Do schools kill creativity?

Reflections from TED talk “Do schools kill creativity?” by Ken Robinson.

--------

The future is unpredictable. Therefore the best way can we train our children to be successful is by making sure they have a skill that is going to be useful: creativity.Some teachers focus too much on academic ability. They are too strict when correcting mistakes. Children and their parents and teachers should not be too worried about making mistakes. “If you are not prepared to be wrong you will never come up with anything original”, says Ken Robinson.He explains that this happens because most school systems were created to meet the needs of industrialism. Most of the subjects taught in schools are related to using our brain, and not our bodies and we use mainly the left side (rational one) and very little our right side (the emotional one).He relates the very interesting story of Gillian Lynne (famous choreographer (Cats and Phantom of the Opera), and how she was lucky to have a doctor who suggested her to go to a dance school when she could not stop moving instead of prescribing drugs to calm her down.
There are thousands of children with ADHD nowadays. Do we encourage them to take part in activities involving movement or do we encourage their parents to get drugs to calm them down?Should we do more group collaboration? Group students in different ways? Will technology be able to help us change from an "industrial revolution" educational model to a "technology revolution" one?The world of education has never been as challenged as now.... but we also have more opportunities.



Schools have now unlimited resources to promote creativity. Creativity can be promoted by the school administrators, its teachers or the students themselves.As a Mathematics Teacher I have myself promoted creativity in many occasions. To cite one example, I have designed, created and put in practice a set of activities in which my students showed and improved their mathematics skills with videos. 


Innovation can lead to improvements but it can also lead to the opposite. In order to make sure the former path is chosen we need to investigate the results. This is what   I did: A study researching differences in IB SL Mathematics students’ understanding of trigonometry depending on whether they used peer-reviewed video recorded tasks or not was conducted. The sample size was made up of 18 randomly selected students, divided into two groups. The intervention group integrated peer-reviewed video-recording activities in their lessons while the comparison did not.
The research design was experimental and I, the researcher, assumed the null hypothesis (no significant different outcome). Prior to the beginning of the implementation phase, a pre-test was undertaken, following a treatment phase where the innovative teaching practice was implemented. A post-test was carried out three weeks later. Data was statistically analyzed, including a T-test between the two columns of change percentages, which was applied in order to reject or confirm the null hypothesis. Qualitative results are also presented. I published the results of this investigation in several educational networks. It can be downloaded here.