Implementing creativity-supportive curricula: Drivers and barriers

Having recognised the importance of fostering students’ creativity in the goals for the education system, the natural progression is for educators to incorporate teaching practices that support learners in appropriate ways. Teaching professionals can support their students’ creative thinking, but doing so entails intentionality from educators who use pedagogies which, balancing structure and freedom, encourage students to explore, generate and reflect upon ideas (Cremin and Chappell, 2019[22]; Vincent-Lancrin et al., 2019[23]).

Research has underlined that embedding creativity in curricula alone is not enough for practitioners to support students’ creative thinking. Different factors may stand in the way of achieving the intended curriculum, including: a lack of clarity on what creative thinking is, how it is taught and learnt across disciplines and the type of outcomes to be expected of students as they progress in their learning; a hostile environment for educators to reflect on, experiment and progressively adapt their teaching; and the absence of adequate incentives for students and teachers to engage in creative thinking practices (Vincent-Lancrin et al., 2019[23]; Davies et al., 2014[33]; Lucas, 2022[26]; Cachia et al., 2010[34])

Supporting creative thinking requires a shared vision on what it means and how it develops in learners

In traditional curricular areas, learning progressions describe how students move through different stages in their learning. Concrete exemplars of expected learning along with specific criteria to assess performance, such as scoring rubrics, may also be available (OECD, 2013[35]). In such areas, teachers and other assessment designers tend to be aware of the knowledge and skills expected of students and the typical learning trajectories they follow to acquire them, but what is true for mathematics or reading may not be so common for creative thinking.

Previous comparative analyses already have indicated that creativity is finding its way into curricula, but it does so differently in different jurisdictions. In some cases, the case for creativity is articulated in detail, providing rationale for its importance and guidelines to teach and assess it. In others, creativity is introduced as a general principle, and only referenced superficially, with little attention to progressions and teaching guidelines (Patston et al. (2021[32]); Care et al. (2018[36]); Taylor et al. (2020[37])). Vagueness about the concrete nature and expected outcomes of creative thinking translates into unclear priorities for educators. While teachers value creativity as an important goal, common understanding on what it means, what key features define it and how it develops in learners is lacking (Mullet et al., 2016[38]). Clarity on learning outcomes and progressions is nonetheless particularly relevant for teaching complex competencies that, like creative thinking, can manifest validity in multiple ways and are defined by both thought processes and behaviours (Foster and Piacentini, 2023[39]).

Teachers’ beliefs about the nature of creative thinking and its outcomes can support or hinder its development in students. Teacher beliefs relate to their conceptions about the nature of creativity, including its definition (i.e. aspects of originality but also appropriateness), distribution (i.e. whether all learners can develop it), malleability (i.e. the extent to which it can be taught and learnt), and domain specificity (i.e. whether it can be exercised in all subjects); and about who creative individuals are, including learners (i.e. the outcomes to be expected of them, across different groups of students), and teachers themselves (i.e. the knowledge, skills and attitudes creative teachers have) (Bereczki and Kárpáti, 2018[40]).

Box 1 Creating a common language to teach and assess creative thinking

Teaching and assessment materials from an OECD project on fostering creative thinking

The OECD Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) carried out the project “Fostering and Assessing Creativity and Critical Thinking in Education”, which aimed to develop a shared professional language on creativity and critical thinking in primary and secondary education and facilitate its teaching, learning and formative assessment across 11 education systems: Brazil, France, Hungary, India, the Netherlands, the Russian Federation, the Slovak Republic, Spain, Thailand, the United Kingdom (Wales) and the United States. The project is continuing with a focus on teacher education and higher education.

As part of this project, a series of rubrics on creativity were developed and field trialled. The rubrics were incrementally developed during the project and improved based on teachers’ and project co-ordinators’ feedback following the field trial. Conceptual rubrics were designed to clarify “what counts” or “what sub-skills should be developed” in relation to creativity, guide the design of lesson plans and help practitioners be more intentional and consistent in their teaching of creative skills. Research-informed sub-skills were included in domain-general and domain-specific rubrics, under the broader, easy-to remember skills: inquiring, imagining, doing and reflecting.

The project also developed assessment rubrics, which teachers and students can use for formative or summative purposes. The rubrics articulate four levels of progression or proficiency in the acquisition of creative skills, ranging from cases where students exhibit little effort to exercise creativity (Level 1) to those where students show a high level of creativity and technical mastery (Level 4). They focus on both creative products and processes: ”Product” refers to a visible, final work (e.g. the response to a problem, an essay, an artefact of a performance) and “Process” to the learning and production steps observed by the teachers or documented by the students, which may not be entirely visible in the final product.

