The 4 Branches of Creativity

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But what I’ve done is pull a significant piece that I wanted to share with you that is a huge aha that I didn’t want to wait because I think that this is something that needs to start to have a dialogue around it now because as I’ve been going through the research, as I’ve been digging through this, this is a conversation that as I’ve been looking at it I’m going why have we not been talking about this until now? Why have we not had this in front of us and been looking at this all along as a discussion point. And so I think that is something that I wanted to bring to the surface today so that we can start to have this dialogue. We can start to be thinking about this, be bringing this back to our communities, be thinking about how can I bring this piece of the conversation. And like I said, it’s a huge topic. So this is just a small nugget of it.

But how can we bring this piece into action right now? Because I do believe that we can start to take some of these elements and really start to work through some of them right now. We don’t have to wait until some of this gets published, right? So that’s the benefit of having your own podcast, right? That we can start to share this right away. So let me give you a little background on what started to trigger me about this particular conversation today. Now the title of this episode is the four branches of creativity. And so I want us to be thinking about if creativity is a tree, there are four huge branches, main kind of arteries, if you will, in education, particularly of creativity that we could explore. Lots of times when we think about creativity, it’s kind of like this massive network that we’re thinking of as if it’s this nebulous. It’s huge and we don’t really know where to start. But if we think about creativity as four main branches, it gives us some solidified set of options of where we want to go, right? It automatically narrows down our selection point of kind of where we want to think about heading, which direction, right, that makes a first of all starts to make things a little bit easier. But before we start thinking about that, I’m going to give you a little story. 

So earlier last weekend, I was taking a class on a totally different topic. It was a business class actually. And I do this from time to time because as you know, business is not my background. And so what do you do when something isn’t in your wheelhouse and you need it to be because you know, you got a function in that arena, you go take a class in it, right? And so I will take business classes pretty frequently in areas that I feel like I need some support. And so last weekend, I was in one of those classes and I was struck by a comment that the instructor made, which was, you don’t need a productivity system, you need a creation system. And in this particular class, we were looking at…

Like how can we be more efficient with our time? How can we be more efficient with our staff? And everybody was thinking about productivity, right? What’s the next productivity hack? And we’ve done this, right? We’ve done this on this own podcast. We’ve had productivity hacks that can save us time. So when the instructor said this, immediately, it was like a light bulb went off in my brain. You don’t need a productivity system. You need a creation system. And what he was saying was that we don’t need another hack to save us five minutes of time. What we need to remember is that we no longer sit in front of a desk and pound out, you know, 50 words a minute, 100 words a minute, and that’s going to win us a bonus at the end of the year because we were able to type out more words than the next person sitting next to us, right? We are rewarded based on a variety of other things now in this economy. As teachers, there’s a lot of different factors for what we’re rewarded on. Certainly not what many other jobs are rewarded on, right? So, but if we’re thinking about the world in general, right, not teaching, but if we’re thinking about where we’re sending our children out into the world, right, and about what the job world looks like now, right, what careers look like now. Their reward system isn’t the same as what the reward system was 50 years ago. 

So it’s not about being more productive, it’s about being more creative. So that means that they need a creation system that’s gonna work for them. So maybe that’s 10 minutes of focus time, five minutes of, you know, just relaxation time or 50 minutes of focus time, 10 minutes of a walk, a creation system. So he was explaining this and that’s when I started thinking about, well, what does a creation system mean? He was giving practical examples, of course, you know, like sometimes women need a different creation system than men or sometimes people with ADHD need shorter bursts of focus time than other people who don’t have ADHD. He was giving very practical examples, but then I started thinking, well, what does a creation system really mean? What does creativity really mean? And that started me down this rabbit hole. And so I’m going to share with you my thought process today. The download for today is actually a series of notes that I kept that I think will actually be more beneficial to you than a series of templates. I could have turned some of these into templates for you, but I actually think that a series of notes will allow you to either create your own templates from them or to expand your own thinking from my notes. So to take a look at my notes and then doodle your own, expand your own thinking and use them as prompts to think about what comes next for you. So that’s gonna be the download today, is these notes in my thinking process so that it can spur your own. So as I started thinking about this creativity system, I then began to think, okay, well, if this is true and we need a creation system in the 21st century, then we gotta figure out what is creativity, right? And so as I began thinking about this and researching it and digging in, I’ve been realizing that there’s really two thoughts on creativity based in research. 

