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Chapter 2

Building a Creative Culture

It does little good to encourage student creativity unless leaders have first put in place the essential elements of a creative environment. This chapter suggests four such essentials and offers a Creative Environment Rubric (see pages 16–18), so you and your colleagues can begin a quest to save creativity at your school with some objective analysis. These four essential elements include:

1. Mistake-tolerant culture

2. Rigorous decision-making system

3. Culture that nurtures creativity

4. Leadership team that models and supports creativity

Mistake-Tolerant Culture

The first element of a creative environment is a mistake-tolerant culture. Although much has been written and said about the value of mistakes in pursuing creativity, the practical reality is that in most schools, mistakes by students, teachers, and administrators are systematically punished. The least effective creative environments require blind compliance with rules and expectations. Success in these environments is equated with avoiding mistakes. The clear, if unspoken, leadership theme is this: We’ve worked too hard to get where we are to mess it up with any new ideas. Alan Deutschman (2007), in the compelling book Change or Die, writes that over decades of research, a consistent finding reveals that many people would rather die than make significant changes in their lives. The best evidence for such an over-the-top assertion is that more than 90 percent of people who have had open-heart surgery, often due to behavioral decisions such as smoking and a sedentary lifestyle, only briefly change the behaviors that landed them under the surgeon’s knife. Within less than a year, they return to their old lifestyle. They would literally rather die than change.

In the field of education, I am often asked, “If it’s so obvious, then why don’t people just do it?” It is obvious, for example, that frequent feedback leads to better student results, but the vast majority of schools only provide students with meaningful feedback three or four times a year. To do more—certainly to provide feedback on a weekly basis—would leave teachers and administrators open to the complaint of “too much testing,” an assertion that seems to shut down the argument. Imagine if diabetics refused to test their blood sugar level because such an effort involved too much testing.

More than two decades of research, from 1990 onward, demonstrate the strong link between writing and student performance in a variety of academic disciplines. One of the foremost researchers in this area, Professor Steve Graham of Vanderbilt University (2009–2010), documents not only the academic impact of writing but also the value of handwriting. Yet at both the K–12 and collegiate levels, the amount of writing required of students is declining (Arum & Roksa, 2010). Cursive writing is nearly extinct from public school settings, and most prevailing English language arts standards have abandoned the practice.

The zeal by students, parents, and teachers for immediate mastery requires that students quickly acquire and master new skills. This expectation would never be applied to proficiency in music or all but the simplest athletic endeavors. Only using what Hattie (2012) calls deliberative practice yields improved performance. However, applying this fundamental learning principle is systematically ignored in a culture in which mistakes—the essential building blocks of deliberative practice—receive negative reactions. Only in a school that actively opposes effective practice would you find the definition of perfect homework or perfect project work that is free from errors.

Lest this book appears to criticize students who have been taught to use negative feedback and mistakes to fuel their improvement, it’s important to acknowledge that these students learned well from their adult role models. It’s difficult to argue that self-esteem isn’t a good thing; indeed, without a sufficient quantity of self-esteem, people lose the confidence to learn. However, the concept of self-esteem has been distorted from a healthy sense of confidence and personal efficacy—the sense that one can influence results with learning and hard work. In common school parlance, self-esteem is the product of endless reassurance from adults that children are almost perfect and nearly incapable of making mistakes. The social harmony of “you’re awesome, I’m awesome, we’re awesome” rarely gives way to the counterpoint of “I know I can do better if I work harder.” But one of the most difficult things for many students (and parents) to hear is: “You can do better if you work harder.” It requires a courageous teacher who is willing to give candid and critical feedback to students and withstand the possible withering assault of emails from parents.

Consider how many teaching and learning initiatives are rolled out in schools. These efforts, however well intended, are often more characterized by announcements, labels, and speeches than substantive changes in professional practice. The culture declares victory and moves on rather than expose new ideas to systematic evaluation. As a result, most student, teacher, and administrator evaluations focus on compliance, often with checklists, to ensure that participants in the system follow the rules and stray from the constraints at peril of their grades and careers. Compliance involves homework, attendance, and obedience, ensuring that even the best practices in research-based instruction are strangled in observations and evaluations.

