Why Teaching Creativity in the Classroom Is the Education Debate Nobody Wants to Have

Most teachers have seen this happen. The room stops moving when a student speaks up and gives an answer that wasn’t in the lesson plan. Everyone is waiting to see what the teacher will do. In a system based on getting the right answers and timed tests, that pause is very important. And the way teachers react in that situation tells us more about education than almost any policy document ever could.

For years, people have talked about school reform in the same old ways: test scores, funding gaps, and keeping teachers. There wasn’t much room for creativity at the table. At best, it was seen as a nice-to-have, something that would only be used in art class or on project weeks. That way of looking at things is slowly changing, though, and the proof is stronger than most people think.

It was hard to ignore the results of a three-year national pilot that included more than 100 schools across England. Teachers who used creative thinking in all of their lessons, not just the arts but also science, math, and geography, said they felt energized by their jobs. Students were more interested, willing to take risks, and had a sense that what they were learning was important to their lives, which is something schools don’t usually test. That didn’t happen because of a new curriculum. They happened because teachers were told they could teach in new ways.

It’s not as silly as that permission question sounds. It’s not enough to plan lessons to teach creativity. It takes a teacher who is sure of themselves enough to go with a student’s random thought instead of sending them back to the textbook. A Year 8 science class was asked to come up with a replacement for their local power plant, which is an example that teachers often bring up. Around the middle of the lesson, a student asked if the town could just use less energy and not have to build anything new. The teacher’s choice to say “interesting, let’s calculate that” instead of “that’s not what we’re covering today” is the kind of small choice that can either encourage creative thinking or put it out of people’s minds.

Still, it’s important to be honest about the problems. Standardized tests are still the main thing that puts a lot of pressure on both teachers and students. When tests reward certain formats and answers, students are sent a clear message: being original is dangerous. In Austria, one teacher asked her students to write a letter of complaint to Father Christmas in the voice of elves.

This was a creative way to bring a dry text form to life. One student sent in a very small piece of paper with very small handwriting to show that they thought elves wouldn’t be able to write on A4. Brilliant in every way. Inconvenient for administration. It’s telling that the teacher felt free enough in their job to accept it as good work. Many teachers wouldn’t have had that choice because they would have had to work under stricter rules.

Also, there’s the matter of how important the curriculum is. It takes longer to teach students how to think about a problem, find dead ends, and come up with new ideas than to finish a unit in a set number of weeks. The kind of inquiry-based learning that really helps kids develop critical and creative thinking skills isn’t meant to be efficient. It’s meant to look a little messy. It’s not easy to fit that into schedules that are already very full.

The humanities may have been doing this work the longest, but they don’t always get credit for it. Literature classes that ask students to look at a poem from different points of view, history classes that don’t come to a clear conclusion, and language classes where the answer that you don’t expect is sometimes the most interesting one—these are all places where creative thinking has always happened. But in many school systems, these subjects have been narrowed down and seen as less important than science or economics. That’s something that should be thought about again.

Researchers and teachers from around the world have been saying with more and more confidence that creativity isn’t something that people are born with. These aren’t traits that some kids are born with and others aren’t. It’s a skill that can be taught, learned, and should be taught on purpose. The schools that know that aren’t doing anything out of the ordinary. The idea is just important to them enough that they are going to act on it.