Raise the Next Generation of Problem Solvers with More Creative Learning
Kids are insatiably curious. Babies are so eager to learn that they grab any new thing they can get their hands on. And young children soak up language like a sponge, often becoming fluent by the time they’re two or three. So if kids are natural learners, why do we expect to walk into a classroom to find a bunch of bored students?
To start, our current school system wasn’t designed to foster each pupil’s natural curiosity and creativity. According to Ken Robinson and Lou Aronica, authors of “Creative Learning,” conventional education emanated out of necessity from the Industrial Age where students were being prepped to work in factories. It’s no wonder, then, that our current education structure with ubiquitous guidelines, standardized tests and strict schedules resemble more of an assembly line than a place where kids fall in love with learning.
While we can certainly use more creativity in our classroom to enhance the learning experience, infusing more creativity and curiosity is also necessary to cultivate the next generation of problem solvers that won’t be graduating into the Industrial Age but an innovation era. Here are some ways to encourage creativity in our students and help them thrive in a changing landscape.
Take the focus off grades. One of the problems with our current school structure is that most kids don’t benefit from sitting down and absorbing information in lecture form, which is a model of learning created to produce good test takers. We have an assembly-line education that feeds every child the same curriculum, then teaches them to regurgitate this information in the form of a timed exam.
But tests are not the best measure of a child’s intelligence, especially non-academic forms of intelligence like emotional and creative intelligence. Such narrow standards disparage children who develop slower and excel in non-academic areas. These kids are treated as developmentally deficient. Even for kids whose brains are more wired to learn from textbooks and take tests well, the obsession with grades slowly kill a love of learning.
A study conducted by the American Psychological Association revealed children reported feeling higher levels of stress on average across the school year than adults. One of the biggest contributors to our kids’ stress are the obsessive focus on grades. Grades have become so important to a child’s future success that schools now focus more on training kids to pass exams and get good grades than on helping kids understand the course material. But if we are to truly raise the next generation of innovators we need to focus on inspiring our children to learn for reasons beyond good grades.
Infuse storytelling. Narrative is a powerful vehicle for learning in any subject. Stories provide context and make information relevant, which helps with long-term memorization unlike straight facts from textbooks, which tend to linger only in our short-term memory just long enough to regurgitate information on a test.
If you want to introduce your child to environmental issues, they’d benefit more from reading Lorax by Dr. Seuss than learning about the latest emission figures. Living books and great literature are cultural artifacts that connect us to the real world around us and inspire a love of reading.
Then there are the stories our own children have to tell. Encourage storytelling imaginative or real, whether at the dinner table or around a campfire. Encourage them to write their own books or recount them in a recording to produce their own audio book. In telling their own stories, they’ll also draw upon what they’ve learned and reimagine who they want to become.
Consider play as essential. Playing is as natural to kids as breathing so it’s not our kids’ mindsets that need changing but our own. Play is not something extra that’s done completely disparate from education. Play is actually an integral means of learning, exploring, inventing and connecting. Play makes learning relevant. Play expands the mind. Play gives children a chance to think big. Play also teaches kids to take initiative, solve problems, persist and persevere. The idea that learning only happens when kids aren’t having fun, is antiquated and perhaps deeply ingrained from our own educational experiences. But we don’t need to perpetuate this misconception.
A Germany study found that when comparing 50 play-based preschools and 50 academic preschools, kids who attended play-based preschools performed better in academics. Play isn’t antithetical to learning; it’s a motivational force for learning because curiosity and wonder are the foundation for all learning. As parents we need to dispense with the idea that the most worthwhile learning comes from textbooks.
Admittedly, I have been concerned about my younger daughter for years – the entire duration of her academic career to be exact. She will be attending 3rd grade and has never seemed to show an interest in learning like her sister. She rushed through her schoolwork, complained about doing homework and dragged her feet to school, except on days her class was doing special projects. Admittedly, I chalked her up to the school-isn’t-for-everyone category. But school can be for everyone. Our current school system perhaps just isn’t for everyone.
What my daughter did love to spend her time on, and the reason she rushed through her schoolwork, was so she could play. She loved to craft and invent things. Her latest project, which has taken up the greater part of our garage, was building an airport out of cardboard. From the moment she woke up until she went to bed, she was laser-focused for days. The girl who shunned even minor discomfort suddenly worked tirelessly in the sweltering sun. She found eating a nuisance. And instead of struggling to find ways to fill her day, there simply wasn’t enough hours in the day.
In recent past, I would’ve lectured her to do something useful with her time alongside playing, like practicing violin or working on her multiplication workbooks. But thanks to the recent epiphany I had while researching for this article, I had the wherewithal to understand she was doing something useful with her time! She was inventing, designing, constructing, persisting, utilizing geometry, ergonomics, physics, and learning to be resourceful. When she exhausted the cardboard supply in our house, she started to ask her neighbors if they had cardboard they could spare. I lauded the efforts I hoped she would repeat and finally supported her play time. I scoured the house for cardboard and parked our cars on the street temporarily so she could utilize the garage. Children aren’t averse to hard work. They’re averse to meaningless busywork.