Encouraging Exploration and Innovation
From exploration to innovation
​
When students explore they deepen their learning, find questions, identify challenges. This reflects the beginning of Creative Problem Solving: Clarifying and Ideating. In the process students employ critical thinking. They need to assess if they need more information. Which exact prompts will leverage their insights? If they use AI to deepen their enquiry, which information is relevant? Is the information fact or opinion? Is it reliable to make decisions based on which? Sharpening their journey, they delineate their path to a creative product. There might be ambiguity and complexity. We teach them to befriend them. It is OK to take a recess, incubate on thinking. Enlightenment will set the path clear. Every mistake is a mis-take, leading toward a more accurate one. This is the creative process that innovators use. Scientists in their lab try and try, search for a clue within ambiguity, yet pursue, toward a breakthrough. Entrepreneurs dare to take initiative, and problem solve, toward innovation. Artists make choice upon choices, until the artwork reveals itself. So, to promote innovation in students, we need to make the journey with them, facilitate it for them, so they will be able to bear ambiguity, complexity and despair, toward discovery.
The Learning Compass
​
Today's students need creative thinking to solve new problems (Darling-Hammond, 2017). Human professions will require Creative Problem-Solving (CPS), especially as artificial intelligence will enable automation in more occupations (Teo et al., 2021). The OECD’s Learning Compass 2030 outlines the strategy toward such educational results. It envisions students' agency in creating value by inter-disciplinary creative problem-solving, innovating by transformative competencies (OECD, Future of Education 2030).
The Creativity Globe Model for encouraging exploration toward innovation
​
The principles of creativity education interconnect to form the Creativity Globe Model:
​
-
Coordinate – The Learning Compass serves as guideline so policy makers, education leaders and teachers are coordinated.
-
Realm – The classroom as a realm of safety that supports the 4 Cs: Communication, Collaboration, Critical and Creative Thinking.
-
Enable – Creative teaching-learning processes enable growth, as they open up possibilities, for teachers and students.
-
Assets – Teachers' and students' potentials, personally and culturally, are assets that contribute to learning.
-
Trans-disciplinarity - Learning that encompasses diverse disciplines enables the creative process toward innovation,.
-
Innovation – Students practice creative learning processes toward innovation, at the intersection of PBL (Project Based Learning), CPS (Creative Problem-Solving), and entrepreneurship.
-
Vocation – Educators embrace that teacher professionalism means students' success.
-
Integrity – Teachers and students feel whole - in their inner world and relating to earth's living world and treasures.
-
Trust – Teachers trust in students' capacity to creatively solve problems and develop original learning products. Students trust their teachers to guide them toward final results.
-
Yield – Teacher models yielding his/her power, to enable students' autonomy. Students conform, yet have the space to explore, experience, examine, elevate and express (The 5 Es strategy). Education yields 21st century innovators, through growth processes.
Further reading
​Darling-Hammond, L. (2017). Empowered Educators: How High-Performing Systems Shape Teaching Quality Around the World. Wiley & Sons, Inc.
​The OECD Learning Compass 2030
Teo, T., Unwin, S., Scherer, R., & Gardiner, V. (2021). Initial teacher training for twenty-first century skills in the Fourth Industrial Revolution (IR 4.0): A scoping review. Computers & Education, 170, 104223.
​