So, one of the main branches of thinking is from Sternberg and and Lubert from 1999, which is the definition that creativity is the production of ideas, insights or products that are novel, original and useful in a given context. Now, you’d be surprised at how many definitions for creativity are out there. There’s so many probably as many as there are for the idea of creativity itself, right? But this definition from Sternberg and Lieber from 1999 is it really synthesizes and captures what most people qualify as what creativity is, right? Which is the idea that it’s a creation of something new or original or a synthesis of previous ideas in a new way, right, that fits the qualifications that it has to be useful. So it can’t just be novel. It has to also be useful and it has to be novel. So it has to be something new, original, novel, and it has to be useful in a given context. So the context piece becomes really important, right? Because it could be new and useful to you in one arena, but if later in life somebody else has already been there.

to them that isn’t new and useful. So think of it this way, for a first grader, you know, a popsicle house might be new and could be potentially useful to store various things, but for a third grader, that’s not, they’ve already done it, right? So again, context is really important. So that definition wrapping around creativity, for a lot of people, they kind of cling to that, that’s what creativity is. If they need to be able to, define something, if they need to kind of cling to what is creativity, it’s the production of ideas, thoughts, insights, or products that are novel, original, and useful in a given context. Now, there’s another road of thinking that creativity isn’t really meant to be defined. This is called the theory of creativity, which says that creativity is an ever evolving process expressed through problem solving, invention and innovation. Which really means that creativity can’t be defined. We can’t put a full definition on it because it is always evolving, always changing and it is therefore expressed through problem solving, invention and innovation. These are people who are like, we can’t really define it so here’s the best way that we can contain it without defining it explicitly.

So you can kind of go through either one of those definitions or theory of creativity if you don’t want to put a definition on it to kind of get to the same idea, right, of what creativity is. The idea here though is that at some point it’s something new. It’s something that’s generated that is a spark, that is something that the world hasn’t seen before, right? And that it’s a result perhaps of problem solving or invention or innovation or something that is continuous, right? That it is not a stagnant piece. That creativity is ever -changing, is constant. So it is not just one and done, right? And so I love kind of meshing those two things together. I think that one doesn’t just capture it alone. So as you’re thinking about this,

Then you begin to understand why creativity is so unwieldy, right? Why it’s so massive. And so as you start to think about, wow, this is really huge, and you start to think about why this is so difficult to capture, then you have to start to understand, all right, well then how could we ever begin to really dive into this in education?

This is where the four branches come in. And this is why I’m so excited because this is where I really feel like education is missing the mark right now and where we can start to have this conversation. So there’s in education for education purposes, there’s really four ways that we could enter into creativity and explore it. The first branch, well, there’s not really like a hierarchy. I’m going to say first,

but it could very well be fourth, right? I’m just gonna label them one, two, three, four, but you could enter them at any given point. So we have creative skills, and you could think of those as like arts classes. This is where you’re learning the skills sets within the arts themselves, right? So think about art skills, music skills, dance skills, creative skill sets, right? Then you have creative thinking. So this is where you have divergent, convergent, and lateral thinking strategies. This is where you’re working on thinking inside, outside of the box, and cross thinking. That’s that lateral thinking. You have creative expression. So this is when you have a representation of yourself in some way. This is when we also leverage our emotions and our environments. And you have creative application.

And this is where things like arts integration and STEAM come in. So four very different branches, right? And you can explore creativity in each of these different ways for very different purposes. So this is where I think when we’re talking about creativity, oftentimes we have this us versus them mentality when it comes to the arts. But this is why I think putting this in this creativity bucket makes so much more sense.

