Creativity and the Common Core Need Each Other
Many fear that rigorous content standards will impede efforts of those who want to nurture creativity in students, but the Common Core and creativity offer each other far more potential synergies than obstacles. Creativity requires content skills and know
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11. CREATIVITY AND THE COMMON CORE NEED EACH OTHER
OVERVIEW OF THE CHAPTER
Many fear that rigorous content standards will impede efforts of those who want to nurture creativity in students, but the Common Core and creativity offer each other far more potential synergies than obstacles. Creativity requires content skills and knowledge—very substantial degrees of skill and knowledge in some domains, with the degree of expertise needed generally increasing for higher levels of creative performance—so the development of such content knowledge and skills promotes the development of creativity by providing many of the tools needed for creative thinking. Conversely, the best way to acquire skills and knowledge is to use that knowledge and those skills in thoughtful, constructive, and creative ways, making creative thinking an excellent way to help students acquire content knowledge. Learning content shouldn’t be thought of as the “rote learning of easily measured knowledge and skills,” as Ambrose (chapter 2, this volume) reminds us. “Broad and deep proficiency in the subject areas” can only be achieved by thoughtful, constructive, and often very creative thinking about the content of each subject area. There are areas of possible contention, of course (e.g., extrinsic constraints often support skill acquisition but may in some cases hinder creative thinking), but many of the alleged content knowledge-creativity conflicts are merely the result of misguided notions, such as the idea that learning content means nothing more than parroting back what Ambrose calls “superficial facts” instead of “grappling with interesting problems in the subjects and mastering key concepts.” “[G]rappling with interesting problems in the subjects and mastering key concepts” is what the acquisition of content knowledge is really about—“deep-level cognitive and affective immersion in a variety of subject areas including literacy, the arts, mathematics, the sciences, world languages, history and governance” (Ambrose, chapter 2, this volume). Another unfortunate misconception is the belief that we must be able to measure every outcome that we care about. Valid and meaningful assessment is hard, especially if we want to assess complex kinds of thinking, but the fact that we may not be able to test, in a standardized format, some of the things that we want to teach should not prevent us from teaching or valuing those things. For this reason, Common Core testing may be a genuine roadblock and the use of such tests for any high-stakes decisions (e.g., who gets a diploma, or who gets—or gets to keep—a teaching job) should be reconsidered, but that is no reason to avoid using the Common Core (or D. Ambrose & R. J. Sternberg (Eds.), Creative Intelligence in the 21st Century, 175–190. © 2016 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.
J. BAER
another set of rigorous content-based standards) as guides in education. We can (and should) teach things that matter whether or not we can test them adequately. Promoting content knowledge and skill acquisition in ma
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