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3 Ways Creativity Improves Mental Health

May is Mental Health Awareness Month. This year mental health is of particular concern among students due to the impact of Covid-19 and school closures. CDC data found that mental health related emergency visits among K-12 students increased by 25% – 31% last year. Several survey results show that student mental health issues have exacerbated during the pandemic. In one survey, over half of teen students indicated that they faced mental health challenges like anxiety and trouble concentrating, and a third of the parents indicated that their child’s emotional and mental health had become worse during the pandemic.  

These sobering statistics were further compounded by the fact that many approaches to mitigating mental health issues like healthy social interactions or building trusted relationships were harder to do with school closures. 

When social connection is not easy, individual practices can help. Teaching students mindfulness meditation has shown to reduce anxiety and stress. However, in this article we will look at a somewhat less known way to improve mental wellbeing –  engaging in creative problem solving and building a creativity mindset. 

Stress and Coping Skills

Creative thinking skills allow students to approach daily challenges more effectively.  In a study of 3rd to 6th grade students, researchers found that students who scored higher on creative thinking, had better coping skills in the school environment and exhibited fewer disruptive behaviors.  

As the researchers explained, “The ability of children to keep an open mind and not judge or reach conclusions about people, situations or problems too impulsively may be a significant factor in successfully managing the stresses of daily life. Also, the ability of children to maintain flexibility of thought and to generate ideas that are not only fluent in number but original may contribute significantly to successful coping.”

In addition, the study also noted that students may respond more readily to creative thinking opportunities than training workshops on stress management and social skills. 

Other research has shown that creative people are more comfortable being on the “edge of chaos”, are better at reframing challenges into opportunities, and less likely to withdraw from college or fail academically. 

In other words, teaching children creative thinking has the secondary benefit of building better coping and stress management skills, that can last well into adulthood. 

Interpersonal Skills

In a study to understand the relationship between creativity and interpersonal problem solving, researchers tracked K-8 students over a period of two years. They found that creative thinking, and in particular ideational fluency – the ability to come up with several ideas – was significantly correlated to different aspects of interpersonal problem solving. 

One potential reason for this is that both creativity and interpersonal problem solving involves related underlying skills – coming up with several solutions, evaluating the impact of ideas and flexibly adapting to different situations to produce novel outcomes. 

Another study showed that more creative children displayed less aggression than less creative children. Research also seems to suggest that creativity is related to successful aging and longevity. 

Higher Values

Abraham Maslow studied creative people and talked about self-actualizing (SA) creativeness which came from possessing an “openness to experience” attitude, and displayed itself in everyday life. SA creative people were not just eminent people who produced groundbreaking work, but also regular people who approached everyday situations with creativity. As he explained, “I learned from her and others like her that a first-rate soup is better than a second-rate painting, and that, generally, cooking or parenthood or making a home could be creative while poetry need not be; it could be uncreative.”

More interestingly, Maslow found that SA creative people seemed happier, more at peace and more fulfilled. They were more motivated with higher values like truth goodness and beauty, and focused more on larger endeavors. 

These qualities are good for individual growth but are much more important for solving larger societal issues and driving social progress. 

Teaching Creativity

Often the most effective interventions are those that don’t even appear to be so. Building more creative thinking skills has a spillover effect into daily life. Creative people are able to use their cognitive style in a flexible and open manner to solve problems and cope with daily life stresses. Teaching creativity has the potential to develop more well-rounded and well-adjusted citizens. Unfortunately, despite being a critical 21st century skill, creativity isn’t often taught often or encouraged in schools. 

As Dr. Richards, an advocate for teaching more creativity, laments in Everyday Creativity, “How odd it may seem, considering the benefits, that we do not stress everyday creativity more in schools, homes, businesses, healthcare settings, senior centers, and centers for personal growth and development. Why, one may ask again, is our creativity so hidden or diminished (or underrecognized, underdeveloped, and underrewarded)?”

This article first appeared on edCircuit.

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World Creativity and Innovation Week: April 15 – April 21

The Fourth Industrial Revolution, marked by an increased use of AI and automation, is expected to have a profound impact on the workforce. 

The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs report found that by 2022, machines and algorithms will increase their contribution to specific tasks by 57% and in some categories of jobs the ratio of work done by machines vs. humans is going to tip towards machines. Tasks that are repetitive in nature and involve sequential thinking are easy targets for automation. Creative, non-linear ways of thinking are much harder to automate and future job growth is expected to come primarily from the creative domain. As the report outlines, “Proficiency in new technologies is only one part of the 2022 skills equation, however, as ‘human’ skills such as creativity, originality and initiative, critical thinking, persuasion, and negotiation will likewise retain or increase their value.”

Creativity is no longer just nice-to-have, it is now an indispensable skill for students to build. 