Because when we’re talking about arts integration, sometimes arts specialists get very defensive and they’re like, no, no, no, no, that’s going to take away from arts time or arts specialists who have training in this area. But if we understand that they’re all branches with various intentions and purposes, we understand that one doesn’t take away from the other, right? They’re all part of the same tree. It’s just a matter of which avenue we’re exploring at any given time. Now,

Once we understand that and that each of them have a different purpose, here’s another understanding. Two of these branches are assessable, which means that we can actually assess what we’re producing, right? And two of these branches are what I call explorable. And it’s not that we can’t assess them or measure them in some way, but it’s much more difficult to do so. It’s like, trying to measure the wind. You know it’s there, but if you try to put a yardstick up and measure it, it’s just going to flap, right? It’s difficult. So the two that are assessable are creative skills and creative application. So arts classes, we can measure skills. We can assess the skill level of a student, correct? Whether they’re a beginner, an intermediate, or advanced we can assess students their progress in an arts integrated project or a STEAM project or a project -based learning project, right? And we can assess how well they’ve done in those arts areas and their application of the arts area. Yeah? But when it comes to creative thinking, that’s much more difficult to assess their thinking.

Likewise, it’s much more difficult to assess creative expression because that is a representation of self. So that is more of an area of exploration. So creative thinking and creative expression are explorable areas for creativity in schools where creative skills and creative application are more accessible areas for schools. So again, looking at these four branches.

You can explore each area in school, but again, where do you want to assess and where do you want to explore? Now, each area is used for a different purpose. For example, creative thinking, the creative thinking branch, those thinking skills can overarchingly support all areas of creativity, right? Certainly it’s going to support creative application. It’s going to support creative skills, it’s going to support creative expression, and more than that, it’s going to support all of the other curricular areas, right? But we don’t need to measure it. It’s simply there as a way for us to be, for us to be working, right? Same for creative expression. So again, creative expression is a way of representing ourselves. Creative expression also leverages our emotions, our environments.

So it’s a great way to hook into things like social emotional learning. Are we assessing social emotional learning skills? Are we assessing how well we can regulate our emotions? Not necessarily, right? But we are exploring them and we’re working on those skills, which trickles into all of the other things that we’re working on at any given time, right? Now, when we understand that we have these four branches and that they’re both assessable, and explorable and that the explorable areas can impact and support the accessible areas, that these all work in tandem together, then we actually start to understand that the act of creativity itself is a cyclical process. See, lots of people think that creativity is just like a spark, like you suddenly are creative, which couldn’t be further from the truth.

I mean, think about the last time that you were creative with something. You might be thinking about the actual act of creativity, but there were things that happened before that creative moment. For example, and just because I’m in it right now, I’m writing this book. But I will tell you, before I’ve been able to write this book, I’ve been thinking about this book for the last 18 months.

I’ve been ruminating on the table of contents of this book for the last six months. In the last three months, I’ve been really kind of wrenching apart each of these pieces and playing around with all of this. It wasn’t until this past week that things started to fall into place and I started to really write. And so while I’ve been really, really productive this week in the writing of it, the creation of it, the last 12 months have been really productively fertile for me in the creation process of the beginning stages of creativity. And so we have to understand before we get into these four branches how the creative process itself works because the creative process feeds each of the four branches. Now, there’s a lot to discuss here so I’m going to just break this down for you. There’s a couple of models for how the creative process works. If you go research this, please understand you’re going to find like hundreds of models. Nobody can really agree on this. Research is all over the place on this. But there’s a couple that stand out more than most. The first one is the Keith Sawyer model. And I bring this up because it’s easy. It’s easy to remember. Short words, easy to remember in a sequence. Ask, learn, look, then play and think, then fuse, choose, and make. And if you think about it kind of in that sequence, like you ask a question, you learn about it, then you look at it a little differently, then you play or tinker with it, then you think about what you played or tinkered with, then you fuse some ideas together, you choose what works, then you make something new, that sequence works, right?

