A Call to Action: The Challenges of Creative Teaching and Learning

By Keith Sawyer. Teachers College Record, 2015

106 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Background/Context In spite of the widely acknowledged importance of creativity to society and the economy, scholars have had difficulty providing research-based recommendations for how to foster creativity in schools. The article extends three strands of research that have attempted to provide such recommendations: studies of whether creativity training enhances domain-general creativity; studies of whether arts education and arts integration enhance cognitive skills that transfer to other content areas; and studies of collaborative learning environments, designed to foster deeper conceptual understanding in the content areas. Purpose/Objective The focus of the article is to provide recommendations for how to design learning environments to foster greater creativity. I bring together arts education research, creativity research, and learning sciences research to provide recommendations for how to design learning environments to foster creative learning outcomes. Research Design This is primarily a review article. It provides meta-analyses of three strands of research—creativity training, arts education, and learning sciences. The conclusion of this review is that domain-general creativity training is less effective than domain-specific changes in how each subject is taught. Conclusions We are not likely to enhance student creativity by teaching for creativity in a distinct, domain general way. Instead, educating for creativity is most effective when schools change the way each subject is taught. Learning sciences research has provided strong evidence that the most creative learning, in all subjects, results from pedagogical strategies that are active, constructivist, collaborative, and improvisational. I provide research-based recommendations for how to design learning environments that result in creative learning outcomes.

Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Music, Visual Arts and Performing Arts

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e4f07be170133ac3103138f3a28427179dc6c181

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

1. R. Sawyer
2. Keith Sawyer
3. V. Glăveanu
4. I. Siraj‐Blatchford
5. Ingrid Monson’s
6. Stacy Lee Dezutter

In Music

1. R. Sawyer
2. Ingrid Monson’s
3. Keith Sawyer
4. Stacy Lee Dezutter

In Visual Arts and Performing Arts

1. R. Sawyer
2. V. Glăveanu

Citations in the corpus

• Teaching creativity in art and design studio classes: A systematic literature review (2017, methodology): “, Sawyer, 2015). These traditional methods, often referred to as instructionism, include lectures, textbook assignments, and standardized tests that are primarily designed to assess student memorization (Sawyer, 2015). Educators and policy makers have called for schools to move away from instruction”