Additionally, a set of design criteria for lesson plans and over 100 peer-reviewed examples of lesson plans with a focus on nurturing creativity and critical thinking in different subjects was also developed by experts and teachers participating in the project. These examples aim to inspire teachers by illustrating the kind of approaches and tasks that allow students to develop their creative and critical thinking while acquiring the content and procedural knowledge across different domains of the curriculum. Both the lesson plans and rubrics are publicly available as open educational resources.

Note: The rubrics as well as a number of interdisciplinary and discipline-specific lesson plans developed by this project are available at https://www.oecd.org/education/fostering-students-creativity-and-critical-thinking62212c37-en.htm and www.oecdcericct.com

Source: Vincent-Lancrin et al. (2019[23]), Fostering Students’ Creativity and Critical Thinking: What it Means in School, https://doi.org/10.1787/62212c37-en

Practitioners need support to build and sustain innovative learning environments

Previous studies on the integration of creativity in education have highlighted that while certain pedagogical practices can support students to think creatively, these are not commonly practiced by teachers and students in schools (e.g. Cachia et al. (2010[34])). Innovating teaching and learning is fundamentally a problem-solving exercise. Teachers identify a need (e.g. fostering students creative thinking) and mobilise knowledge to implement changes accordingly. In this process, the knowledge they mobilise is sometimes explicit, resulting from study during formal education and training and as part of their daily practice, and often tacit, fruit of their own experience, reflection and exchange with colleagues (Révai and Guerriero, 2017[41]; Paniagua and Istance, 2018[42]). Professional learning and innovation thus go hand in hand. They benefit from access to pre-service and in-service training, especially when its provision affords opportunities for experiential, hands-on and collaborative learning. They are more broadly supported by a working culture providing safe spaces for teachers to try out and develop new pedagogical approaches collaboratively, and the extent to which this is promoted systematically by school leaders and regulatory frameworks (OECD, 2019[43]; OECD, 2019[44]; OECD, 2013[35]).

As expectations of schooling rise, the emphasis on advanced competencies like creative thinking coexist with ambitions to maintain or even increase the breadth of curricular content covered. This results in scarce time for teachers to engage in both collaborative reflection on and experimentation with creativity-supportive pedagogies. Processes of joint planning and collegiate exchange among educators can be further challenged by school structures that, for the most part, remain organised by strong disciplinary divisions (e.g. syllabuses, timetables, teaching departments), and more generally by an extended view of teaching as an individual, siloed practice (OECD, 2019[43]).

The physical space of learning environments can also have an impact on the capacity of educators to promote creativity. On the one hand, some forms of creative work may demand special equipment and modernised facilities. Engaging students in the construction of artefacts requires specific tools – whether these are physical objects produced in technology and arts activities, or videos, websites and blogs in the context of language or history, for example. On the other hand, the design of physical spaces influences the relations and practices that are possible within them. The physicality of “the classroom” can facilitate or hinder the capacity to combine different types of tasks during instruction, including play, manual work or study, and the use of different grouping strategies, with students working individually or in groups and teachers engaging in team teaching (OECD, 2013[45]). This has particular relevance for the use of instructional strategies incorporating more freedom for students to explore and make choices, which often entail students and teachers engaging in longer, complex tasks involving different forms of doing and making and requiring more flexible and open spaces (Davies et al., 2013[24]).

Curricular goals and assessment instruments must align to create positive incentives

As signposts of what students should learn and be able to do, student assessments highlight the knowledge and competencies that society values and, in so doing, can have an enabling or constraining effect on teaching and learning practices. The effects are likely to be larger when assessments carry high stakes for students, like at the end of upper secondary education, when examinations have a strong influence over future educational and employment trajectories (OECD, 2013[35]).

Student assessments can have a constraining effect on creativity education if they omit creative thinking in their evaluation criteria – for instance, when they have a strong orientation towards the reproduction of pre-defined knowledge as opposed to original thought and acceptance of difference forms of expression. Student assessments can also disincentivise some aspects of creative thinking when they focus on some subjects at the expense of others (e.g. testing mathematics but not visual arts), and therefore neglect the types of creative work more commonly associated with specific domains of knowledge. Assessments that positively contribute to creative thinking are capable of generating evidence on how students deal with complex situations and iterate towards solutions, which demands the use of multiple, open-ended assessment tasks (e.g. projects, presentations) and tools (e.g. rubrics, portfolios) for teachers and other assessment designers to be able to document a wide range of student performances (Vincent-Lancrin et al., 2019[23]; Beghetto, 2020[46]; Lucas, 2022[47]; Foster and Piacentini, 2023[39]).

The ways in which schools are evaluated have similar enabling and constraining effects on the adoption of innovative pedagogies. This concerns not only the criteria used by external evaluators, but also the extent to which schools consider creative thinking an important learning outcome in their self-evaluations. Additionally, it relates to the views and concerns of other, increasingly vocal stakeholders, such as families and the media. The views of stakeholders on what good education is do not always align, which generates competing demands for educators (Burns, Köster and Fuster, 2016[29]).