Common Core: The Creativity Challenge
Teachers and students are at a loss of creativity in their classrooms due to Common Core’s limiting standards. While Common Core poses many challenges for teachers and students, the most interesting one is how creativity is affected.
Creativity is lacking among young students across the nation and has been trending negatively since the implementation of Common Core. Kyung Hee Kim, a creativity researcher at the College of William and Mary, has analyzed the results of the Torrance test to confirm this idea. According to Kim, the Torrance test is “an exam that measures an aspect of creativity called divergent thinking. In this test, kids might be shown two circles and asked to draw something out of these shapes”. Standardized tests with multiple choice questions do not allow for open-endedness like the previous example does.
Lack of creativity is the issue at hand here.
According to Ronald Beghetto, associate professor of educational psychology at the University of Connecticut, creativity is one of the essential 21st-century skills acknowledged as vital to personal and organizational success.
Common Core emphasizes right and wrong answers and standardized tests. Because of these standards, students are taught to focus on the one correct answer instead of divergent thought, according to Beghetto. So, one can say there is a link between Common Core and the shortage of creative minds in the primary education system.
Beghetto and his colleagues James Kaufman and John Baer agree that creativity and the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI) seem paradoxical because “creativity is thinking outside the box, and the Common Core could be thought of as the box itself”. Standards are essential for establishing clear objectives for student learning, but when they inadvertently narrow what strategies teachers can use to teach them, they become troublesome.
The absence of creativity in problem-solving is shown to limit student success.
According to Robert Sternberg, professor of Human Development at Cornell University, “like any habit, creativity can either be encouraged or discouraged. The main things that promote the habit are a) opportunities to engage in it; b) encouragement; and c) rewards when people think creatively.” If teachers and schools do not supply the opportunities, encouragement, or rewards, then students can lose out on developing creativity in the classroom.
Teachers are the ones who can cultivate this habit of creativity in their students despite straightforward standards, but without the proper instruction on how to encourage creativity in the classroom, teachers struggle to stray from just teaching the strategies their students will be tested on.
The ability for students to take intellectual risks in school is essential for learning. Sternberg states that “creative people take sensible risks” but sometimes fall short of success. This failure is deemed as unfavorable in the classroom when this can cost students their expectation of their scores or grades, and thus the unexpected lower grades act as a punishment for students who try to be original thinkers.
Speaking from personal experience.
While I was in elementary school, I knew that if I didn’t solve a math problem the way my teacher was looking for, points would be deducted from my grade on the test. Therefore, even if I could solve the problem a different way, my fear of a lesser grade deterred me from doing so.
In hindsight, this fear has stayed with me throughout my schooling. As a college student, I sometimes find I’m hesitant to take creative risks when I can follow what is more comfortable to me: what is expected of me by the guidelines the professor sets. The way in which risk-taking and creativity were involved in my education as an elementary school student is memorable to me because of how I interact with situations which call for these traits.
I understand that guidelines are important to effectively test if someone has learned the necessary elements to, for example, write a persuasive paper (writing in paragraph form, using credible sources, etc.), but when they limit how someone can convey their knowledge in other scenarios in which more creative freedom can be allowed, then standards become problematic.
How can we let creativity wane in school systems during a student’s formative years, when we know certain school practices can affect them years later?
As advocates for a holistic education, we must urge those in education reform to rethink what students should be learning and consider what will shape them into successful individuals when their academic career is behind them: skills such as creativity that can influence they interact with the world around them.
