|
|
 |
| Peter Chaban |
By Peter Chaban
Over the holidays, I had the opportunity to read Malcolm Gladwell’s new book Outliers: The Story of Success. The book sets out to dispel the notion that creativity is a unique and specialized gift. While Gladwell does acknowledge
that a highly creative person may have some innate talent, more importantly, the flowering of creativity is dependent on external
factors and hard work.
Gladwell puts forward the 10,000-hour rule: it takes 10,000 hours of practice to hone a creative talent to the highest level
and without the right circumstances in place, innate talent just isn’t going to flourish.
He cites the Beatles as an excellent example of the rule. There was nothing special about their music initially. In fact,
two of the members were turned down for elite high school music programs. But between 1960 and 1962, the group made five trips
to Hamburg, Germany, where they performed eight to 12 hours a day, seven days a week. They returned a highly disciplined musical
group, heads above anyone else in Liverpool, precisely because they had put in the 10,000 hours while other groups had not.
It was only then that their creativity in terms of writing music and performance really began to shine.
What is creativity?
One way to think about creativity is to break it down into possible components. It is generally agreed that there are three
pillars that contribute to creativity: personality, environment, and cognition. Each of these has an equal and important role
in the creative experience. And like a stool, if one of these three legs of creativity is missing, the other two can’t do
the job.
Personality
It takes a particular type of personality to be creative. They need to be highly motivated, committed, and open to differences.
Interestingly, these are exactly the personality traits necessary to achieve Gladwell’s “Ten Thousand Hour Hypothesis”. The
unmotivated are unlikely to sustain that kind of effort.
Environment
Yet, passion and practice are not enough. Environmental factors, which include social and cultural values, play a major role
as well, both positive and negative
A society's restrictive rules and traditions can foster personal insecurities or social ridicule that in turn lead to habitual
ways of thinking and intellectual conformity, both barriers to creative thinking. In other words, a creative personality can
be squelched in unfavorable conditions, of which there are potentially many types.
But the reverse is also true, a correlation Gladwell examines in a thought provoking way. He cites psychologist Roger Barnsley,
who identified a correlation between month of birth and success in hockey. It turns out that the majority of players in elite
hockey leagues – from kids' "all-stars" and "reps" right through to the NHL – are born in the first half of the year. According
to Barnsley, 40% of these players are born between January and March, 30% between April and June, 20% between July and September
and 10% between October and December.
Why is this? Because in Canada, January 1 is the cut-off date for the placement of budding players into groupings. As a result,
five-year-olds born in January play with five-year-olds born in December of the same year. At that age, 12 months make a huge
difference in terms of physical development and motor function. The older kids are bigger, stronger and faster. They in turn
are selected to play in premier leagues where they are much more likely to get in their 10,000 hours and become highly skilled
hockey players.
In much the same way, social circumstances can pave the way for a creative personality to thrive and for creative skills and
thinking to develop to their full potential.
Cognition
The last leg of the creativity stool is cognition, or how an individual's brain actually thinks. In his 1986 book, Creative Talents: Their Nature, Uses and Development, psychologist and leading creativity researcher J.P. Guilford described creative thinking as the ability to be sensitive
to a problem while at the same time, be able to redefine ones thinking in driving towards a solution for that problem. In
simplified and colloquial terms, this is equivalent to "thinking outside the box". To do this, Guilford suggested one needed
to have cognitive fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration.
What Guilford called fluency and flexibility are traditionally assumed to be innate mechanisms. On the other hand, originality
and elaboration are considered higher order thinking processes that are learned and can be developed. These days, these two
higher order process are called generative thinking and analytical thinking. By generative thinking we mean the ability to
produce an idea, and by analytical we mean the ability to evaluate an idea.
Creativity, neuroscience, and teaching
While generative and analytical thinking are certainly distinct processes, many people, including a lot of educators, believe
they take place in different halves of the brain. This belief goes back to the 1960s and the work of Roger Sperry in the field
of hemispheric specialization. Sperry based his left brain/right brain hypothesis, which included the belief that creativity
is found in the right brain, on one case study. He never pursued his theory, though the media picked it up as fact.
Michael Gazzaniga, who also studied split-brain patients (these are patients who have severe seizures and require surgery
to separate left and right lobes as a treatment) would later state that the left/right brain specialization was an oversimplified
idea that was blown out of proportion by the media.
Despite these widely held misconceptions, neuroscience still has much to give in informing teachers and their practice. Recently,
British researchers devised a novel study integrating neuroscience and teacher-training. The study taught drama teacher-trainees
to differentiate between generative and analytical thinking.
They were taught about the nature of these higher order processes, when each was an appropriate problem solving tool, and
what they looked like in a classroom situation. They were asked to stop during key learning moments and identify whether they
were using generative or analytical processes and to reflect on what was going on in their minds both emotionally, intellectually,
and in terms of their creative process.
As a result, trainees felt they had developed insights into their own teaching practices. They also began to think about learning
and creativity in terms of cognitive processes. As well, they were able to use their own reflective experience around the
two types of cognition to understand how children learn.
Conclusion
Ask any researcher about creativity and the brain and they will all be in 100% agreement: science has only scratched the surface.
They will also agree that many of the beliefs we have about creativity and exceptionally high skill levels are outdated myths.
With that in mind, it is important that educational systems and educators take a closer look at their own practices around
teaching creativity in order to rout out practices that may be counter-productive.
Moreover, kids should understand that practicing "eight days a week" is the best way to hone a creative skill and that no
amount of innate creativity will rise to the highest skill levels without putting in the time. The nice thing is that one
need not go as far as Hamburg to do it.
Peter Chaban is a teacher researcher and is head of the School Liaison Team, Community Health Systems Resource Group at The
Hospital for Sick Children. He is also the learning disabilities representative for the Ontario Minister's Advisory Council
on Special Education (MACSE).
