Two straight lines crossing over in the middle.

The Easter holiday represents a pause, a chance to catch breath and enjoy the texture of my world ... I have mostly caught up on promises made and promises broken  – and I am at last free to think about some of the approaches to building deep maths understanding and mathematical innovation  observed in the secondary schools I worked in this term - and from there the relationship of creativity to educational policy.

I know it’s only an impression but it seems that ever since the launch of the New Zealand Curriculum, we have been awash with calls to “bring back” creativity in classrooms.

"Creativity is now as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status". — Ken Robinson

I always smile grimly at this quote from Robinson - our adult literacy results - "380,000 Kiwi adults' whose “literacy skills are so poor they would be unable to determine how to use a fire extinguisher from the instructions written on the bottle.” (Prime Minister Helen Clark 2007) suggest that Robinson is not aiming high enough if he wants to lift creative potential/capital through educational endeavour. 

Still it seems the “call creative” is the new cry of the educational wild.  And it has grown louder and increasingly wilder with our Education Minister Anne Tolley’s call for the introduction of national standards. A call, which despite Tolley’s best efforts, (see Questions for oral answer 9 April 2009 below), is being widely and possibly unfairly represented in New Zealand schools, as a call for the introduction of league tables.

Hon ANNE TOLLEY: Firstly, I did not say in the Christchurch Press that I had a favourite. I want to make it very clear to that member that the Ministry of Education will not be publishing league tables. I will say that again to the member. The ministry will not be publishing league tables. This Government will be using the information that we gather from the national standards policy in a responsible way, to help to lift the literacy and numeracy standards of young New Zealand children. That is what this policy is about.

... and it is hard to counter the need for improving the ways in which we understand student achievement given the ERO statement that despite all the measuring going on in New Zealand schools - 56 percent of them were not using worthwhile achievement data to look at their student learning outcomes. 

Hon ANNE TOLLEY: I have seen a report that suggests that a number of schools are using formative assessment, and the data produced by it, to help their students. For those schools the national standards policy will complement the excellent work they are already doing. The same report from the Education Review Office states that 56 percent of schools were not using worthwhile achievement data. The national standards policy is about ensuring that those schools do use good assessment practices to help our young New Zealanders to read, write, and do maths at a much higher level than they do at present.

ERO’s 56 percent statistic reminded me of John Hattie’s key question at the end of Visible Learning.

"The key question is whether teaching can shift from an immature to a mature profession, from opinion to evidence, from subjective judgements and personal contact to critique of judgements." P259 Hattie, J. 2009.  Visible learning

In the New Zealand schools I work with there has been a lot of talk about national standards leading to league tables which if I take taxi drivers as a measure - seems a prospect that bothers educators much more than it does the rest of the country. 

There has also been the suggestion that creative endeavour and creativity, which is widely and for the most part approvingly received by teachers, will be lost if we adopt national standards.

To sum up these lunchtime conversations: we have Tolley’s - National standards  “a very bad thing – don’t let them in” , Robinson’s - Creativity in classrooms – “ a very good thing – let’s bring it back” 

The weird thing about any discussion about “creativity” in New Zealand is not the “let’s bring it back” sentiment – though that’s kind of weird since it never went away in a lot of the places I work - it is the creative conversation default setting.

When you join a conversation about creativity in education in New Zealand  - instead of finding yourself interrogating what creativity might mean in 2009, or evaluating how we might judge creative practice in New Zealand classrooms - you end up revisiting the writings of Elwyn Richardson in the 1950’s early sixties.

This default to the activities of just one male teacher and his mostly self described creative practices from nearly sixty years ago makes me suspicious.

I’d like to ask -

Why are we privileging Richardson’s descriptions of his classroom experiences?

Why was it that Richardson was published and promoted and other creative educators didn’t and aren’t?    

I ask this because I do not find it plausible that in a culture that is built upon “number eight fencing wire innovation” Richardson was, (or for that matter is), the only educator designing worthy creative adventures in learning in New Zealand classrooms.

I don’t find it credible that nothing creatively worthy was going on in New Zealand classrooms before Richardson, at the same time as Richardson, or since Richardson. 

And I also wonder why - if creative teaching did occur in the past and does occur in the present - we don’t we refer to it today? Why we don’t appear to even know about it?

You might jump in here and declare Richardson an iconic educator on the basis of his writings and the memories of teaching colleagues – but it does not explain why in our discussion and commentaries we fail to reference any creative educators before or since Richardson – For instance I have never climbed a mountain but I know the names of more New Zealand mountain climbers than I do New Zealand teachers famous for their creative teaching practice or creative student outcomes.

It makes me wonder if anyone at NZCER has done a historiography of creativity and creative practice in New Zealand education; has anyone looked at the way creativity has been represented and understood and the way creativity has been written about?

