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Three Strategies To Help Your Child Build A Creativity Mindset

As a child, Alexander Graham Bell, the prolific inventor best known for inventing the telephone, was intensely curious about the world. He built his first real invention – a simple dehusking machine – at the young age of twelve! While Bell was no doubt a smart and inquisitive child in his own right, his upbringing also played a big part in his success. His father was an inventor of sorts himself and he actively encouraged Alexander to make a speaking automaton. These early experiences paved the way for his future accomplishments. In other words, he grew up in an environment that valued creativity and problem solving. 

Creativity, as a cognitive skill, is becoming increasingly important in our world as routine jobs get automated. To be successful children now need more than literacy and numeracy skills – they also need to be confident creative problem solvers. The first step towards this is building a creativity mindset. 

So, how can parents help orient their child towards creativity? Here are three broad strategies you can use as a parent to start shifting your child’s mindset towards creative problem solving.

Make Creativity A Part Of Your Vocabulary

Most parents take a deliberate approach to help their child learn from an early age. They might casually introduce a new word during conversation or bring in numbers to build their child’s budding reading and math skills. This not only improves the child’s skills in the 3Rs but it also orients them towards those skills in the real world – they might notice new words more often or see mathematical connections in everyday situations. 

In a similar way, talking about creativity and everyday inventions can open their minds towards creative problem solving. One activity we do when we start our invention classes is to have a discussion about creativity by analyzing everyday creations around us. What makes something both novel and useful (the core definition of creativity)?  As students start discussing and analyzing things around them, they start to realize that everything around them is an invention – created by someone, or more accurately by many people over time, in order to make our lives more efficient. Parents can do the same exercise at home. As an example, a conversation between a parent and their child about a painting on the wall might go like this:

P: Is that painting on the wall an invention?

C: It’s original because I haven’t seen this painting anywhere else and it’s useful because it makes people feel good. 

P: That’s a good point about art making people feel good. Humans have been making art for a long time – even before they made language.

C: Like cave paintings.

P: Yes, like cave paintings! How are paintings now better than cave paintings? 

C: Cave paintings were fixed to the cave wall. But today, you can move them around – you can take your paintings with you if you move houses. So that’s another way it’s an invention. 

In our experience, children find this to be an eye-opening exercise and it opens their minds to creative problem solving. They start to look at things in their world a little differently. A few days after I did this exercise with my son, who would have been a 1st or 2nd grader at the time, he suddenly had an epiphany while we were driving. He excitedly shared an idea that could avoid holiday lights from getting tangled up. What if the lights were sewn onto a net that could be draped over a tree when in use, and then folded up neatly when done? Not a bad idea for such a common problem! 

Don’t Teach, Co-create

Even when parents understand the importance of creativity, they often try to “teach” it to their children. A more effective method is to co-create something with them – like making a new story, a fun game or a cool gadget together.

Children, and even adults, learn implicitly from others as much, if not more, than by being explicitly taught. Our brains are wired to detect patterns and connections around us and use them to update our models of the world. By continually updating and refining our internal models as we integrate new ideas, we improve our understanding of the world. Learning is more efficient when we deduce the pattern ourselves instead of when the pattern is taught to us. When you co-create with your child, they start picking up ideas and automatically integrating them in ways that are compatible with their current knowledge. As almost all parents have experienced, you might be focusing on one idea but your child might pick up on a different one. In effect, co-creation leads to a fully personalized learning – one that fits perfectly with your child’s current mental models. 

There are two additional advantages to co-creation. One, traditional teaching approaches can be perceived by the child as evaluatory and controlling, which raises their defenses. They are much more likely to engage in activities that are collaborative and low pressure in nature. The second advantage is the emotional aspect. Emotions bind the learning much more strongly, and positive emotions are better than negative. So if an activity is viewed as a fun family experience with lots of laughter and love, then not only is the child willing to engage in it more frequently, but what she learns from the experience is deeper.

The advantages of engaging in co-creation take some time to become evident. For example, if you start a dinner time routine of making silly stories, you might notice that your child doesn’t offer that many ideas or plays safe by reusing your ideas in the beginning. Don’t let that discourage you. Over time, you will see that the complexity and the novelty of their ideas start to increase as your child gets more comfortable, both cognitively and emotionally, with the activity. 

Do More Arts At Home

High quality art programs, including visual arts and music, have been shown to benefit creativity and related skills. In the case of Alexander Graham Bell, his mother encouraged his interest in art, poetry and music. Despite any formal training in music, he mastered the piano and became the “family pianist.”

Arts provide children with a canvas to try new things and take more risks, skills that can transfer more broadly to other domains as they grow older. A research study found that incorporating arts increased both children’s self-efficacy and original thinking. As the authors noted, “Self-efficacious children believe they can be agents in creating their own futures and are more optimistic about what the world has in store for them.”

