The Creative Classroom

When you live an online existence, birthdays are a major event. The usual congratulatory messages flood in from around the world and, inevitably, there is a gem tucked into the greetings stream. This happened to me recently. Word got out I had turned 60 and amid the flood of greetings a former student sent me this:

Not sure if you remember me (xxx xxx is my real name), but I was one of your awesome students at Humber a few years ago (ok more than a few) in the Multimedia Design program, and contributed to your book you were writing at the time because Flash and I had "a thing" for each other lol.. 

Just wanted to say "Hey!", see how you're doing and most importantly wish ya a Happy Birthday. You were/are THE cool instructor I always remember (that didn't give a shit or two what we said or how you explained things to us - just as long as we understood!) that gave me that drive I have today from going to Humber.

Honestly - Most memorable project: "Flesh of the Orange" where who ever made the smallest SWF from the ridiculous audio & image files you gave us, got the best mark... It really pushed us all to test everything possible, experiment and go beyond what we normally would to "just get by". I hope you're still presenting the students with crazy "rip your hair out till ya figure it out" style projects and REALLY wanna thank you for doing that with us! It comes to mind every time I'm faced with messed up requests/challenges at work now, and I'm just that much more successful in my career because of it.

Can't thank you enough.

(I'm not bullshitin' ya! hahaha) 

Hope you're more than well!

This really resonated with me because a while ago Adobe Education released a research paper “Creativity and Education: Why it Matters” which was, in essence, a call for the addition of formal Creativity courses into our curriculum. Adobe had commissioned an independent survey of 1,000 Americans who were college-educated and above age 25 to determine the importance of creativity in their business lives. What do these survey respondents have in common with my grad? It turns out the answer is “Quite a bit.”

The three findings in the survey that really caught my attention were :

• 78% said creativity is important to their career while only 57% thought so in college.
•  82% wished they had more exposure to creative thinking as students.
• 91% agreed there is more to success in school than focusing on course material.

The reason those findings leaped out at me is that I have suspected this for a number of years. Not being a “classically-trained” educator with degrees, a killer CV and research papers I could only go with my gut as I listened to teachers talk about what they teach. I couldn’t help but come away from many of these conversations and conference presentations thinking: “They sure know how to talk about it and think about it.”

This isn’t an indictment of the teaching profession. Lord knows teachers are under assault from all directions, but I can’t help but notice that the teachers held up as models of their profession are the ones who looked at what they taught, decided it wasn’t working, and got “creative” in presenting their subject.

For example, two history teachers in Toronto once made the news because they realized their approach to teaching Canadian history wasn’t working. Their students, being multicultural, weren’t relating to a history driven by White Anglo Saxon Protestants which had no relation to their family stories. These two guys turned the curriculum upside down by encouraging the students- Asian, Indian, West Indian – to tell their families’ stories in the context of assimilating into Canadian society. Brilliant. Canadian history and how it relates to “my story”. That is creative.

Strange as this may sound, I don’t believe, as the survey suggests, formally adding “Creativity 101” to a curriculum is going to work. The word “creative” is far too ambiguous. If you ask me what it means my answer will be “What do you want it to mean?” Formalizing what “Creativity” means suggests there is a generally accepted definition around which curricula can be constructed. Do that and creativity’s definition gets put in a maximum-security cell which runs counter to the ambiguity of the word.

I suggest, as teachers, our job should be, regardless of subject matter, to foster creativity not teach it. Why? That second finding is a pretty strong indication that teaching to the test, the book, Learning Outcomes or the course outline doesn’t work. It appears our grads see it while we don’t. There is a disconnect here.

Sir Ken Robinson summed it up neatly when he observed; “To be creative you have to do something.”

When that “something” is predictable – teaching to the test- then there really is no room to “do something” with what you have learned. When I delivered Digital Media lectures throughout China I usually expected 200 to 800 students and faculty to attend. It is always interesting to see the differing reactions between the students and the faculty. The students will see something I am presenting and immediately start talking about how they can do it using what they know. The faculty usually grill me about how I teach a certain technique or why I do it that way. For me the students are suddenly realizing they know a whole lot more than they gave themselves credit for and have become excited about the possibilities of what they are learning. The faculty, on the other hand, are looking for ways to foster creativity in their students and to challenge them in new ways. As one Dean said to me, “We are really great at a driving our students to do well on tests but we need to also teach them to think creatively.”

While I don’t have a clue how to put the disconnected Creative plug back in the socket I would like to start that conversation by sharing lessons I have learned and why my student sent me that note.

Lesson #1: Failure is an option.

Now that I have used the “Academic F-bomb” let me explain. Having spent over 40 years hanging around creative people I have learned they embrace failure as much as success. To them, failure is a learning opportunity with the primary lesson being: “I won’t to that again.” Even then, failure, or even a piece of it, is an opportunity to discover something new to explore. For others they come away from the experience- “Flesh of the orange” - realizing stretching their skills to the breaking point shows them they know more than they give themselves credit for. In that student’s class, easily 60% of the cohort had the project blow up in their face. Rather than focus on this “defeat” we spent a lot of time exploring what they learned from the experience – “I won’t do that again.” – and on the positive aspects of the experience.

Lesson #2: Encourage students to "cheat".