It seems more likely that we have neglected and undervalued the stories and practices of other creative teachers in New Zealand in a way that we haven’t done for mountain climbers both before and after Hillary.

If we did privilege Richardson in the past and if we continue to do so  - is this because of gender, or ethnicity, is it simply because our current day commentators are mostly contemporaries of Elwyn, or is it something else?

I suspect we need to clarify “creativity” and to more carefully distinguish creative acts of teaching from creative achievement outcomes if we are to progress.

To ask –
What are the assumptions we make when we identify a teacher and or their practice as creative?
Does creative teaching result in creative achievements by students who in turn become creative adults?
Should it?
Is a measure of the success of a creative teacher the measure of the creative success of their students?
Should it be?
What is the measure of the success of a creative teacher?
Without a measure of achievement success how can a creative teacher who is teaching creatively tell what they are doing, whether it is going well or not, and what they should do next?
Ditto for the student in a classroom with a teacher who identifies themselves as creative or who describes their teaching strategies as those developing creative outcomes.
Who do we judge to be creative adults in New Zealand today? 
Who taught the New Zealanders we judge as creative today, and how did they teach them?
What did these creative New Zealanders remember learning from their teachers that they believe enhanced their own creative abilities?

If we accept Ken Robinson’s definition of creativity

“I define creativity as the process of having original ideas that have value.”

Then J.J Thompson  must surely have been a highly successful in enhancing creative thinking in the science students he taught 

“I’d like to cite the example of J.J. Thompson, who had nine Nobel prize-winners, thirty two fellows of the Royal Society, and eighty three professors of physics among his pupils … Yet when you look – what were his rules of thumb?  How did he teach? You find practically nothing.”(Dedijer, 1966 cited in Root- Bernstein 1982, p.200) 

 And Bill Manhire -  jumps out as a New Zealand educator who is highly successful in enhancing creative writing in the writers he teaches.
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Perhaps the researchers of a historiography of creativity in New Zealand education could start by asking the contributers to Manhire at 60: A Book for Bill (ed Fergus Barrowman and Damien Wilkins; 2007, VUP) to identify “How did he teach?” – "what were his rules of thumb?"

Published in a limited edition of 500 copies for Bill's birthday, this is an anthology including memoirs, essays, poems, stories and extracts from work-in-progress which have been contributed by over 40 writers who have been inspired by Bill as writer, teacher and friend: Michele Amas, Barbara Anderson, Angela Andrews, Hinemoana Baker, Fergus Barrowman, Rachel Barrowman & R.A.K. Mason, Jenny Bornholdt, William Brandt, James Brown, Kate Camp, Catherine Chidgey, Geoff Cochrane, Nigel Cox, Jim Crace, John Davidson, Kate De Goldi, Stephanie de Montalk, Ken Duncum, Laurence Fearnley, Cliff Fell, Bernadette Hall, Dinah Hawken, Janet Holmes, Ralph Hotere & Mary McFarlane, Keri Hulme, Eirlys Hunter, Andrew Johnston, Elizabeth Knox, Robyn Marsack, Paula Morris, Gregory O’Brien, Vincent O’Sullivan, Emily Perkins, Chris Price, Jo Randerson, Michael Schmidt, Iain Sharp, Elizabeth Smither, Kathryn Walls, Peter Whiteford, and Damien Wilkins.  http://www.bookcouncil.org.nz/writers/manhireb.html

Those staffroom claims – both simplistic and expansive, that our current educational focus on accountability, assessment and compliance are dangerously hampering the innovative and original classroom teacher need to be more carefully unpacked.

Because I don’t know that they can reliably or validly be used to reject the Minister of Education Anne Tolley’s push for a national standards policy.

Hargreave’s I’m stuck to the floor keynote address at L@S09 - “The Fourth Way” revealed a man and a mind that was funny, provocative and ever so smart – a great pick by the conference programme organisers to launch New Zealand teachers at the start of our school year.  His claims over the freedoms and innovation The First Way afforded teachers seem kind of relevant here

The First Way:  Over dependence on the state.
“These policies provided unprecedented levels of support for the poor, but they also fostered long term state dependency without providing any real foundation for long term civic engagement.  The First Way granted state professionals, including educators, considerable freedom. In education, it fostered innovation but also allowed unacceptable variations in quality.”

Rather like topology we shouldn’t be looking at the objects involved but rather at the ways in which they work together.

Creativity and creative endeavour is advanced by deep learning, and conceptual understanding and if national standards mean knowing what you are doing, whether it is going well and what to do next then it would seem that national standards and creativity may well be two straight lines that cross over in the middle.

One supports the other and X marks the spot.