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Valuing student creativity

What are the ultimate aims of K-12 education? In our current era of high-stakes testing and accountability in the United States, many people might answer "helping students and the schools they attend achieve high scores on standardized assessments." Yet if we think about it, this goal falls far short of encompassing many of the reasons parents send their children to school and taxpayers support them in this effort. All parents want their students to learn and be prepared for the challenges they will face in the future as adults and fulltime members of the workforce (in some capacity) and society in general. Most will acknowledge, if pressed, that the work environment and challenges of the future are difficult if not impossible to predict with certainty. Given these realities, many people can agree that helping students LEARN TO THINK more critically is a key educational goal.

So how do we determine if educational environments, tasks, and experiences help students develop their thinking skills? Bloom's Taxonomy was first proposed in the mid 1950s to motivate educators to focus on three different domains: the affective, psychomotor, and cognitive. Many people think of Bloom's Taxonomy and its well known pyramid of levels in only the cognative domain, but it is important to remember it includes affective and psychomotor domains as well:

Often in K-12 classrooms, lessons and their related student outcomes focus predominantly on the lower knowledge and comprehension levels of Bloom's Taxonomy. Lower-level recitation of facts and details should form a part of the cognitive learning landscape for students, but to truly help them learn to THINK more critically and with more depth, lesson outcomes must focus on higher levels. Traditionally, using Bloom's taxonomy, that meant helping students analyze, synthesize, and evaluate ideas and information. If students reached the "evaluation" level of thinking as a result of a teacher's lesson or assigned task, those students were considered to have achieved the ultimate level of cognitive development for the given context.

In 2001, however, Lorin Anderson and David Krathwohl proposed a revision to Bloom's taxonomy that has important implications for learners, particularly in our era of web-based read/write tools. Anderson and Krathwohl placed THE CREATION of new knowledge (including knowledge products) at the top of their taxonomy:

This may sound reasonable, but I think it is actually a revolutionary proposal for most K-12 educational settings. Many adults seem to accept as an article of faith that educational systems exist primarily to transmit knowledge from the old to the young. The purpose and mission of students in schools is believed (fallaciously, I contend) to be sitting quietly, reading their assigned materials, participating in class discussions on cue, and dutifully completing assignments and tests which focus primarily on the knowledge/comprehension level of Bloom's taxonomy. To summarize rather bluntly, students are expected to "sit and get" and regurgitate accurately upon demand. (We generally call those moments "tests.")

I think more educational constituents (broadly defined to include not only educators and administrators, but also parents, board members, and other community members) should be challenged to think about cognative learning outcomes through the lens of Anderson and Krathwohl's revised pyramid of the cognitive domain of Bloom's Taxonomy. If this happened, perhaps we would value STUDENT CREATIVITY more highly that we do in schools today, where the suggestion that students should be remixing and authoring original content via blogs, digital stories, and collaborative wikis strikes many as fanciful idealism at best, or dangerous heresy at worst.

How do we help parents, school board members, and community members in general expand their vision of what teaching and learning should mean in the 21st Century? I think a big part of this answer depends on LEADERSHIP. We need visionary educational leadership that understands and effectively communicates the importance of emphasizing student CREATIVITY and the creation of original (and remixed) knowledge products. Absent this leadership, we're likely to continue with the short-sighted focus on summative assessment that defines many K-12 classrooms and educational environments today.

*Additionally, CREATIVITY IS FUN! And it while we are having FUN that we learn the most.

Posted by Wesley Fryer on December 16, 2006 12:34 AM | Permalink