Making Creativity Accessible: Practical Pathways for 21st Century Learning

Creativity is a mindset, and every student can tap into it — no special talent required.

DR. JEN GOWERS
Instructional Specialist

When we picture creativity, we often imagine talented dancers floating across a stage or gifted painters filling a wall with flashes of incredible color. Our CPET team believes that creativity is the beautiful capacity to make something from nothing, and our research-based Global Mindset Framework — which explores 21st century skills across five mindsets, each articulating capacities that research suggests will be the most valuable and valued skills in the future — centers a Creative mindset as one of five essential areas to nurture in students. 

All classrooms can be hubs of creativity when we reframe being creative as using our mindset, or how we’re seeing things, as opportunities to make something new. If this is exciting to you and you’re already doing it, share widely with your colleagues to make your practices more common! If this is new to you or sounds challenging to include in your every day, here are a few simple, practical ways to get creative in your classroom. 

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Visual Thinking Strategies

​Most content areas involve some kind of visuals to examine, and Visual Thinking Strategies offers a quick, clean framework that sparks an open-ended discussion about an image that often generates ideas among a group of students. Put up an image, and ask the three questions below (with wait time and opportunities for young people to respond in between):

• What is going on in this picture?
• What do you see that makes you say that?
• What more can we find? 

This simple strategy has young people making claims (what’s going on in this picture?) and supporting them with evidence (what do you see that makes you say that?) every time you use it. Even more — it encourages divergent thinking and alternative interpretations (what more can we find?) in an open-ended way that keeps students excitedly talking until you choose to wrap up the discussion. 

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Choice Boards

​Agency is a powerful motivator for young people. Menus, or Choice Boards, provide opportunities for students to select how they’d like to show what they know. For instance, after reading a novel together as a class, a Choice Board might include options such as:

• Writing an essay
• Creating a Canva presentation
• Eulogizing one of the characters
• Writing a letter to the author
• Engaging in a Fishbowl discussion with other students
• Creating a video about the novel

or many, many other creative ways to demonstrate learning. 

A modification of Choice Boards, Menus, allows you to keep the traditional assessment core, if you need everyone to complete one common assessment. In this modification, everyone needs to choose the main dish, or the entree, but there is choice for the appetizer and dessert. For example, if, after reading a novel, it’s important that everyone complete an essay about it, make the essay the entree and allow choice in smaller assessments, like sketching your favorite scene from the novel or painting your favorite setting as an appetizer and making a soundtrack to accompany the novel or dressing and acting as the author as a dessert. Choice Boards encourage engagement, autonomy, and creativity and open up ways of showing mastery. 

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Acting / Improvisation Strategies

​One great way to learn an entire toolkit of these strategies is through our Literacy Unbound initiative, which works with students and teachers to reimagine challenging, classic texts through multiple modalities, allowing greater access to and understanding of texts.

A few tools we use which you can try right now: 

• Character Panels: students act as/play various characters in the novel (or historical time period, etc.) and interact with each other in character, and/or sit at the front of the room and answer questions from the readers (other students/the audience).
• Polaroids: students create an image of a concept or process (in any subject area!) in small groups, entering the image one person at a time, so the picture develops slowly (like a Polaroid) and the observers/audience (other students) caption it, or ask questions.
• Teach Someone Else: students create a short skit through which they teach key concepts and/or vocabulary of a given topic (in any subject area). It’s especially helpful if students imagine their audience for the skit as younger students who need to learn about the topic since this prompts them to distill and streamline what might otherwise be complicated to understand (bonus: if you have access to younger students, they can actually go and teach them the concept or topic)!

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​Creativity is a process of using our original thought or our imaginations to make something new. You don't need special gifts or talents — everyone can be creative! In our classrooms, we can nurture this belief by giving students space to explore their natural creativity, helping them develop skills that prepare them for the 21st century.

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