Creative students can be a blessing. They show others new ways to approach old problems, add fresh perspectives to stale concepts, and can surprise and delight with their work - and not only in so-called “creative” subjects.

In an era of increased automation, with traditional careers under threat from technological developments such as driverless cars and artificial intelligence, it is arguably more important than ever that schools instil creativity in pupils.

But what exactly is it? How do we measure how creative someone is? And are there surefire ways to increase the creativity exhibited by students?

The research on this matter is conflicting, but thanks to a growing body of literature, experts are beginning to understand more about the cognitive processes that contribute to an individual’s creative tendencies.

One such expert is Stellan Ohlsson, professor of psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has published extensively on the issue of creative insight. His book Deep Learning looks at how the human mind is able to set aside prior experience and adapt to changing circumstances: in short, how it can be creative.

His research has led him to believe that there are undoubtedly “different cognitive processes operating when people are struggling with problems”, and that some of those processes “fulfil certain criteria that we might call ‘creativity’ ”.

But his work also explores whether these processes are an extrapolation of prior experience (sometimes used as a proxy for “uncreative” ), or “does it require of the person ... [to] respond by ignoring, overruling or suppressing prior concepts and actually attack the problem by looking at it in another way?” - in other words, to be “creative”.

A creative diversion

One common misconception among teachers and the population more widely is that this latter, “creative”, approach results in conspicuous outcomes. However, as Ohlsson explains, creativity can be hard to detect.

You can look at things creatively “at any level of magnitude”, he explains, giving the example of figuring out how to get home if your train is cancelled. In this situation, “you can’t just extrapolate past experiences, you need to find another route home - that is creative”, he says.

Can you measure how creative this is compared with, say, writing an original piece of fiction? It’s an important question, as this is often the basis of an argument posed against schools attempting to “teach” creativity: it cannot be measured, so how can we begin to know if we can improve it in schools or not? And shouldn’t we focus, instead, on what we can measure and the things we do know that schools can influence?

“I think we can try to measure it,” muses Ohlsson. “But I think we probably shouldn’t try. Creativity shouldn’t really be seen as a quantitative trait, like weight or height.”

To demonstrate, he gives the example of a child in the classroom and how difficult it can be for their teacher to work out if creativity or something else is at work.

“Of course, creative students can make teaching much more difficult,” he explains. “If students compute [their work] in ways that go beyond what they have been [told] to do … it increases the demands on the teacher because they have to be able to recognise if this is due to random guessing, or does it look different because the student has done something really interesting?”

Despite these difficulties in measurement and detection, cultivating creativity has become a key objective for governments looking to nurture a school system that not only achieves highly in international rankings but also produces young people who are able to approach economic, social and artistic pursuits in creative, original ways.

Train but no gain?

So, does Ohlsson think it is realistic to “train” people to be more creative?

Plenty have tried, he says. “Training creativity is a huge topic now in the public debate…in part because we all seem to have bought into the idea that you either innovate or you die at this point in human history.

“Companies and other organisations are very interested in training employees in creativity. The people who administer the school system would also like to be able to tell the rest of society that ‘yes, we are training students to be creative’.”

But the problem, he believes, is that, while the research in this area suggests it is possible to train pupils to be more creative, the actual improvements that have been observed after such training are minimal. “There is a longstanding line of research on training creativity with respect to what is often called ‘divergent thinking’,” he says. This refers to the notion that you “can use resources in your environment in multiple ways - some of which might look common and familiar, and others which are not”.

He adds: “You can test for that with the so-called ‘divergent thinking test’, where you give people the task of coming up with novel ways of using a familiar object.”

Research shows that attempts to teach people to be more creative have led to a “statistically reliable, positive effect” - but only to a fairly limited extent.

If you are going to spend millions in investing in a training programme for creativity, “then you would probably want to see larger effects”, Ohlsson argues. “You would also want to see delayed effects, so that, if you come back next year and interview people, the effects of the training are still there.”

Ohlsson concludes that, while the evidence suggests you can teach creativity, “it falls short of what organisational leaders would want cognitive psychologists to be able to do for them”.

Is this minimal impact because creativity is likely to be a highly heritable trait, so how creative we are is down more to nature than nurture? Ohlsson does not buy into that narrative. He does not believe that creativity “is a trait in the normal sense”.Rather than being innate or acquired, “it is something else”.

“I do not think creativity is some kind of thing that is sitting in your head that you try to measure by doing tests,” he says. “A big part of the explanation” about why some people create more than others “is the fact that some people choose to live creative lives”. They choose to engage in opportunities to create and “surround themselves with people who can engage them in creative tasks”, he adds.

“The factors that determine those life-defining decisions, some of them might be innate, but I doubt it.” Most, he says, are “just environmental factors that get a person on to a creative trajectory”.

So, perhaps the key to creativity in schools is to establish more creative environments? If so, some would point to the lack of policy focus on, and funding for, the arts as a significant barrier to efforts to nurture creativity in schools.

Trusting teachers

Ohlsson argues that the creativity challenge for teachers actually boils down to two distinct areas: the need to teach subjects in a way that encourages creativity and the desire to teach creativity itself, directly.

On the first point, he has a pretty good idea of what might work: trusting teacher intuition about how to get pupils thinking creatively.

“In teaching in a creativity-enhancing manner, teachers need to know their subject matter well,” he says. Then they need to have permission “to engage with children in the classroom in the way they see best. They are the experts, and they should be given the licence to execute that expertise.”

On the second point, he says the research is not much help so it is “a much tougher task”.

“To do it, you actually have to include in teacher training more attention to what is known about creativity,” he argues. “But exactly what the curriculum should be for that aspect of teacher training is currently a problem that has not received much attention.”

That may not be the case for much longer, however. Ohlsson is working with a consultancy group in Amsterdam to develop training exercises specifically related to the cultivation of creativity.

“If we can start to show value and worth,” he says, “then we might, at some point, be able to write down a [teacher] training programme that could fulfil such a role.”

And the hope would be, one assumes, that the teachers would embrace such a programme creatively.

Chris Parr is a freelance writer

This article originally appeared in the 15 February 2019 issue under the headline “Tes focus on...Creativity”