There was a Brainzooming posse in Lawrence, Kansas on Saturday as Marianne Carr and I attended ConfabuLarryum, the Lawrence festival of creativity. In just its second year, Ben Smith’s brainchild increased its attendance 4x to more than 5,000 adults and kids.
What a fantastic event celebrating creative thinking skills of all kinds!
The only disappointment was I didn’t get to spend any time with the incredible array of activities and demonstrations. With a noon time slot to speak, I stayed in the auditorium to see the presentations before mine, getting a read on the audience, the room, and what content would work most effectively.
I presented a mini-workshop on Busting Creativity Barriers. One of the audience questions from a fourth grade teacher was on how to help kids stop editing their creativity and new ideas for fear of being wrong.
My response was that’s clearly a challenge in a school environment where we are grading kids on their academic performance and monitoring all their actions and behaviors for conformity to expectations. Talk about a recipe for teaching children to edit their creativity and curb their creative thinking skills! It takes a full-blown creative rebel to survive creatively in that environment. And that survival will likely be VERY rocky because a student putting up enough of a fight to hang on to their own creative thinking skills and instincts will be going dangerously against the grain.
How about establishing a grade-free zone to cultivate creative thinking skills?
My spontaneous idea and response to her question was to create a grade-free zone in the classroom. This would be a spot where children could go to experiment, imagine ideas, and explore their creative thinking skills without ANY grading or correction.
Thinking about it, the grade-free zone might be a physical location in the classroom, a condition (i.e., a certain day or days), a situation (i.e., a child could call for grade-free zone time to create), or maybe all three of these.
What else might need to be in place for a successful grade-free zone?
- Create a vocabulary for the grade-free zone where teachers AND other students know how to respond to and celebrate their own and others’ creative work
- Ample and varied resources children can readily and easily access
- Ways for children to work individually if that’s what they prefer
- Meaningful and equitable ways to celebrate creative thinking skills expressed in the grade-free zone
- A well-understood approach to any critiques a student might solicit along with a remedy if the critique gets into grade-like territory
Those are some initial thoughts from someone who ISN'T a childhood educator; they are based, however, on how we try to create what are essentially grade-free zones inside creative thinking workshops. It would be interesting to see how my friends at the Boulder Journey School would address the question!
Two other thoughts emerged later:
- Perhaps rather than being grade-free, the zone should be an all-A zone. That would be akin to conductor Benjamin Zander’s statement that he only teaches A students.
- Even though ConfabuLarryum WAS a grade free zone filled with all kinds of creative outlets, I heavily edited my workshop presentation before starting, inserting stories that weren’t part of the presentation when I walked in the building and taking out a number of pieces.
I guess being grade-free is harder than it initially sounds.
What do you think of the idea, and how would you approach helping students to stop editing their own creativity? - Mike Brown
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