Another benefit of doing arts is that it provides an easy avenue to experience flow – where one is fully immersed in the task that action and awareness seem to merge. Experiencing flow not only helps improve mental health, it also builds a more intrinsic orientation towards learning which is beneficial in the long run. 

A creative mindset developed at an early age can have a tremendous impact on a child’s long-term success allowing them to make meaningful contributions to society. Parents play a crucial role in this. By helping their child understand creativity and by engaging in creative activities with them, they can equip their child with the right mindset and confidence. 

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Why A Growth Mindset for Creativity is Essential

During our enrichment programs we often run into students who get stumped with creativity exercises. In one session, I gave a group of 4th and 5th graders a simple divergent thinking exercise. As the students started writing down their ideas, I noticed one girl who seemed uncomfortable with the exercise. When it was time for students to share their ideas, she refused to participate. Later, during a different activity, I stopped by her desk and gently asked if she wanted to share her ideas with me. She crumpled up her sheet of paper and tearfully said that she doesn’t really have any good ones. 

This isn’t an isolated case. Many students, including those in gifted programs, find creative thinking challenging. One reason lies with our education system which heavily emphasizes analytical thinking at the expense of creative thinking. Students are so used to the “one right answer” approach in education that they don’t know how to approach open-ended problems with several potential solutions. The gifted student who can confidently say the answer to a math problem because she can double check her answer, doesn’t have the same level of confidence for ambiguous problems with multiple solutions. 

This is harmful for students in the long run. As we transition from the “knowledge” to the ”creative” economy, students are increasingly ill-prepared to contribute meaningfully to the workforce. As work expectations shift toward higher creativity, it’s leading to a creativity gap – the disparity between valuing creative performance in adults and not fostering creativity in students. 

So, how do we better prepare our students to become confident creators? The answer starts with building a growth mindset towards creativity, what researchers call the “creative mindset.”

Carol Dweck pioneered the theory of growth mindset that improved educational outcomes for many students and revolutionized the way we approach learning. Dweck found that, when faced with challenges, some students give up too easily while others doubled down on learning. She realized that students who gave up easily had a fixed mindset, where they believed that intelligence is innate and therefore extra effort would not yield better results. The other students displayed a growth mindset – a belief that intelligence and skills are malleable. More interestingly, Dweck found that educators could shift students to a growth mindset and help them become better learners. Her growth mindset intervention workshops helped numerous students improve their math and science scores. 

Growth mindset has now become ubiquitous in both education and the workforce. However, most people view a growth mindset as applicable only to learning new skills (“I can learn new things”). They don’t realize that mindsets are equally important to creativity (“I can create new things”). 

By leveraging a growth mindset for creativity, we can help students build the ability and the confidence to be creators and innovators. Below are three ways to build a creativity fostering environment in your classroom. 

Emphasize Creative Mindset: Much like learning new skills, our brain also grows when it tries to create new things. Creativity often requires making connections between unrelated things or looking at the problem with different perspectives. When students practice these skills their brains adapt accordingly in order to make them better at  creative thinking. Similar to the growth mindset, educators can emphasize that our brains are like a muscle that grows stronger the more we practice creative thinking. If students find creativity hard, it’s a sign that their brains are stretching and learning to get better at it. 

Appreciate Non-conformity: Creativity by definition depends on non-conformity. To foster creativity, educators need to provide opportunities for students to think independently to come up with original ideas and perspectives. By exploring ideas outside of mainstream norms, students build creative confidence. Educators are often worried that by allowing students to voice non-conforming ideas will lead to chaos. It doesn’t have to. Educators can create explicit times or projects where students get to be creative, and a respectful environment for ideas to be shared with each other. 

Model Creativity: Nothing inspires students more than seeing their teachers embody the skills they are learning. By sharing their own creative pursuits, educators set the expectation that creativity is valued in their classroom. When teachers share their failures and how they overcame them, students learn to approach setbacks with a problem solving mindset. This builds perseverance towards challenging problems, which further boosts growth mindset.  

Bloom’s taxonomy places “creating” as the top skill for education. Without the ability to convert their knowledge into new solutions, students miss out on learning how to be valuable contributors. Unfortunately, most teacher training programs don’t emphasize creativity and typical school curriculums don’t integrate creative thinking. However, creative thinking skills are not that hard to cultivate. By deliberately building mindsets, modeling creativity themselves and providing adequate opportunity, educators can foster creativity in their students. 

This article first appeared on edCircuit.

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How Rewards Impact Learning And Motivation

In an interesting study to understand the relationship between motivation and learning, researchers gave elementary students a reading comprehension task. One group was explicitly told that they were going to be tested and graded on what they learned at the end of the activity, while the others were not.

