Writing in Teaching Scotland, the General Teaching Council for Scotland’s chief executive Dr Pauline Stephen discusses how critically informed creativity is core to the professional development of the self and one’s ability to learn.
“Get curious, not furious.” This phrase was on a poster in a colleague’s office a long time ago and has stuck with me. I try to bring it to mind when I need some inspiration about a particular issue. Some other favourite phrases include “let’s get off the balcony and see”, and “one foot in pain, one foot in possibility”.
I must sound like a broken record to those who work closest to me, however, I have realised that these are my hooks for engaging in a creative process. I enjoy thinking out loud. I know not everyone does and I believe it is important to recognise that individuals have different ways of looking at familiar things with a fresh eye, examining problems with an open mind, making connections, learning from mistakes and using imagination to explore new possibilities.
We know that the creativity skills of curiosity, open mindedness and problem solving are transferable across learning, life and work. They increase engagement, support learning and enhance employability – for our learners and for us. Creativity is core to education and our own professional development and learning.
The creative process involves investigating a problem or issue, exploring multiple viewpoints and options, generating and testing out ideas, developing, refining and communicating solutions and evaluating whether or not they have worked. This speaks to much of what it means to be a professional teacher or lecturer and it starts with being critically informed, an aspect enshrined in the Professional Standards for Teachers.
Being critically informed is being able to justify practice with sound reference to a range of credible sources which offer differing views on the matter and making explicit the ways in which these differing views have been taken into account to reach the professional decision taken. It is the deep, reasoned consideration of differing views in light of our own lived and situated experiences that can support and demonstrate critically informed practice.
To fully embrace what a critically informed, collaborative and creative way of working can offer us, those around us and our learners, there is a need, I believe, to have a degree of self-awareness as to how we go about the process. Who are the ‘thinking out louders’ who aren’t precious about their idea being grappled with and moulded until it looks somewhat different than its starting point and who are default internal thinkers who benefit from some time away from an issue [and you] to consider before coming back to build a solution?
Yin and yang
One of the best things that has happened to me personally in my career was sharing a room with a peer who was the yin to my yang approach of exploring new possibilities. Frustrating at times? Yes. Fun? Sometimes. Ultimately able to develop, test out and implement different ways of delivering our services that positively impacted on children and young people? Absolutely. Creativity is a process that generates ideas which have value to the individual and to society. We shouldn’t underestimate its value.
Having this self-awareness about our own approach in this area helps us be critically informed. For example, I am very aware of who I gravitate towards to help me solve a problem. It is probably natural to head towards individuals who undertake the creative process in a similar way to you. After delivering hundreds of professional learning events, I know teachers can react in a similar way to their learners – they don’t always like being allocated to mixed groups, they like to choose their table! There are dangers in this approach, however, as we can gravitate towards an echo chamber, to people who think like us, and we might even not adequately consider other perspectives. If we have a role that involves employing others, we may even tend to employ people like us.
Positive impact
Like our own professional learning, our use of creativity needs to do more than just make us feel better, it must have positive impact. It shouldn’t also lead to change for change’s sake – that’s where the critically informed part comes in. A helpful check-in point throughout the creative process – and one which underpins our critically informed actions – could be to consider: for what and whose purposes do we do what we do as teachers and lecturers? It is a question that both Professor Gert Biesta and Dr Joe Smith offered their views on in our recent ethics roundtable and could help us in both our creative process and in working towards nurturing relationships with our learners.
Stuart McIntyre, of Forth Valley and West Lothian Regional Improvement Collaborative, believes creativity happens all the time and when we least expect it. For Stuart, teachers are the most important agents of creative change. You can read more about his creative approach here.
Collaborative practice is a key element of teacher professionalism. My absolute favourite phrase – and one my GTC Scotland colleagues hear often – is: “I have the beginning of an idea; I’ll share…”
Photo by Seema Miah on Unsplash