The UN recognized the growing importance of creativity, and in 2017 it designated April 21st as the World Creativity and Innovation Day (WCID). Their goal is to raise the awareness of the role of creativity and innovation in human and economic development. April 21, the day before Earth Day, April 22, was deliberately chosen to emphasize the role creativity plays in solving global challenges to create a sustainable planet.

The origin of the WCID goes back several years. It was founded in 2001 by Marci Segal, after seeing an article on the Canadian Creativity Crisis. Having studied creativity at the International Center for Studies in Creativity, SUNY Buffalo earlier, she decided to raise awareness around creativity and its impact around the world. In 2006, the day expanded to a week-long celebration starting on April 15th, Leonardo daVinci’s birthday, and culminating on April 21st. The World Creativity and Innovation Week (WCIW) was born!  

WCIW starts next week on Thursday (4/15) and there are several events planned for that week. Here are a few fun events geared towards building and encouraging student creativity. 

  • Seven-Day CreateTUBEity Challenge, April 15-21 12 pm EST: Dr. Cyndi Burnett, Creativity expert and Director of Possibilities at Creativity and Education, and children’s book author Barney Saltzberg, are going to subject themselves to a new creativity challenge led by a different creativity expert each day from around the world. Join them for a FREE daily 15-minute live-stream event on CreateTubeity. Appropriate for the young, and the young at heart!
  • Global Innovation Field Trip (GIFT), April 17th-April 18th: GIFT is a 24-hour, virtual, multi-country event hosting presentations from innovators currently spanning 28 countries. Young innovators and educators from across the globe will share their ideas to support and inspire innovation, and the event is free for anyone to attend. “GIFT provides an excellent platform for students to share their stories of innovation with a global audience and inspires educators to incorporate innovation, invention, language, culture and a variety of other subjects utilizing STEAM skills into their regular daily lessons,” says Juli Shively, GIFT Co-Founder and COO of Innovation World. 
  • Belouga’s Creativity and Innovation Playlist: To inspire students and educators to learn more about creativity, Belouga has created a playlist of lessons for the World Creativity and Innovation Day. There are over 50 lessons corresponding to over 30hrs of content, covering many different aspects of creativity in our lives. 

I hope you can find time to join in these creativity focused events next week, or be creative in your own way! And if you choose to do your own creative activity, don’t forget to register it with WCIW and share with others. 

This article first appeared on edCircuit. 

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The Educational Challenge For This Decade: A Story In Two Graphs

As we start the new decade and move towards the post-pandemic phase with cautious optimism, the question of how education needs to evolve is still looming. The pandemic shone a light on challenges like the magnitude of inequity in our society, but it also became a catalyst for better technology adoption in schools. Without technology platforms that made remote learning feasible, it is scary to imagine what last year could have looked like. 

However, the role technology has played in education so far has been to enable the same teaching that took place in person to occur in remote settings – it hasn’t really transformed education in deeper ways. But transformation is what’s really needed to address underlying issues.

The problem with our current educational system has been in the making for several decades – we are simply not adapting fast enough to keep up with the technological progress. The gap between skills that students acquire in schools and skills that are needed in the workforce continues to widen. 

Jonathan Rochelle, who started the Google Apps for Education team, captured the essence of the problem we face in education today. While comparing the progress we have made in machine learning to human learning, he quipped “we are teaching machines to be more like humans and we are teaching humans to be more like machines.” 

Is Creativity The New STEM?

The impact machine learning is having on human livelihood brings us to the first graph (Fig. 1). 

Research by economists Henry Siu and Nir Jaimovich shows that economic growth over the last two decades has come entirely from non-routine, or creative jobs. Routine work – both manual and cognitive – has been steadily declining due to automation. Machines learning is getting better at increasingly complex tasks, performing them with fewer errors compared to humans. 

We are teaching machines to be more like humans, and we are doing that quite well. 

As a side note, the graph also shows that every recession accelerates the decline in routine work, and in a few years we will learn the full impact of covid on long-term job trends.

The current situation is reminiscent of the early 2000s when various reports (e.g. Rising Above the Gathering Storm) raised concerns about the quality of math and science education, and the shortage in the STEM workforce to meet the growing demand. 

In response to that Obama, who had earlier called STEM education our “Sputnik” moment, announced incentives for schools that create STEM programs for their students in his 2013 State of the Union address. That triggered an intense focus on STEM education from many players including schools, nonprofits and the technology industry. These efforts have paid off to an extent. Access to coding and other STEM programs is much more easily available to students of all age groups and backgrounds now. There are indications that although we have a scarcity of STEM graduates in certain geographical areas and domains, we also have a surplus in others. 

We are yet again at a junction where economic forecasts are pointing to the need for a skill that isn’t being adequately addressed. It’s likely that Creativity is the STEM of this decade. 

