Summer Institute 2013: Nurturing Young Children’s Creative Thinking
By Jeanne Zuech, Teacher
“Facilitating creative development is a sophisticated process that must find a balance between learning skills and stimulating the imagination to explore new ideas.”—Ken Robinson, Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative, 2001
The Bing Institute’s summer 2013 sessions focused on the value of creative thinking for young learners and its importance in the early childhood field. Guided by Beverley Hartman, head teacher and director of the Bing Institute, and Sarah Wright, head teacher, participants examined creative thinking through hands-on explorations, discussions, video analyses and presentations by Bing teachers. Twenty-five attendees, from the United States and abroad, took part in each of the two three-day intensive workshops, which took place in mid-July.
The following is an overview of the program that was offered for both three-day sessions.
The program began with a hands-on experience designed to launch the creative process and help the group bond. In this first session, led by head teacher Adrienne Lomangino, the attendees discussed how best to define creative thinking. This was the resulting definition: “Imaginative activity fashioned so as to produce outcomes that are both original and of value” (from All Our Futures: Creativity, Culture and Education, published in 1999 by the National Advisory Committee on Creative and Cultural Education). This definition appealed to the group because it could be applied to young children, as well as adults. Determining what constitutes true creative thinking for a young child helped the group to acknowledge that creative thinking is a complex undertaking that reaches beyond the arts and into other disciplines.
Window on a Young Child’s Creative Thinking:
A 4-year-old girl joins her brother at a table where he has been connecting together pieces of a set of construction materials
—flat, plastic, organic shapes with slits on the edges. She joins him, slipping pieces together along the slit to form an extended structure. Both children continue adding to their structures until the pieces are all used. The girl turns to a teacher to complain, “He has more than me!” The teacher responds, “Yes, he’d been building with them for a while before you came.” The child lowers her gaze to her construction. She pauses, frowning slightly, and scans the area. She then swiftly glides to nearby shelves, picks up a basket of small plastic animal figures and returns to the table. Settling back into her chair, she picks up an animal out of the basket. After holding it up to examine for a moment, she hangs the animal on her construction. She continues to hang numerous animals on the structure. When an animal falls from its placement, she seeks out a more stable position for it. Her brother watches her for a minute then adds animals to his own structure.
The session’s leaders asked attendees to analyze examples of creative thinking including the behavior of the girl in the scene described above. The group members asked themselves if the above scenario in which the girl uses animal figures to solve her problem was likely to occur in most early childhood classrooms. They concluded that teachers might set the stage for creativity yet creative thinking is beyond some children’s reach. The group discussed the girl’s scenario in terms of her needs and her solution as it related to the guiding definition of creative thinking: Was the child’s work original and of value? The group deemed the girl’s solution as original and of value for her. The child had the novel idea to combine materials that enabled her to pursue her goal to continue building. This novel approach had additional value because it impacted her brother’s choice to start using animals on his structure. The group acknowledged that they cannot know from one anecdote if the girl has developed her creative thinking ability to the level that she asserts it in other experiences. She might have had a single creative effort in this scenario or perhaps this is her first step toward solving challenges using creative thinking in her future play. This kind of group reflective practice on a child’s documented learning story is an important collaborative process for educators as it allows us to ask questions, consider ideas and make sense of children’s learning from diverse perspectives.
The first day’s study session included a TEDx video of a talk by Tina Seelig, PhD, executive director of Stanford Technology Ventures Program. The talk, A Crash Course in Creativity, addressed internal and external influences on creativity. The keys for creativity, according to Seelig, are the internal influences of imagination, knowledge and attitude, and the external factors of habitat, resources and culture. The group used Seelig’s work to generate overarching questions regarding creative thinking: Does creativity have value to us? What is the potential for children’s learning? Is nurturing creative thinking your goal? These questions led toan even bigger discussion: What if creative thinking weren’t to exist at all?
The second day brought one of the most interesting topics for the participants—the school environment. The institute initially looked at how schools convey culture through the overall design of their buildings and play space. Educators began by considering their school culture and the implications for promoting a creative climate. To help teachers lay the foundation for creative thinking with 2-year-old children, head teacher Kitti Pecka guided the educators through the concepts associated with heuristic education which encourages a person to solve problems on his or her own by experimenting or by trial and error. Pecka helped the participants examine how the heuristic approach can lead to self-directed creativity. She further detailed methods to encourage and support activity in the visual, tactile and auditory realms.
Later in the day, the whole group, facilitated by head teacher Parul Chandra and teacher Nandini Bhattacharjya, examined the nature of learning environments. The participants investigated space, equipment, materials, schedules, time and curriculum design. The attendees talked about their own teaching spaces and some of them provided images. As a whole group, they studied the attendees’ photos for areas that worked well and for areas that could be developed further. For example, an urban school in Asia had a rooftop playground! The attendees brainstormed how the space could be adjusted or materials could be brought in to promote creative thinking. Other participants presented problems with their play spaces, ranging from restricted access to difficulty obtaining quality materials to limited indoor natural light or underdeveloped outdoor spaces. The case studies for the participants were one of the session’s highlights, as the process was interactive and personal. The attendees could inspire their school colleagues with the ideas generated during the discussion. Two goals the teachers settled on regarding culture and learning spaces were offering children a naturalistic environment as well as offering a program built on trust, relationships and play.
In the afternoon attention turned from the environment to the teacher. Head teacher Peckie Peters guided participants in integrating open-ended language with children, such as asking clarifying questions and reframing ideas. Teachers supporting children’s play might use language such as “I notice …” or “I wonder …” or “I am curious about ….” This type of communication eliminates “yes” or “no” responses and as a result encourages children to consider what they think and to explain it to peers and adults. This type of dialogue with children connects seamlessly with the opening quote by Ken Robinson about stimulating new ideas.
The group also examined the significance of the teacher’s role and how it might impact children’s creative thinking. The participants examined topics such as children having valuable ideas, children as competent thinkers and perspectives on failures as opportunities for learning. These discussions led teachers to look at their own teaching style to consider openness, flexibility or ability to take risk. The attendees were asked to identify examples of creative thinking by children. They also talked about key moments for children that happen each day when teachers have a less active role: Children can engage with peers to build on their own play, testing out creativity and creative thinking in their own time.
On the last day, head teacher Nancy Howe crafted a culminating experience for participants that promoted creative thinking. Howe shared inspiring slides of the art of Nina Katchadourian, who recreated famous Flemish paintings using only her cell phone and items she had around her during an international flight. The art helped catalyze educators to make their own inspiration boards to reflect on and promote creative thinking in their schools. To consolidate the experience, the group also viewed a TEDx video, Creative Confidence, by Stanford professor and IDEO co-founder David Kelley.
Finally, the participants had the opportunity to reflect in small groups on their overall experience at the institute. The educators then devised an action plan identifying short- and long-term goals for incorporating creative thinking in their own setting.
Beverley Hartman and Sarah Wright contributed to the reporting of this piece.