 Whether we care to admit it or not, our students are entering a world where collaboration in the workplace is a given. When asking my students to undertake a new project I encourage them to share what they have learned- or know- with others in the class. Obviously, there are limits to this, but I never ceased to be amazed by my students coming up with solutions I had never considered simply because they talked to each other or pointed each other to sources of alternate approaches to the problem. Again, this sharing of knowledge has always been a hallmark of creativity. The crazy thing is I learn as much from my students as they do from me.

Lesson #3: Embrace ambiguity.

 If there was one thing I refused to do was to directly answer the following questions: “Is this what you are looking for?” or “Am I on the right track here?” Answering yes to each of those questions- and their derivatives- puts them in that maximum-security cell because they are really asking “Will this get me a passing grade?” It struck me as rather interesting that my former student would mention this: It really pushed us all to test everything possible, experiment and go beyond what we normally would to "just get by". By framing assignments in an ambiguous manner – “Complete the project with the smallest possible file size.” – the student is now in a very unfamiliar place because he or she has no clue how small it can be and now must do some critical and creative thinking around the approach and asking an important question: “Is this the best possible solution?”

Lesson #4: Classrooms don’t have dimensions.

The classroom is not flat, flipped or distorted. I am not a huge fan of fads and this fascination among academics with the classroom, to me, has disaster written all over it. First, the class was flipped. Then it was flat. Then the discussion of what is meant by flat or flipped broke out with differing definitions and examples that were amorphous and often obfuscated by what I call “Academia Speak”.

I really don’t pay much attention to this stuff because I discovered something very interesting about my classroom several years ago: The classroom is wherever I am. Casual hallway conversations with students are teaching opportunities. Sitting in the student common areas with your tablet and chatting with a couple of students is a teaching opportunity. Answering a student question via email at 11:30 p.m. is a teaching opportunity. In fact, I do less teaching surrounded by the four walls of the room on my formal on-campus teaching schedule than I do elsewhere. For me, the definition becomes even broader when you take into account my speaking engagements, books, Training Videos, and tutorials. All are a simple extension of me being a teacher and they all show up in my classroom, which could be the room on my schedule, a lecture hall in China, a book or a LinkedIn Learning tutorial.

Lesson #5: It’s how you teach that counts.

We wouldn’t be teachers if we weren’t masters of our subject which is why what we teach is irrelevant. I do, however, spend a lot of time watching online lectures, TED talks, Conference videos and sitting in on industry seminars and presentations. Part of why I am there is to watch the teacher. Watch Jarred Ficklin talk about how sound can be seen - and you realize these otherwise drab subjects come to life based on how they are taught. The personality of the teacher comes through. There is a degree of engagement due to how the materials are presented in a rather creative manner.

Lesson #6: There is a world out there.

It drove me crazy when my students presented projects that had no relation to the world around them. Colors are wrong. Objects fall in straight lines. Type is boring. My advice to them is simple: Get your eyes off of the screen and actually watch stuff.” See something interesting? Pull out your phone’s camera and either shoot it or grab some video. I’ll go outside, pull a leaf off of a tree and drop it in front of them. Then ask them to describe what they saw. We’ll discuss how that leaf falls and what happens before a leaf falls off of a tree branch. This is all stuff going on in the world around them and they are missing it.

For me, my students spend far too much time working with computers and computers, by their very nature, foster linear thinking. It has nothing to do with real life. Real-life isn’t linear. We don’t walk in a straight line down the sidewalk. Snowflakes don’t just drop onto the ground. My family’s Canadian History is different from my neighbor’s. Which is why I suspect that 91% of the respondents to that survey said there is more to success in school than focusing on course material. Being able to experience the world around you and bringing that into your work simply isn’t in the text or on the test. Yet experiencing the world and bringing those experiences to bear on a problem is the essence of creative problem solving, regardless of what we do, throughout our personal and professional lives.

Lesson #7: It is about “me”

There is a certain intensity that students exhibit when learning new material in the context of their experiences. One of the projects I had my students complete is an interactive presentation that takes a Lego toy’s assembly instructions and makes those instructions interactive. They have all played with Lego at some point in their lives and the project resonates with them because it has something to do with “me”. Those history teachers were so successful because the project had a serious “me” factor: How “my” family fits into Canadian history.

My students learn and apply the concepts of UX and UI design, write code, user testing, project management and all of that other stuff in the course of the Lego project because they have something at stake – “My” Lego project. These esoteric concepts become real and, most important of all, they discover that being creative is actually fun.

Do I think creativity can be taught? Nope. The word is far too ambiguous. Instead, maybe a little trickle-down creativity is the route to follow. If we can get creative in how we present our lessons- and there is a real fine line between teaching and entertaining- then our students will, in turn, understand the importance of creativity in everything they do. If we foster a creative classroom, students will quickly learn there is more than one solution to the problem and that solution is not always the most obvious solution.

I am going to finish this rumination with the end of the note from my former student. As teachers, we really don’t get enough of those moments that validate the importance of what we do. I call them “Magic Moments and I am going to share one with you:

“I hope you're still presenting the students with crazy "rip your hair out till ya figure it out" style projects and REALLY wanna thank you for doing that with us! It comes to mind every time I'm faced with messed up requests/challenges at work now, and I'm just that much more successful in my career because of it. 

Can't thank you enough. …. so I figured it would be nice for you to hear from a now successful former student on your birthday of how you made a difference in his life BIG cheers to that.”