The tension among three types of feedback—(1) effective feedback, (2) paralyzing feedback, and (3) benign feedback—leads to what Hammond and colleagues (2013) refer to as the Goldilocks Principle. When feedback is overbearing and punitive, it inhibits performance by everyone in the system, including students, educators, and administrators. But when feedback is absent or dully reassuring, it also has a negative effect, leaving the recipients endlessly wondering if they are really doing good work. Just as Goldilocks searched for the “just right” bowl of porridge, the development of a creative culture requires feedback that is accurate, specific, and timely but also humane and decent.

Feedback for students and teachers can be clear and explicit, and the best formats provide a continuum so that everyone in the school understands how to achieve a higher level of performance. For example, classroom protocols as seemingly obvious as “raise your hand before you speak” could be readily challenged if teachers and students were to consider other means of achieving recognition. Yet the 18th century protocol of raising one’s hand to seek teacher recognition has been handed down from classroom to classroom, as if it were sacred fire rather than an outmoded system of engaging students in thoughtful conversations. Kim Marshall (2014) provides an excellent way to coach teachers on effective feedback techniques by providing a clear continuum of descriptions of professional practices. His rubric for monitoring, assessment, and follow-up includes the following range of professional practices.

• Highly Effective: Uses a variety of effective methods to check for understanding; immediately unscrambles confusion and clarifies

• Effective: Frequently checks for understanding and gives students helpful information if they seem confused

• Improvement Necessary: Uses mediocre methods (such as thumbs-up, thumbs-down) to check for understanding during instruction

• Does Not Meet Standards: Uses ineffective methods (for example, “Is everyone with me?”) to check for understanding

Students can also be very helpful in creating a range of performance standards. Larry Ainsworth (1998) makes a compelling case for the clarity and specificity provided by student-generated rubrics. He calls it the playground standard of clarity. When students explain the rules of a game to one another, they don’t use complex or obscure language. They say, “You can go here, but you can’t go there. You can do this, but you can’t do that.” Few kindergarteners I know have arrived home and gleefully exclaimed, “Mommy, I did great in phonemic awareness today!” Yet many report cards continue to use language that alienates parents and is unclear to students. If feedback for students or adults in the school is to have an impact on performance, then it must be clear to the giver as well as the receiver.

Rigorous Decision-Making System

The second essential element of a creative environment is a rigorous decision-making system. This kind of environment embraces discussion and debate as the fundamental processes for decision making on everything from class rules to criteria for student success to leadership and board policies. This is the opposite of student success defined by a teacher’s syllabus and rubrics and teacher and leadership success defined as compliance with a voluminous scorecard. Indeed, most board policy discussions are not conducted in an atmosphere of discussion and debate but rather behind closed doors from which a single recommendation is forwarded to the board for (almost inevitable) acceptance or rejection.

Alan Lafley and Roger Martin (2013) set a very high standard for disciplined decision making. They require decision makers to have mutually exclusive alternatives. In contrast to the common practice of presenting a single recommendation for consideration, they require alternatives, debate, and clear acceptance of one alternative and rejection of others. This is effective guidance not only for the boardroom but also for the classroom. The search for comity that infects so many social situations, including the classroom, is the enemy of vigorous debate and rigorous analysis of alternatives. When students believe that the end of every debate results in both sides being right, they arrive to the world outside of school better prepared for cocktail party conversation than a position of responsibility.

This approach to decision making is not just plucked from the business world and forced on schools. The concept of competing, mutually exclusive decision alternatives is essential in many environments, including nonprofit boards, religious institutions, schools, and symphony orchestras. I once watched James Levine conduct a rehearsal of the Boston Symphony. He asked different musicians for their opinions on the sound and expressive qualities of a particular passage. Although the musicians seemed pleased to have their opinions solicited, they also understood that Levine would consider the alternatives and then make a decision. Rigorous decision making, whether it is the opinion of a story in second grade or a multimillion-dollar technology proposal before a school board, requires that advocates take a position, defend it, critique alternatives, and then understand that, win or lose, they contributed to a culture in which dissent is not a social evil to avoid but a creative imperative to embrace.

Culture That Nurtures Creativity