At Andrews Osborne Academy, a PK-12 co-ed independent day school with a 7-12 boarding program in northeast Ohio, we have become keenly interested in creative thinking -- the cognitive process that leads to creating a new and useful outcome. As I have written elsewhere, creative thinking is crucial to success in college and in the professional world -- and the set of skills that gives rise to creative thinking is simply not taught in many schools (see "Time to Assess for Creative Thinking").
Although the rhetoric of many schools describes a commitment to innovation, entrepreneurship, divergent thinking -- all of which illustrate creative thinking -- their students' experiences in the classroom frequently mitigate directly against these qualities. Innovation and divergent thinking require the thinker to be comfortable with ambiguity -- to believe that there are always multiple answers to a question or problem. In most classrooms, however, a student's grade is determined by the number of "right" answers s/he produces over the course of the semester or year. While the teachers of those classes -- and the school itself -- may claim to value much more than "right" answers, the grades the teachers (and therefore the schools) give the students are determined by how well students navigate the space of NON-ambiguity (clarity) and single-answer problems. This is true, by the way, at many schools that claim to be "progressive" and "innovative." The "credits" that the students earn -- the marks on the transcript -- are overwhelmingly predicated on the percentage of "right" answers the students have given while taking the various forms of assessment a teacher has designed.
This, I believe, is highly problematic. In her article "Where Curriculum and Creativity Meet," Elena Grigorenko describes the impact of "implicit" beliefs in the classroom. Specifically, she points out that students react to the implied value of behaviors. For example, if the teacher consistently rewards students who give the "right" answer with praise while never rewarding students who make comments that stray from the intended trajectory of the lesson, the students will adjust their behavior to pursue "right" answers and avoid "straying" from the main point. I suggest that many of our classrooms send this implicit message -- and for good reason! We only have so much time with our students each day -- and the demands of coverage require efficiency.
But, of course, there is a cost to this efficiency. The very behaviors we claim to value in our rhetoric -- the behaviors that will lead to innovation, out-of-the-box thinking, etc. -- we give more than just short shrift; we actually discourage them.
For a school to truly develop creative thinking skills in its students, it needs to have a clear valuation of those skills. And in schools, value = credit/grades. We can try to avoid this all we like, and many teachers do ("I wish we didn't even GIVE grades," teachers will often say). But without a transcript, our schools would not be viable. If we could not represent to other institutions (colleges, for example) how accomplished our students are (relatively speaking), we would soon go out of business. Grades are the currency with which we "pay" our students, even if the real value of the education has nothing to do with the grade. So if the school wants students to behave as if creative thinking matters, the school needs to take the initiative first! Schools need to assess for creative thinking, and incorporate the resulting scores/marks into grades on transcripts.
This is usually where I lose people. They're with me on the need to supplement our "critical-thinking heavy" curricula with creative thinking content. They can see that success in college and professionally requires a great deal more skill in adaptation and tolerating ambiguity than was ever the case in the past. But going as far as to evaluate these skills and assign a relative value to them as they are developing in students often causes my interlocutor to resist -- to say, "Well, you can't really assign a value to tolerating ambiguity, can you? How does one put a grade on creativity?" And so on.
Well, that is exactly what we are doing at Andrews Osborne Academy. We are working through the very tricky twists and turns of assigning relative value to creative thinking skills. It can be done (we're doing it). For those who are interested in trying this in their own classrooms, here are a few tips:
Begin by being clear about what skills you are evaluating. When I assess my students’ work on a creative thinking assignment, I will often identify three stages of "work": fluency, or the ability to generate a multitude of possible directions to go in (or ideas); divergent thinking, or how far outward from the center the thinker can take those ideas; and convergent thinking, or the clarity and cogency developed to render the new idea comprehensible and valuable (useful) to others. Being clear on the specific skill being evaluated helps enormously -- the teacher will feel like s/he is on much "firmer ground" in giving the student a specific score/grade.
Use a grading scale that is less granular than the typical A-F scale. If one uses +'s and -'s, the A-F scale has 13 different levels of relative achievement. And distinguishing among 13 different levels of proficiency -- even in a clearly defined skill -- is difficult. At Andrews Osborne, we are beginning with a three-point scale: 1 = "developing" (we can see that the skill is present to some degree and the student can be coached to improve in that area); 2 = "demonstrating" (the student is showing a reasonably proficient grasp of the skill); 3= "exceeding" (the student is going beyond what we would have expected from someone his/her age/stage).
Solicit student feedback on the process. For students, too, the prospect of getting graded on new criteria is anxiety-producing. Asking them about how clear the assignment/assessment was/is, or how taxing it is/was to complete, or whether the grade/score they received seems fair to them, etc. will lower their anxiety -- and provide the teacher with very useful information moving forward.
We are in the early stages of working through this dynamic at Andrews Osborne Academy. I hope to write more in the coming months about what we have learned and provide encouragement and (fingers crossed) guidance for others who want to make this same effort.