The results of the experiment revealed a lot about the interplay between learning, motivation and rewards. Students who were told that they would be tested and graded, found the reading task less interesting and felt more stress compared to the others. Their assessment afterwards also showed an interesting pattern. They performed as well as the other groups, but only when limited to rote information. Conceptual integration of the material was poorer than the other groups. In addition, one week after the experiment, they had forgotten more information compared to other groups! As the researchers concluded, “It is not unreasonably speculative to argue that grades as traditionally used in schools often result in the perception of an external locus of causality, produce pressure, and result in force-fed, poorly integrated and maintained learning.”

So how does learning get affected by motivation and rewards, like grades?

Learning can happen in multiple ways. Autonomous learning, where there is no directive to learn something specific, happens all the time and might even be the biggest source of learning. This type of learning, also called undirected learning, is triggered by curiosity and interest and is associated with lower negative emotional states. However, since this type of learning can’t be managed, we’ll focus on directed learning, where there is a specific set of material that needs to be learned and assimilated.

Students can be directed to learn in two ways:

  • Controlling, where the control comes from external mechanisms like grades or evaluations.
  • Noncontrolling, which uses approaches that tap into students’ need for autonomy and self-determination.

The issue with the controlling approach is that it leads to inferior learning outcomes compared to the noncontrolling approach. The reason behind this is better explained through achievement goal theory of motivation.

According to the achievement goal theory, people expend different levels and quality of cognitive self-regulation depending on the purpose of the goal. Cognitive self-regulation refers to how deliberate one is in the learning process and includes using different strategies, or planning and using resources effectively. What determines the level of cognitive self-regulation is the purpose behind the goal, which could be performance or learning based.

Performance Goals

Performance goals, also known as ego-goals, are driven primarily by a need to outperform others in order to increase one’s status. Performance goals are positively associated with more superficial, rote learning and not with deep learning. Performance orientation further comes in two flavors – performance/approach and performance/avoidance. Performance/approach is when students are aiming to outperform their peers. Students with this orientation do end up spending considerable effort and using superior study strategies. Performance/avoidance students want to avoid failure so as not to look less competent compared to their peers, and therefore put in less effort and avoid challenging work.

This is where class incentives or rewards, like grades, also come into play. When rewards are scarce, like when only the top few students get the highest grade, it creates a competitive environment where the focus changes from learning a concept to finding ways to outperform other students.

Students in the performance/avoidance orientation fare the worst since the incentive structure does not give them any reason to learn. Instead, they use strategies like procrastination which provides an explanation of their poor performance without being perceived incompetent (if the student only studies on the last day, they are not expected to do well and it isn’t a reflection of their ability).

Learning Goals

Learning goals, also known as mastery goals, are driven by a need to improve one’s competency irrespective of how others are doing. Related to this is the growth mindset, or the belief that one can learn and become smarter by putting in effort. Learning orientation is positively associated with deep-level processing, higher cognitive self-regulation, and pride and satisfaction in success.

Research has shown some promising directions to change grades and reward structure to create a better learning environment. This includes permitting students to work for any grade they want by accomplishing more, and using mastery based grading which focuses on whether one finally mastered a concept regardless of failures along the way.

 

Our current educational system has often been compared to a factory model where students are expected to learn the same content at the same pace as others in their age group. However, there is an additional dimension – extrinsic-focused scarce rewards – that makes the educational system mirror a corporate environment. Unfortunately, such rewards encourage performance goals in both systems leading to poorer learning, higher stress and less satisfaction.

Extrinsic rewards and performance goals work can be effective in limited ways where the task is simple or algorithmic. For more complex and creative work, a learning orientation becomes critical. However, nurturing a learning and growth mindset cannot happen in a vacuum – it needs a supportive environment to go with it. A poorly designed environment can push people from a learning orientation to that of a ego-focused performance mindset, while a well designed one could enable deep learning, growth and positive emotional well-being.

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Growth and Creativity Mindsets

As a graduate student, Carol Dweck was deeply influenced by Martin Seligman’s work on understanding depression. In experiments conducted in the 1960s, Seligman found that when animals are given a painful stimuli without the ability to control the situation, they become passive – a condition he called learned helplessness. This sparked Carol Dweck’s interest in human, and more specifically, student motivation.

She noticed that not all people show learned helplessness when faced with adversity and asked, “Why do some students give up when they encounter difficulty, whereas others who are no more skilled continue to strive and learn? One answer, I soon discovered, lay in people’s beliefs about why they had failed.”

Her work with students over the next several decades led to the theory of Growth Mindset, which is now transforming educational outcomes. She found that students who believed that their abilities can improve with effort (growth mindset), outperformed those who believed that their intelligence is fixed (fixed mindset). This effect held for different subjects areas including math and science.