The Decline of Student Creativity

How well students are doing in their creative thinking abilities brings us to the sobering reality of our second graph (Fig. 2). 

Professor Kyung Hee Kim first discovered that student creativity as measured by the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (TTCT) has been declining since the 1990s and her analysis led to the highly popular Newsweek article, The Creativity Crisis. She found that measures like originality (thinking of novel ideas) and fluency (thinking of several ideas) – the hallmark of creativity – have shown a significant decline over the years. 

Part of the reason for this decline, according to Prof. Kim, has been the heavy and narrow focus on standardized testing which doesn’t leave room for building higher order thinking skills. Learning in school heavily prioritizes “one right answer”, which machines are good at, as opposed to multiple possible solutions, which give students the opportunity to exercise their creative muscle. Or as Sir Ken Robinson expressed, “we are educating people out of their creative capacities.”

Current EdTech tools used in schools aren’t helping either – they primarily help students express their creativity instead of building it. 

In other words, we are teaching humans to be more like machines, and unfortunately, we are doing that quite well too.  

Navigating the Skill Gap

Educators have long recognized the importance of fostering creativity as part of student learning but the current economic environment is making this an urgent need. 

The good news is that creativity is a cognitive skill that can be developed with practice, and cognitive creativity programs have shown promising results. 

The not-so-good news is that most focus on divergent thinking which is disconnected from academic content students are learning. As one study pointed out, “It is hard to see how listing 100 interesting and unusual ways to use egg cartons will help Johnny improve his scores on state-mandated achievement tests.” 

One approach taken at MindAntix is to identify thought patterns, like associative or reverse thinking, that aid in creative thinking and actively incorporate them into school curriculum. Other educational approaches, some of them domain specific, have also been effective in improving creativity which offers room for some optimism. 

If we start teaching humans to be better at what makes us uniquely human – our ability to think creatively – we stand a much better chance at improving educational and career outcomes for our students. 

This article first appeared on edCircuit.

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Creativity In Education: Reflections From ISTE 2020

The ISTE conference, one of the largest in the edTech space, concluded earlier this month after the pandemic delayed it from its regular summer schedule. Apart from presenting our approach to creativity this year, I was also interested in learning about tools and techniques educators are using to foster creativity among their students. 

Overall, I found it heartening that educators are increasingly recognizing the importance of creativity and discovering ways to nurture it in their students. Creativity is a crucial 21st century skill. Unlike linear and sequential thinking, creativity relies on non-linear processes making it hard for AI to automate. This is one of the main reasons why creativity is now the most sought after skill among employers. 

EdTech tools, on the other hand, haven’t progressed much in improving student creativity.   

(A quick note – while I looked at several different sessions related to creativity, this is not meant to be an exhaustive analysis as there were several hundred sessions this year.)

What is Creativity?

One of my first observations after watching several sessions related to creativity was that most educators use creativity as a proxy for open ended projects where students have freedom to express themselves. While this is clearly better than assigning work with one right answer, it’s not sufficient.

Simply giving students the space to be creative doesn’t necessarily equip them with the skills to think creatively. What students produce may or may not be creative, and can only be assessed by digging deeper into student created artifacts. 

As a result, most educators and students have built misconceptions around creativity.

So, what really is creativity? Creativity as psychologists define it is the ability to come up with ideas that are both novel and useful. An idea that looks original but doesn’t solve a problem or is appropriate in a situation is simply imaginative, not creative. Similarly, if the idea solves a problem but has already been done by others is useful but not creative. 

There are several models of the creative process and at a high level we can think of it as two phases – coming up with the initial creative idea followed by expressing the idea and iterating if needed.

Do EdTech tools help or hinder creativity?

All of the EdTech tools I saw – which included products from Google, Microsoft and Adobe – were geared towards helping students better express their creative idea but didn’t play a role in enabling creative thinking. In that sense, they don’t really help build creativity.

That said, they can potentially hinder creativity in some cases. One of the problems in using digital tools too early in the process is that students end up producing work that looks very polished but isn’t backed up with deep thinking. Students might rush into creating the final product without spending sufficient time exploring and examining different ideas, leading to sub-par results. 

This doesn’t mean that these tools shouldn’t have a role in the classroom. These tools are great for building digital literacy, acquiring knowledge and collaborating with others. But, as far as creativity is concerned, we need to be mindful about how to use them in the overall workflow. 

How are educators fostering creativity?

I saw several examples of educators using digital tools in interesting ways to teach content to students. However, those approaches fall into the category of “teaching creatively” instead of “teaching for creativity”. Teaching creatively implies finding novel ways to make teaching more effective and engaging, but it doesn’t help build student creativity. Teaching for creativity, on the other hand, is to teach in ways that help students build their own creativity. 

