Creativity and Curiosity: My Thoughts- Special Post #12A

I do believe that schools in the United States inhibit creativity/curiosity in the classroom today. There are several conditions that contribute to this:

• Need for success, limiting risk-taking or pursuit of unknown.
• Conformity to peer group and social pressure.
• Discouragement of exploration,  using imagination, inquiry.
• Differentiation between work and play (e.g., learning is hard work).
• Disrespect for fantasy, daydreams.
• Reward systems.
• External locus of control.
• Need for closure and rigid time lines.
• Need for security and acceptance of product.
• Perfectionism.
• Low self-concept.
• Anxiety.
• Competition.

These are just a few, but in my opinion, there are a few that are more common than the others. I think that the need for success is the biggest. When I say this, I am referring to the need of the school. When the school's standardized tests scores are not where they need to be, children are taken out of other classes, such as art and P.E. and are doubled up on subjects where improvement is needed. Although these subjects are important in education as well, so is the ability to use imagination. 


There are things that we can do as teachers to facilitate creativity and curiosity.

• Provide an environment that is rich and varied in stimulation, safe, and accepting.
• Teach with materials and methods harmonious with each other and with the teacher.
• Delineate clearly and repeatedly the aims of this type of program.
• Allow free interplay of differences.
• Make environment and materials friendly and nonthreatening, thereby allowing disagreement and controversy without hostility (this allows children to engage freely in behavior underlying creativity).
• Reduce anxiety in classroom, especially that created by teacher.
• Handle differences as confrontations, not as conflicts.
• Find integrative elements in differences.
• Allow unifying concepts to emerge.
• Allow individuation and differentiation within the unity.
• Foster positive change in directions congruent with student's predilections in cognitive and affective areas.
• Provide situations that present incompleteness and openness.
• Allow and encourage lots of questions.
• Produce something, then do something with it.
• Grant responsibility and independence.
• Emphasize self-initiated exploring, observing, recording, translating, inferring, testing inferences, and communicating.
• Provide bilingual experiences resulting in development of greater potential creativity due to the more varied view of the world, a more flexible approach to problems, and the ability to express self in different ways that arise from these experiences.
• Allow rather than control.
• Be receptive.
• Value and model intuitive behavior.
• Give opportunities to investigate ideas of successful, eminent people who used intuitive processes.
• Give opportunities to try out intuitive behavior (e.g., in problem-solving).
• Treat the child with respect and allow freedom to explore the universe.
• Create an atmosphere with really good music, books, and pictures as a natural part of the child's world.
• Treat ideas and questions respectfully.
• Respect the child's privacy.
• Value the unusual, the divergent.
• Help the child learn by mistakes.
• Avoid sex-role stereotyping.
• Encourage self-expression.
• Teach the child to look and really see.
• Help the child learn to trust the senses.
• Permit the child's own creativity to emerge.

I truly believe that if these things were done in every classroom, that the rate of "killing curiosity" would decline. There are many jobs that require creativity to a certain extent, teaching being one of them. When you are a teacher, especially at the elementary level, you must not only be creative, you must inspire creativity and curiosity. It is our job as future educators to want to do this. 

Elspeth Bishop is a writer for InGoodMeasure.net. She was born and raised in Colorado and now enjoys skiing, playing tennis, and hiking in the mountains of Salt Lake City, Utah.Find out more about Elli through Google+