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Creativity Leads Learners

In the Daily Telegraph (Thursday, November 23, 2006, page 4) there is a review of School performances under the Ofsted regime. [This is a full formal inspection of every school in the UK and happens every three years. The reports are published on the web at *] One head teacher, Elizabeth Ward of Colchester County High, maintains creativity is the key to excellence. Let her speak for herself:

This is not a traditional grammar school. It is not regimented or restricted or restricting. ... Creativity and "thinking outside the box" are important. ... I never say we will help the girls reach their potential because we don't know what their potential is and nor do they. We urge them to try things out and take as many opportunities as possible to find out what they like and how far they can go.

It seems this head teacher espouses an emergent strategy for promoting excellence, rather than a prescriptive strategy. Ward seems prepared to let her pupils experiment (be personal scientists?) in her phrase "we urge them to try out things", to tap into their intrinsic motivation by finding out "what they like" and recognises the mystery of human potential as in "we don't know their potential and nor do they".

A prescriptive strategy would involve blue prints, plans, coercion and would demand dutiful compliance at all times. You must do this... (the pupil, wanting to be free and unconstrained, might want to do that) has all the overtones of Other-Organised Learning (OOL). This head teacher is confident her pupils will find their way for ward to their future and make themselves attain their potential.

This does fly in the face of teaching subjects and being subjected to them. Creativity works best when there is an infrastructure of basic resources (i.e. reliable) working under the inquiry of the creative mind and its uncertain processes (i.e. no result guaranteed).

Uncertain processes are a nightmare for the stereotypical administrator. They like oder and predictability. Nobody controls the English Language, yet it evolves with new words added from time to time by those that speak the language. Nobody is in charge of the English Language, or any other living language for that matter.

Similarly, no company set up the World Wide Web - it came into being because a volunteer force of programmers and enthusiasts committed to the uncertain processes of collaboration and creativity. There is the World wide Web Consortium that has to ensure technical standards are adhered to and changes to the Web are agreed. This is a modicum of control needed because of the technological component this communication medium. But the web has been allowed to evolve in a seemingly boundary free way. [For an objection to this read Who Contols the Internet? Goldsmith and Wu, Oxford Press, 2006]

The felt need to control a process flies in the face of the fact that many processes are not amenable to control. The administrative cast of mind wants total control of a process. Yet a learner working on his own ideas soon gets into a state of "flow" and controls his own processes. No administrator or administrative mind-set is required, except for issueing qualification certificates.

So I think Elizabeth Ward is onto something, for she believes creativity leads learrners to control their own learning-processes, and these learners often persist in those processes to see how far they can go. This is an important human reality.

Our organisations should recognise this human reality as such, and adapt themselvers accordingly, to harvest the benefits that arise from its adoption. They should not be happy to accept crrent non-inspirational eLearning practices which "having a form of learning but denying its power "( to paraphrase 2 Timothy 3:5) attenuate the creative and inspirational impulse.

What did Teresa Amabile say in her 1998 Harvard Business review paper How to Kill Creativity? If you want to destroy creativity, carry on doing what you are doing at the moment. The woory is that too many are doing that and too few, like Elizabeth Ward, are embracing creativity and its powerful emergent processes in personal learning.

OFSTED Outstanding Head espouses creativity

In the UK schools are formally inspected every three years and the resulting reports are published online. The Daily Telegraph, a UK daily newspaper, had this to say about the Headteacher's approach to getting the best out of her pupils:

This is not a traditional grammar school. It's not regimented or restricted or restricting. ... I never say that we will help the girls reach their potential because we don't know what their potential is and nor do they. We urge them to try things out and take as many opportunities as possible to find out what they like and how far they can go.

The phrase "we don't know what their potential is and nor do they" leapt out at me. So much intake to educational institutions is based on the quality and intelligence level of the intake that a phrase like "we don't know their potential" seems absurd. Yet this is a highly rated school, with students impressing government inspectors.