Creative Thinking: An Undervalued Teacher Resource?
Creative thinking is a top ability that teachers and their employers often overlook.
Teachers overlook their need to create and express novel ideas because they are busy, stressed and overworked.
The people that employ teachers overlook the need for teachers to create and express novel ideas because they both "feel and deal in stress", and because the bureaucracies that they work for cherish a complaint-free, no-risk environment.
Of course, new ideas involve risk. Therefore, new ideas are considered to be disruptive, risky, anti-harmony, anti-authority, "anti-my-way" forces that need to be squelched by some folks who are in charge.
If Teachers don't Protect their Creative Freedom, Who Will?
Teachers must advocate for themselves if they wish to protect their creative freedom.
Yes, unfortunately, this sometimes means relocating to another campus or school district. Some bureaucratic jurisdictions are so restrictive that teachers cannot, in good conscience, remain working there. Children in some campuses and districts are so poorly served that just drawing a paycheck becomes untenable.
Fortunately, in most employment venues, teachers are free to create and express, as long as they remain under the "complaint-driven" radar.
Creative Principles
Here are some strategies for developing an "all that you can be" creative, self-expressive environment…
- Do what is important, and find a way to defer urgent (but unimportant) tasks
- Teachers need "stress-free" time to think in higher-order ways, incubate ideas, and reexamine possibilities
- The "never-stop the action" daily routines that teachers face are poor environments for thinking and innovation
- Motivate yourself to find your passion and desire, your personal stamp of self-expression
- See each step (especially the steps that collapse under your feet) as learning opportunities and stepping stones
- Communicate your successes (in subtle ways) to your supervisors to gain their confidence in your creative ideas
- Balance your ideas with the ideas of others
- Creativity is kind and caring. Empathy and understanding improves most creative expression, while different viewpoints and vantage points enhance most creative ideas
- Learn to view ideas as dependent, independent and interdependent on other ideas
- Ideas do not flourish in a vacuum, but neither do ideas blossom in an overly compressed environment
- Relationships are important, associations, branches, Webs spawn other associations, branches and more Webs
- Cross pollination, cross fertilization, planning and accident, meticulous structure and mutation, control and serendipity…what surprises most about creativity is the unpredictability of the outcome
- Why didn't I think of that "simple solution" is as much a hallmark of creativity as as an "earth-shaking, cutting-edge breakthrough in avant-garde technology
Self-Care: Caring for Students
Teachers who take care of themselves enjoy the most favorable position for helping their students.
Setting the stage for creative planning and creative problem solving requires the same timing, requires the same props, and requires the same direction and mind set as taking care of yourself.
Students learn better, more, faster, more thoroughly in the same stress-free environment that enhances memory and increases creativity.
Of course your students deserve the advantage of your creative ideas…applied to your instruction and applied to your life.
Create the space where creative ideas flourish and learning just about takes care of itself.
Your creative potential is vast, never over-tapped, always replenishing, and your greatest resource.
Praise yourself for all the creative ideas you have generated so far, and ever more remarkable ideas will bubble up, even erupt geyser-like, to benefit everyone.
Be ready!