Some educators have made teaching for creativity a core part of the student experience. Here are some examples:

  • Visual Thinking: Using sketches and doodling is a way to not just express ideas but to think. Sketchnoting can help students find connections between different concepts and build personal meaning. Manuel Herrera got inspired to use visual thinking after attending a design conference. He realized that not a single speaker at the design conference talked about any tools. Instead, the conference was all about the creative process before any tools are used. That influenced him to start using a visual thinking process with his students. One of his techniques is to ask students to fold a sheet of paper in eight sections for brainstorming. Students then take 30 seconds to sketch an idea in one section and then quickly move on to the next one. He found that when students get to the fourth or fifth idea, they start coming up with more original and interesting ideas.
  • STEAM Mindset: Tim Needles shared how he encourages the STEAM mindset which centers around creativity, failure, curiosity, design and fun. After working on many projects he has realized that the process is more important than the product – even if students don’t have a successful piece they still learn through the process. One of his techniques to spur creativity is to introduce a constraint which forces students to think in different directions. For example, in one project he asked students to create an untraditional selfie using a different material. Students  responded with creative self portraits made out of skittles, cheetos or leaves. 
  • Creative Thought Processes: Our own work on building creativity relies on identifying thought processes like associative or reverse thinking, that underlie creative thinking, and incorporating them in the process. This year I presented some fun warm-up games that can be used standalone as brain breaks or incorporated into what students are already learning (see resources here). For example, one game asks students to reverse an assumption and find a scenario where the reversal would make sense. One group of students who challenged the assumption that tables have legs, came up with a table design that can be lowered from the ceiling. Students often find that by challenging assumptions they can come up with radical insights.  

The future of creativity in education

Given the economic trends and forecasts, the role of creativity in education is only going to grow more. Current edTech tools allow students to express their creativity more efficiently, but don’t help build it. This leaves the job of improving student creativity to educators who are filling this gap through different creative processes. This doesn’t mean that EdTech tools can’t improve creativity. It is highly likely that as these tools evolve to incorporate creativity building elements, they will make a much bigger impact on student learning and creativity.

This post first appeared on edCircuit. 

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Creativity Through The Lens of Evolutionary Biology

Understanding how we, as humans, think and behave has always held fascination for scientists. Creativity – the ability to think of novel and useful ideas – is often considered a key trait that has allowed us to flourish as a species. Evolutionary biology dictates that traits beneficial to the species as a whole survive in the long term, while the less useful traits die down. 

So, in what ways is creativity beneficial to us?

Research of innovation in other birds and animals provides clues that creativity evolved when brains developed more, and it provided distinct survival advantages. 

One example found in nature is the bowerbird, one of nature’s creative engineers. Bowerbirds, found natively in Australia and New Guinea, have an interesting courtship and mating ritual. The male bowerbirds build elaborate structures called bowers from sticks and vegetation, and then decorate them with brightly colored objects like shells, stones, flowers or berries. 

When scientists looked at the complexity of the bower, which indicates higher intelligence and creativity, and the brain size they found an interesting correlation. Bowerbird species that built more complex bowers also had a larger cerebellum volume. 

Similar research on birds and primates confirm the hypothesis that more advanced brain structures developed to allow more complex cognition, which conferred evolutionary advantages. In a metastudy of birds and primates, researchers developed an innovation index by coding documented innovative behaviors and found that higher innovation levels correlated with larger brain sizes. 

Two main aspects of cognition that have to work together to support adaptability are innovation and social learning. 

Innovation

The ability to innovate plays a crucial role for a species in its survival. When faced with a new environment, species that are able to discover new food sources, avoid new predators or adapt to a different weather have significant advantages over those that don’t. One example of innovation in adapting to new foods comes from black rats that occupied the Jerusalem pine forests. The only source of food appropriate for the black rats in that area are pine seeds. The rats developed a technique to strip the pine cone to reach the seed, a behavior they had not previously used, which was critical for them to survive in the new habitat.  

Social Learning

While discovering a new food source or developing a new tool to extract hard to reach foods can help an animal survive a new environment, the species as a whole can only benefit when animals can learn from each other. Using the earlier example of black rats, scientists found that black rat pups were able to learn the new pine stripping behavior from their mothers, while other adults were not always successful in learning through observation. This successful transmission of learning from mothers to their pups allowed the black rats to flourish in the new environment. 

Our own history offers numerous examples of successful innovations that were exchanged and adopted by others. Our ability to think creatively and learn from others have allowed us to thrive in new environments. As one of the research studies summarized, “The combination of innovation with social learning, as documented in a number of primate species, is likely to be especially advantageous for species in novel habitats, as it could allow copying exploratory behavior per se as well as permitting the rapid transmission of successful strategies.”