Creativity Now! Learning from  Creative  Teachers

Outstanding teachers share how they teach creatively in an age of scripted lessons and accountability. Creativity in learning is often highlighted as a skill essential for success in the 21st century. Daniel Pink (2005) notes that creative thinking is increasingly necessary to accomplish goals in our complex, interconnected world, and education researchers and psychologists tout the social, emotional, cognitive, and professional benefits of possessing creative abilities (Sternberg, 2006). Despite this increased attention to creativity, we still have little understanding of how to nurture and support creativity in current classroom contexts, particularly creative teaching. The U.S. climate of high-stakes testing and scripted curriculums makes it difficult for education stakeholders to infuse creativity into teaching practices (Giroux & Schmidt, 2004). Teachers and administrators face the question of how to successfully integrate creativity into teaching practice when teachers have many pressures and little leeway. As a part of our research at Michigan State University, we've been developing ways to integrate creativity into classrooms and explore the role of teachers in enhancing students ' creative skills (Mishra, Koehler, & Henriksen, 2011;; Mishra, Henricksen, & The Deep-Play Research Group, 2012). Our work goes beyond teaching generic techniques and seeks to genuinely embed creative approaches within disciplinary contexts (Mishra, Henriksen, & The Deep-Play Research Group, 2012). We hope to resolve a fundamental dilemma about creativity—that even as it's grounded i