaders at the executive level. He believes that focusing more strongly on developing right-hemisphere potential, and corresponding values like intuition, creativity and empathy, is essential, and thinks the time has come for talented people with these attributes to take up leadership positions.  This is an example of how creativity transcends our future educational and business world.

Sir Ken Robinson talks about the importance of creativity in education and how we are limiting our students in this area.  He discusses how schools are narrowing and continues to narrow creativity based on the standardized testing among our students.   We discuss the importance of being creative but, our curriculum and focus takes that away.  After listening to Sir Ken Robinson it is clear that we need to continue to push the efforts of being creative in our schools.  Take time to view  Sir Ken Robinson, Why is Creativity Important in Education?

If we want to learn more about creativity we need to look at our children… do our schools teach creativity right out of our students? We can learn a lot from our children, how do we know? There are three takeaways we can learn from this video by Kid President:

1. It’s okay to make mistakes, failure is the backbone of creativity
2. We are not alone in this adventure, the more we work together the more creative we can be
3. Kids are our most creative inventors, they aren’t afraid to try anything. As adults we need to stop telling them it might not work, you’re right it might not, but it just might and what can we learn from the mistakes?