But most research shows that there’s some aspect of at least four stages in general. There’s the preparation stage where you’re building knowledge or getting ideas. There’s the incubation stage where all of that knowledge and all of those ideas start to just kind of churn a little bit, you ruminate on those things. There’s the illumination stage. This is what we normally think of as creativity. This is where the spark happens. And then there’s what they call the verification stage that after you create your thing, you put it out into the world for verification or some sort of reflection or feedback. I actually like to call this the offering stage. I’m going to offer this to you as a creative and you’re going to give me some feedback. Okay, but the academics call it verification. In education, this four stage process actually kind of we describe it like this, describe, analyze, interpret, create, present, evaluate, reflect. And then we do it all again. Once you get the reflection from that evaluation, you describe, analyze, interpret, create, present, evaluate, reflect. And it keeps on kind of going in this cycle. And we do that because it fits really nicely with the design process and also with the scientific method. So the creation process kind of works really beautifully with the design process and the scientific method and they all kind of work together in tandem. So whichever way you best understand it, and none of them are wrong, by the way, they all work together, they all basically say the same thing. So as long as you understand how that basic cycle works of creation, as long as you understand it’s not just a spark, but that there is a period of time where we’re gathering information, we’re letting it ruminate, we create, we then share it, evaluate it, reflect, and then continue. That it is a continuous cycle. Remember the theory of creativity. Creation is never stagnant. We’re continuously evolving, right? So as long as we understand that this continuous cycle continues to happen, now we can start to understand how we want to build this back up. So now that we’ve broken all of these pieces down, we understand the definitions and theory of creativity.

We understand the four branches of creativity and we now understand the creative process itself. Now I want us to start to think about how are we going to build this back up and make it useful. Okay, so here’s where the rubber meets the road today, my friend. I want us this week to think about each of the four branches of creativity. Okay, remember what they are. We’ve got creative skills, creative thinking, creative expression and creative application. All right. I want you to pick one this week for yourself, just yourself to explore. Right. Always start with yourself before we start thinking about our classrooms, because we got to try it for ourselves first. Right. In order for us to make meaning. All right. So pick one for yourself. Pick a branch that you want to explore. Then within that branch, pick a topic or a subject that you want to focus on. So.

If you want to explore creative skills, maybe you’re going to pick, you’re going to pick a skill, you want to pick watercolor. That’s your skill that you want to focus on this week. Or maybe you want to pick playing the piano. That could be an art skill that you want to focus on this week, right? Then I want you to move through the creative cycle. So think about that preparation stage, right? What knowledge do you need? What do you need to learn about?

What kind of rumination do you need to do once you learn that knowledge? What do you need to practice? Maybe what do you need to explore a little bit more? What do you need to think about a little bit more? Then create what do you want to experiment with? What do you want to try and then share it with one other person and get some feedback? Okay, try that for yourself in one branch. If it’s not the creative skills, try it in a creative expression or try it in creative thinking or try it with an application of something that you want to pull together. We have lots of different ways that you can do this, lots of different ways you could explore any of those branches, but pick one for yourself this week and see if you can try it. Because once you try it for yourself, then it’s really easy to see how this process could work in your classroom. And that’s where the magic happens. So remember, there’s a downloadable note sheet for this this week. This is a lot.

But I love digging into this topic of creativity. I’m so excited for where this is going in our schools and our education just in general. And I hope you’re as excited about this topic as I am because it has so much potential for our students and for ourselves. Again, remember, you can go over to artsintegration .com forward slash artworks.

Take a look for this episode, the four branches of creativity, and you can download my note sheet so that you can use those as prompts to generate your own thinking around creativity this week. All right, my friend, thank you so much for tuning in, and I’ll see you again next week for another episode of Art Works for Teachers.