Key points:
- It’s time to encourage and celebrate student creativity
- The 4 keys to creating meaningful student-led inquiry
- How educators are shaping the future of edtech
- For more news on student creativity, visit eSN’s Innovative Teaching hub
When my daughter was little, every time we climbed into the car, she’d look up and ask, “Are we going to take the low way?”
It took me embarrassingly long to realize what she meant. To her, the “highway” was a place where we got stuck in traffic—a “high” duration (I guess…), and therefore, bad. She wanted the “low way”: the shortcut. That’s not what those terms mean (if they mean anything), but she recognized a problem—being stuck in the car—and used the tools she had to invent a solution.
This is the essence of creativity: the decisions we make to get from Point A to Point B when the path isn’t known. Humans develop and demonstrate this skill from the very beginning of life. Yet, as a 2024 report in the Journal of Creative Education highlights, there is a notable absence of structured creativity learning in U.S. classrooms. While many countries are leaning into creativity in education, the United States has been slower to follow. Why do we enter school fearless and inventive, yet leave cautious and constrained? Creativity isn’t lost, it’s just seldom encouraged.
The orthodoxy trap
Kindergartners often outperform adults and CEOs in creative problem-solving tasks like the Marshmallow Challenge. Not because they’re smarter, but because they haven’t yet internalized the assumptions about how things are supposed to work. They’re less likely to believe there is only one right way, so they experiment more freely.
As we move through school, we internalize those assumptions. We learn how things are supposed to work—and gradually stop looking for other ways they might. The challenge isn’t structure itself, but how quickly we start to treat boundaries as fixed, and how little freedom students sometimes feel to explore or question them.
In the name of assessment and accountability, schools often over-rotate toward Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities because they are easy to observe, measure, and compare across cohorts. Creativity, by contrast, is messy, iterative, and difficult to quantify. So, we tend to prioritize what can be assessed quickly and clearly—things with defined answers and predictable paths.
But creativity only really flourishes in the presence of knowledge. It thrives when students understand something well enough to apply it to new or unfamiliar situations. The question, then, isn’t whether assessment and accountability matter—they do—but we also need to make space for the kinds of thinking that allow students to explore, revise, and discover solutions that aren’t already known.
From subject-matter-driven to experience-driven
We often treat school subjects like isolated basketball skills: dribbling, crossover technique, chest pass. A student can master every skill and still be paralyzed in a real game. A game isn’t a coordinated series of skill demonstrations—it’s a series of decisions made within a complex and unpredictable flow. You might win not by running a flawless set play, but by embracing chaos and forcing the opponent into mistakes. That pivot—from the “right” way to the “effective” way—is where creativity begins.
This mirrors what researchers describe as the challenge of learning transfer. Students can demonstrate skills in structured practice, but applying those same ideas in messy or unfamiliar situations is a completely different cognitive task. As learning scientist James W. Pellegrino often notes, there’s a critical difference between knowing something and being able to use that knowledge in context. Creativity emerges in that space when learners must apply what they know in situations that are unpredictable, dynamic, and unscripted.
This is the shift from Subject-Matter-Driven to Experience-Driven Education: the difference between reciting a formula and applying it in a context confounded by variables a textbook could never predict.
Consider a screw. Our current system teaches students to turn it: screwdriver, screw, pre-drilled hole. Task complete. Celebrate achievement.
But the world rarely hands you a pre-drilled hole. If students enter the workforce knowing only how to turn screws into pre-drilled holes, they’re helpless when building a bridge. Wind blows, steel expands, budgets tighten, and turning a screw may not even be the right solution. They may need to weld, bolt, or invent a new fastener. Teaching isolated maneuvers alone fails students. The tool is secondary to the goal.
The stigma of being wrong
We can’t talk about creativity without talking about failure. In a classroom of 25 students, learner variability is an immutable truth—kids are all over the place. Some will know, understand, and be successful with the material, and some won’t (at least not right away). Yet our current system stigmatizes being wrong or not knowing or understanding something.
Look at video games. Kids fail constantly in games, but they don’t quit. Failure is a necessary step toward reaching the next level. In school, however, we celebrate the perfect score and those who get there fastest. We don’t celebrate the productive struggle.
If we teach kids to fear being wrong, we teach them to fear learning itself. They begin to cut corners or lean on technological crutches like AI.
Speaking realistically, AI may shift the value of knowledge rather than replace it. Students will still need strong conceptual understanding to interpret information, evaluate outputs, and decide how to apply ideas in new situations. In some ways, that makes creativity and judgment even more critical.
That brings us to Creative Application: the ability to collaborate, to think critically, and to see patterns where others see noise. These are the “applied liberal arts” of the future—hard to master, agnostic of technology, and essential for navigating careers and challenges that don’t exist yet.
A call to celebrate the process
We must move beyond checklist-oriented education. Educators and families need to start celebrating the process of learning, not just having the correct answer. That means experience-based learning, open-ended explorations, and classrooms where productive struggle is expected and celebrated. We need to acknowledge that even the highest achievers struggle, and that struggle is vital—whether in a welding class or a calculus class.
If we opt out of modeling and encouraging creativity because it’s too messy to grade, we are limiting our students’—and society’s—future. It’s time to encourage our students to find the “low way” and celebrate when they do.