Why aren't more schools more creative?

 If you do a bit of a search on the web about leadership and creativity, you tend to get results that focus on the business domain. Having done that, I was interested in what some of the literature said about how leaders can sustain greater levels of creativity in organizations, and how that might pertain to schools. If you like, my driving question is ‘why aren’t more schools more creative’?

I wasn’t undertaking some sort of literature review, nothing as comprehensive as that (although I know I should). I did come across one interesting article, ‘Creativity and the role of the leader’, by Teresa M. Amabile and Mukti Khaire (Harvard Business review, October 2008). Amabile and Khaire identified a series of factors which they suggest support greater creativity in business. Here is my summary:

• Higher success rates tend to come from ideas suggested from within teams than from the top down
• Highlight those who support others, described as “how to get people to shut up at the right time” (Pge 5)
• More likely when people from different disciplines and areas of expertise share their thinking (Pge 5) from Franz Johanssen, “The Medici Effect”
• Diversity enhances creativity, from work by  Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks, Fiona Lee, Ch-Ying Cheng
• Kim Scott, at that time working at Google who suggested that creativity within an organisation depends on “vibrant, ongoing collaboration and free idea flow, layers of management often lead to more bureaucracy” (Pge 7)
• They cite Scott Cook, “You’re most interested in fundamental paradigm changes,” he observed, “and yet you tend to staff your new projects with the people who did very well working on version 15 of the last big thing. You're crazy if you think you’re going to get a big shift out of the verison 15 team.” (Page 12)
• ‘Embrace the certainty of failure’, “Virtually everyone …. agreed that managers must decrease fear of failure and that the goal should be to experiment constantly, fail early and often, and learn as much as possible in the process.” (Pge 13)
• Howard Gardner, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education who has conducted research on ‘good work’ with professors Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi of C laremont Graduate University and William Damon of Stanford, said “The potential for passionate engagement in one’s work is highest when the work itself is seen as noble”, (Pge 15)

If you have made it through reading that list, well done. I reflected a little on this and its connection with schools. I thought that many schools probably have many of the characteristics on this list. 

• Many kura are team focussed, with distributed leadership structures that support creative problem solving. 
• Teacher teams are often cross disciplinary, although you could argue they are all teachers and hardly cross disciplinary at all. It depends on what you mean by cross-disciplinary.
• There are of course variations in leadership style in kura; not all Principals delegate well, or support creativity in any aspects of a kura’s operations etc. But equally there are those who do. 

This still left me with my key question: why aren’t more schools more creative? Sir Ken Robinson suggested that schools in fact kill creativity.

I thought about the willingness of both leaders and teachers to accept the idea of failure, to take risks. I think we are collectively a ‘risk averse’ profession. I have two ‘wonderings’ in this regard, two ‘hunches’ if you will.

• Are we the product (and therefore victims) of our own success? After all, to be a teacher you have probably known success throughout much of an academic pathway (with the occasional failure along the way)? 
• Many teachers do, I think, see our mahi as ‘noble’ in intent and a possible consequence of this might be that we are less willing to accept the possibility of failure for our students. We perhaps see this as such high stakes that we want to minimise risk for our learners?
• Are we risk averse because of the results focussed public dialogue, the tyranny of the metrics at times imposed upon us by our political masters, and the league table mentality that is perpetuated by the media and which still prevails in some communities at least, around achievement?
• Are we risk averse because we feel constrained by a mandated curriculum outside if which we are afraid to step? Even as a Manaiakalani school with an underlying pedagogy 'Learn, Create, Share', that is a pedagogy in which creativity is at the centre, we have to work hard, to be deliberate and intentional, in order to sustain and grow creativity.

These last questions lead me to wonder if we have failed to reach agreement about the purpose of education? Did we EVER have a consensus about the purpose of education? 

My thinking does however also remind me that I need to be deliberate and intentional actions I need to use to support, sustain, and grow creativity.