Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes, and having fun.
Mary Lou Cook
We are living and teaching in a world of ever-standardizing curricula, where students have fewer and fewer opportunities to inject their own creative sparks into their work. For those of us fortunate enough to teach outside of the confines of boxed programs and mandated pacing guides, we have an increasingly vital role to play in preserving playful and creative spaces for young people.
Whether you lead a group of students in a creative field or are simply looking to infuse more creative opportunities into your learning space, keep reading to learn strategies for enhancing the degree of creative freedom you offer to students.
1. Provide parameters, not firm requirements to make sure your tasks are truly open-ended.
When designing and presenting STEM challenges, we want to find the sweet spot between providing no direction whatsoever and offering a prompt so specific that it restricts creativity. Students often flounder and simply spin their wheels when no parameters are provided, but responses become increasingly cookie-cutter when projects require them to check off too many boxes. Criteria and constraint lists work well for defining a task, but make sure you ask yourself whether each item is truly necessary to include to produce successful products.
Here’s an example from my “Supplies Up High” challenge:
Notice that the criteria and constraints clearly define the task – creating a free-standing tower that can support an apple without assistance – but don’t define rules for how students can use the school supplies (beyond not destroying them so I can reuse them with other groups!) Consider how this prompt would feel different if the criteria specified that the tower needed to use one of each material available or if it explicitly stated that students should be trying to build the highest tower possible – each additional layer provides just a bit more restriction on students’ potential creative solutions to the prompt.
A good litmus test is to carefully evaluate each potential criteria and constraint and ask whether it is truly essential for students to access the challenge and explore the concepts you hope they’ll discover.
2. Permit and encourage “loopholes.”
Hands down my favorite part of watching students engage in STEM challenges is the gleam in their eyes when they discover a “loophole” to the criteria and constraints for their projects. Their glee at “outsmarting” me is pure joy, particularly since I’m secretly rooting for them to do just that. Finding a loophole is a signal that students are thinking carefully and creatively about the established rules of the game and is a critical thinking behavior that I love to support. Whenever possible, I try to allow discovered loopholes; even if I am disappointed that a particular loophole goes too far, I adjust my criteria and constraints for future groups, but try to allow the current group to carry on unimpeded.
3. Use a Materials Buffet instead of pre-prepped supply kits.
A pre-prepped supply kit takes student agency out of material selection, as students get handed identical kits and typically have no say over what comes in their bags. Contrast that with a Materials Buffet, where materials are presented as “on offer” (with limits on quantity as necessary), and students get to make decisions about which resources might fit with and support their design ideas. (Learn more about Materials Buffets and why to consider using them here.) As the materials manager in my classroom, I find I can offer a broader array of materials when I don’t need to spend time putting every material into a kit or need to have enough of an item to offer one to every team – the increased diversity of materials available for each challenge further enhances the possibilities for student creativity.
Here’s a look at the Materials Buffet that I offered for the “Supplies Up High” challenge:
Psst…Grab a free Materials Buffet Guidelines poster by completing the form below!
4. Don’t Show Exemplars or Past Student Work – especially at the beginning of a project
I’m always collecting photos and saving artifacts from how students tackle our STEM challenges, but I don’t often wind up sharing them with students engaged in that challenge. Why? Well, once we show an example, we signal to students that we think that work is valuable – for students trying to play the “game” of school, that example can quickly become “what the teacher wants.” It feels much safer to try to recreate something or slightly modify something than to generate an idea that is wholly new. I want my students to stay in the murky area where they have materials and no models upon which to seize, because that uncertainty is a necessary ingredient for creativity. I will occasionally show an example of past work to a student working on a problem in a similar way or to focus in on the way that a past student used a material. In other words, there are places for past examples, but they should be used sparingly and intentionally, with a specific teaching point in mind.
5. Provide Free Build or Open Makerspace Time
The ultimate creative freedom we can offer our students is to be fully in charge of their making experiences. Free Build and Open Makerspace Time are both valuable opportunities for students to practice being independent, self-motivated creators. The power of these practices should not be overlooked – if you need more convincing check out this post for four reasons to consider making it a regular part of your instruction and this one for advice on structuring Free Build time.
These five strategies can help you to lay the groundwork for a classroom that fosters creative agency in your students. Turning over increased control to your students can often be easier said than done, but taking even small steps can pay huge dividends by empowering students to reach their full creative potentials.
Do you have other strategies for offering increased creative autonomy to your students? I’d love to hear them!