Growth mindset is especially important in creative work since such work often requires higher levels of perseverance. As she points out, “In a poll of 143 creativity researchers, there was wide agreement about the number one ingredient in creative achievement. And it was exactly the kind of perseverance and resilience produced by growth mindset.”

But there is also growth mindset about creativity, or in other words, the belief that creativity is not innate and can be developed just like any other skill. Research studies have found that when it comes to Creativity – people can hold both a fixed and growth mindset at the same time. They view great creative accomplishments, or Big-C creativity, as a fixed trait and believe that smaller levels of creativity, or little-c creativity, is malleable. In other words, people believe that Einstein was successful because he was exceptionally gifted but their own (limited) creative potential can be improved by putting in effort.

In an approach similar to the growth mindset, we teach children in our programs how their brain works as an associative engine and how that can help in coming up with creative ideas. In other words, everyone is capable of becoming more creative with some effort.

Apart from growth mindset, Creativity is also influenced by other beliefs and attitudes that help in different aspects of creative problem solving (collectively referred here as the Creativity Mindset). Some of these attitudes, and how we try to encourage them, are highlighted below.

Openness

Openness to Experience, which includes six dimensions, has been found to be the strongest and most consistent trait to predict creative achievement. One dimension, intellectual curiosity, has been found to be the best predictor of scientific creativity. Openness leads to the ability to seek diverse information and reconcile multiple perspectives which then often results in unique solutions. We encourage openness by building a collaborative environment where students take each others feedback and perspectives in improving their own solution.

Non-conformity

Having a non-conforming attitude means having the confidence to pursue ideas outside the mainstream norms. It helps people find uniqueness in their ideas, an essential component of creativity. One activity we use in building a non-conformist attitude is challenging commonly-held assumptions. We play games where students pick an assumption, reverse it, and find ways and situations in which the reversed assumption would be useful.

Playfulness

Being playful means taking things lightly and having an exploratory approach. A playful attitude enables flexible thinking and has been found to correlate with creativity. To build playfulness, we often use improv games as warm-up exercises.  The cognitive processes that underlie improv are the same as those used in creative thinking.  A research study found that improv comedians produce 25% more creative ideas than professional product designers.

 

In the end, both the growth mindset and the creativity mindset result in behaviors that are essential for high creative accomplishments. By fostering these mindsets in children and teaching them creative thinking skills, we can give them the tools to unlock their full potential.

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Effective Feedback for a Growth Mindset

Suppose your child comes to you disappointed after receiving a B- on a math test that he worked really hard preparing for. What would you say to him?

If you already know about growth mindset, you know saying something along the lines of, “It’s OK, maybe you are just not a math person” isn’t the smartest thing. You should be focusing on the effort he put in instead of his inherent ability.

How about – “Great effort! I am sure you’ll do better next time”? Would that work better?

Not really.

In general, focusing on effort as opposed to ability increases intrinsic motivation over the long term. However, in certain situations, focusing on effort can actually make things worse. When the work results in a failure, focusing on effort solely can still leave the child feeling inept. Or if effort is overemphasized for relatively easy tasks, children may infer that as a sign of their low ability.

Growth mindset and intrinsic motivation go hand in hand. Children with a growth mindset are more likely to regulate their behavior for intrinsic reasons (e.g. I enjoy doing this activity) whereas children with a fixed mindset are more likely to regulate their behavior for extrinsic reasons (e.g. I want my parents to think I am a good student).

Having a growth mindset is clearly superior to a fixed mindset, since growth mindset enhances intrinsic motivation which in the long term improves perseverance and resilience against failure. But how do you inculcate a growth mindset in your child? If you as a parent model a growth mindset would that rub off on your child?

Carol Dweck, Professor at Stanford, and the originator of the mindset theory of intelligence, found that there is no link between parents’ mind-sets and their children’s. Parents’ own mindsets aren’t generally not visible to their children because they don’t necessarily manifest in parental practices. For instance, parents can have a growth mind-set but still praise their child’s talent, leading their child to develop a fixed mindset. 

However, one factor that does influence children’s mindset is not their parents’  intelligence mindset but their parent’s failure mindset. As Carol Dweck explains, “parents can view failure as either enhancing or debilitating, that this belief manifests itself in their reactions to their children’s setbacks, and that it influences their children’s intelligence mind-sets.”

So how can you handle a  failure situation more effectively?

When faced with a setback, a better approach is to frame the feedback in a more broader process-oriented feedback that includes thoughtful analysis of strategies and new approaches to explore. Think of the effort-oriented feedback as a subset of the larger process-oriented feedback. 

So, instead of simply saying “Good effort!”, use Prof Dweck’s recommendation and try this – “The point isn’t to get it all right away. The point is to grow your understanding step by step. What can you try next?” And follow this up with a discussion of what strategy did not work and what strategies might be worth trying the next time.