Martin Moran: Is 'Doing Less' the Key to Building Schools that Inspire Creativity?

In 2008, former vice president Joe Biden was asked to speak in front of a group of business leaders about the concept of value, specifically, business value. And in that talk, he said to them ‘Don’t show me your value statements, show me your budget, and I’ll show you what you value.’

“I think about this a lot, when it comes to creativity in schools and whether or not we design specifically for creativity.” Says teacher, Martin Moran. “I think about how so many schools have mission and vision statements, and when I see them, the same sentiment applies: Don’t show me your values, show me your student schedules, and I’ll show you what your school values.”

Moran recalls a past student of his, who was worried about writing an essay for college. He offered to help; she agreed and told him she’d email him sometimes so they could arrange a time to work on the essay together.

?“A week goes by, and I still don’t hear from her.” Says Moran. “One day I see her in the hallway and ask her about it, and she says ‘I can’t find a single hour to work on this essay’. I’m thinking she’s likely being hyperbolic, so we take a look at her schedule together, and I see that she’s got barely half an hour a day to do anything that’s her own, she’s so scheduled that she can’t possibly find an hour to work with her teacher on an essay.”

“What are we doing to our students that make them have schedules that are so tight and restricted, but also feel the type of pain this student was feeling?” Moran questions. “This is the world in which our students are living, and yet so many schools talk about the idea of building creativity. But what kind of creativity can happen with such a restricted schedule?”

And so, Moran began thinking about what we need to do to create better schools that foster creativity. “We need to design spaces that are expressly built around creativity, because right now our schools are data processing plants. The students show up, we feed them data, they return that data to us and we move on.”

So what should be the goal of our schools? Moran believes schools need to think about what it is that makes human beings worthwhile on the planet. Moran himself argues that it’s two things: “One of which is to create relationships and be emotional supports for one another. The second, is to be creative, to build things from nothing. To take ideas that are disparate, find connections and build things that were not there before, that are beautiful and useful. I think that’s what makes us who we are.”

While considering how to design a school that is expressly built around creativity, Moran came across an article in Harvard Business Review. The article stated that there is one factor that matters more than anything when building creative problem solvers in the workforce. And that factor is time.

“The more time they have, the more likely they are to build a creative solution.” Explains Moran. ?“However, even if you don’t have that much time, you can still build creative problem solvers if those people feel like what they’re doing is important, has a mission, and they’re connected to that purpose.”

That same article talked about the ways in which we kill creativity in our businesses. “One of which is, the people who are working there feel like the work is unimportant.” Notes Moran. “Second, if your workers are working on a fragmented schedule, with the article specifically referencing the idea of doing a multitude of things throughout the day, for about an hour each, with no connection between these tasks, this will also kill creativity.”

“Lastly, the workers feel distracted, and they don’t feel connected to a bigger purpose. I immediately thought how these things described my high school experience.” Says Moran. “These three things are defining most of the high school experiences in America. So, I set out to build a school to confront these challenges, built specifically to enhance creativity.”

Moran spoke to a lot of people about what it means to be creative in schools. And in doing so, he realised that he needed time on his own to process things, and found going out for runs helped him to work through his thoughts.

On one particular run, Moran came across a storefront window painted with the slogan ‘Do Less.’ “I saw these two words and I thought maybe there’s something to be had here. Maybe the key to unlocking creativity in schools comes down to these two words.”

Right now, we quantify schools by how much they do. Rigor in schools is defined by how many things we force adolescents to do every day, such as planning for collage. “We spend a huge amount of time in our schools today, talking about something that will happen after they leave.” Notes Moran. “Why are we focusing in on what happens next?” He questions. “Can we enjoy and appreciate and learn from the moment?”

Moran goes on to highlight the immense pressure placed upon students to memorize the prescribed curriculum, internalize it, and regurgitate it back. “Our schools today are defined in rigor in terms of how quickly they can put students on a hamster wheel and make them spin, and that faster we can spin on that wheel, the better our schools get ranked.” He describes.

“I don’t want to stop this wheel.” Moran Says. “I want to break this wheel. I believe our schools need to refocus themselves. They need to think less about the rigid curriculum and more about the responsiveness to their children.”

It is Moran’s belief that we need to build responsive systems that actually listen to the students, help them decide their own futures, and how we can help them get there. “We need to build schools that give students the autonomy and trust to design their learning path, but also have an adult with them to help them marry what they know they want in the future, with who they are now, and find a way to bring it together.”

“We need to build schools we systematically reward their teachers, not for the quickness with which they go through the curriculum, but with their ability to listen to, connect with, empathise with, and think about the needs of the students who walk into their classrooms every day, and then design, what those children need, and what they can do for them to help them become better people.”

Once again, Moran finds himself thinking back to that slogan: ‘Do less.’ “We’ve become so caught up in how much we do in schools. I think we need do less. We need to think about who these people are, who are walking into our classrooms, and how we can adjust our system to fit those people.”

Moran recognises that the problems in education are myriad and systematic. “But I think we can start by pledging to every student who walks through our door that we, as adults, entrusted with helping inspire the next generation of creative citizens, promise that we will listen to our students more, learn about them more, empathize with them more, and “do” less.”

Our obsession with rigor, and with doing as much as we possibly can in both school and workspaces, has become a Sisyphean task. With this in mind, how can we go forward to create schools, business and spaces that inspire creativity? How can we break the cycle of rigor, and instead build responsive work and learning spaces that allow creativity to flourish?

Written by Katie Wilson, EP Business in Hospitality