Fostering Creativity in Chinese and American Students

Deborah Walker

Last fall I was invited to deliver the keynote address at the 2008 Chinese Top High Schools International Education Forum in Beijing, which brought together principals from 400 high schools throughout China. My topic was on how to foster student creativity, critical thinking, leadership, and moral development. While I thought this was a tall order, my Chinese colleagues assured me that educators in their country believed they could learn a lot from the United States about how to transform their education system to produce more innovative thinkers.

I knew that Chinese educators did a very good job of teaching advanced mathematics and science to their high school students, and that they granted college degrees in these two fields along with engineering to a staggering number of students. But what I found out during the conference from talking to principals, listening to speeches by government officials, and visiting a high-performing high school is that the Chinese are not content with the foundational education they provide their secondary students. Instead, they want to develop students’ ability to think creatively, to invent new products and solutions, and to become leaders rather than followers.

Larger Social Values Have an Impact

In crafting my keynote address, I decided to illustrate in words and pictures what makes it possible for U.S. schools to engender creative thinking and an entrepreneurial spirit in students. It seemed to me that part of our success in developing creativity and imagination in our students was due to the values that shape our larger society. My speech was organized around three sets of democratic values or ideals:

1. Entrepreneurship, creativity, willingness to take risks, and resourcefulness
2. Critical thinking, inquiry, and individual and collaborative problem solving
3. Citizenship, responsibility, leadership, and moral development

To demonstrate how these values play out in the classroom, I gave examples from secondary schools we work with at Collaborative for Teaching and Learning. To illustrate creativity, I described how the arts can be used to help students learn more deeply and demonstrate their learning by representing knowledge in a different way that causes them to synthesize and broaden their understanding. Having students research an ancient culture and then create a work of art reflective of that culture is a way to have students learn beyond facts and dates. It is a way for students to imagine what it is like to live in another culture and to have sufficient command of that culture’s perspective to create a piece of art.

To illustrate entrepreneurship, I showed how students in a history class created a Web site to demonstrate their learning. The students created a network beyond the classroom by involving others outside of the school who contributed to the site. Then I told them of students in an economics class who developed business plans and launched real businesses on their own, such as a school-based cafe, a landscaping firm, and a computer assistance group that sold stocks and generated profits. These examples demonstrated that students in U.S. classrooms are expected to take risks, try new ideas, and learn independently, and that these values are important in our society.

A Creativity Gap

In China, students must apply to high school and pay for their secondary education; those who don’t qualify go to work. From my observations of teacher pedagogy and student learning in Chinese high school classrooms, I found a seriousness of purpose on the part of teachers and students since high school coursework prepares students for university study. Trigonometry classes were fast-paced, teacher-centered, and involved little student interaction other than answering direct questions. Students were working hard to master difficult content and reported spending hours doing homework and studying. Their dedication to learning was enviable.

However, I saw few instances where students were able to apply knowledge, seek solutions together to complex problems, or analyze their own learning. Even in an English language class where the teacher was using more interactive approaches, student response was limited since this kind of instruction was very new to them. The pedagogy I observed mirrors China’s society that values compliance, hard work, and linear thinking. Students in China do not have the freedom to question school or classroom practices, select their own projects, or direct their own learning, because in the larger society that kind of freedom does not exist. For China to truly foster creativity in schools, it will need to grant more freedom of thought and action to its citizens. Creativity thrives in a society where independent thought and multiple perspectives coexist.

That said, we in the United States do not consistently practice in our schools the kind of instruction that fosters student creativity on a daily basis. Some teachers excel at this kind of instruction; some schools work as a professional community to ensure that their students learn deeply and can apply their learning in new and inventive ways.

At the end of my address, I posed the following questions to my Chinese colleagues that we as American educators should also answer if we truly want to foster creativity in our students. 

• What core values influence current education practice?
  
• To what extent do curriculum, instruction, and assessment of student learning reflect those core values?
  
• What are ways educators currently promote creativity, critical thinking, leadership, and moral development?
  
• What are some things educators can do to develop these skills and dispositions in students?

As a nation, we can do better to build on our democratic values to promote creativity and innovation. If we want to compete with countries like China, who have ambitious plans to remedy their own deficiencies, we not only need to do a better job of teaching all students demanding coursework, but we also need to take advantage of the U.S. cultural context to help our students develop the kind of creative problem solving they will need to meet the challenges of the future. The potential is there.

Deborah Walker is president and chief executive officer of the Collaborative for Teaching and Learning in Louisville, Ky.