For a long time, creativity was associated with certain fields, such as art, music, and literature, and also with a particular idea of talent: something that some people had and others did not. Today, we know that this conception falls short. Creativity is a capacity that can be developed and that comes into play in activities as diverse as solving a mathematical problem, formulating a hypothesis, finding an alternative explanation, designing an experiment, or looking for a solution to a new situation.
In education, this idea has important implications. If creativity can be learned, we can also ask what conditions foster it and what conditions hinder it. And this brings us to questions that touch on the very heart of teaching: how much room we leave for questions, what we do with unexpected answers, how we teach students to live with mistakes, and to what extent we allow them to explore paths that do not immediately lead to a correct solution.
The emergence of artificial intelligence has added a new dimension to this debate. For the first time, we have tools capable of producing texts, images, ideas, and multiple answers to the same question in a matter of seconds. Their arrival in classrooms forces us to consider what it means to create when a machine can also generate and combine content, but also what capacities we need in order to use those possibilities with judgment, purpose, and autonomy.
In recent months, at the ProFuturo Observatory we have approached these questions from very different perspectives: what we know about creativity and the conditions that foster its development; how to encourage more open and divergent forms of thinking; what methodologies and routines can be incorporated into the classroom; and what new possibilities (and questions) artificial intelligence opens up. Here we bring together six of those articles to explore some of the ideas, research, and experiences that are helping us better understand how we learn, and how we teach, to think creatively.
Understanding in Order to Create
What can a school learn from one of the most innovative restaurants in history? Much more than it might seem. After revolutionizing gastronomy at elBulli, Ferran Adrià set out to transfer part of that creative process to education. This led to Creative Schools, a project that invited 17 schools to use the Sapiens methodology to tackle their own transformation challenges.
The proposal is based on the idea that before creating, we need to understand. Organizing information, putting it into context, classifying it, establishing connections, imagining possibilities, and, from there, seeking new answers. The participating schools applied this process to very different challenges, from transforming teaching methodologies to rethinking school spaces or using art to broaden students’ possibilities for expression.
Ferran Adrià: Recipes for Bringing Creation into the Classroom tells the story of that experience and brings together tools developed to transfer to education some of the principles that made elBulli an extraordinary laboratory of creativity. Because innovating also requires a thorough understanding of what we want to transform.
Beyond the Right Answer
A barometer, a building, and an apparently simple question: how can you calculate the height of the latter using the former? The well-known story devised by physics professor Alexander Calandra provides the starting point for discussing one of the great enemies of creative thinking in schools: the search for a single correct answer. The student in the story comes up with numerous solutions to the problem, although none initially matches the one expected by the person assessing him.
Thinking Outside the Box: Promoting Innovative Ways of Thinking and Solving Problems reflects on how conventional answers and the penalization of mistakes can limit our ability to explore alternatives, and presents four initiatives that seek to do precisely the opposite.
Making Creativity Visible, Design for Change, Cultivating Creative & Civic Capacities, and Club 2030 demonstrate different ways of bringing creative thinking into the classroom: observing and interpreting, imagining solutions, tackling real-world problems, experimenting, collaborating, and learning to look at the same issue from different perspectives. Because teaching students to solve problems also means leaving room for them to find paths that no one had anticipated.
AI as Raw Material for Creation
Artificial intelligence can suggest ideas, establish associations, generate images or texts, and offer multiple solutions in a matter of seconds. But having all those possibilities at our disposal does not automatically make us more creative. The difference lies in what we do with them.
Artificial Intelligence as a Driver of Creativity in the Classroom explores how these tools can be incorporated without turning students into passive recipients of answers. To do so, it draws on an evocative metaphor from researcher Rodrigo Fábrega: thinking of AI as a new kind of “modeling clay,” a raw material that acquires value when someone manipulates it, experiments with it, and uses it to build something of their own.
The article proposes combining three dimensions—speed, slowness, and depth—to harness its educational potential: automating certain tasks while also stopping to question the answers; comparing alternatives, detecting errors and biases; and using technology to experiment and develop projects. AI can expand the realm of what is possible, as long as students are the ones deciding what to do with it.
Rediscovering the Art of Asking Questions
When did we stop asking questions in the classroom? For Rodrigo Fábrega, a researcher and expert in education, technology, and creativity, this question is particularly important at a time when artificial intelligence can provide us with almost immediate answers. Faced with concerns that these tools might end up homogenizing thought or replacing human capacities, Fábrega proposes using them precisely to stimulate curiosity, experimentation, and creation.
In Artificial Intelligence as an Ally of Creative Thinking, we talk to him about how to turn AI into a tool that students can question, test, and shape according to their own ideas. The goal is to move from passive use of technology to an approach in which children and young people learn to direct it with judgment.
The conversation also addresses the role of mistakes, teacher training, and the need to reconsider some of the habits of a school system that is still very much geared toward finding answers. Because when answers are becoming increasingly easy to obtain, learning to formulate good questions takes on a whole new value.
Making Thinking a Routine
How do we teach people to think? That was one of the major questions that Project Zero, founded at Harvard University in 1967 to investigate the cognitive processes involved in the arts and creativity, began to explore. Over time, its research expanded to include issues such as understanding, critical thinking, and the ability to look at a problem from different perspectives.
A School That Thinks: Routines to Awaken Curiosity and Understanding traces the history of Project Zero and focuses on one of its best-known contributions: thinking routines. These are brief, repeatable procedures that help make explicit mental processes that normally remain hidden: observing before interpreting, justifying a claim, asking questions, making connections, considering other points of view, or revising an initial idea.
Routines such as See-Think-Wonder, What Makes You Say That?, or I Used to Think… Now I Think… can be incorporated into everyday classroom activities. Practiced regularly, they turn thinking into something that can be observed, shared, and improved. In doing so, they also create some of the fundamental conditions for thinking more flexibly and creatively.
Creating the Conditions for Creativity
Creativity is not a gift reserved for a select few, nor does it depend on waiting for inspiration to strike. It is a capacity that can be developed, but it can also be inhibited. In fact, various studies on divergent thinking show how our ability to imagine multiple solutions and explore alternatives declines as we move toward adulthood.
How to Educate Without Killing Creativity examines what happens during this process and, with the help of María Lourdes García Vázquez, an expert in creativity and educational technology, reviews some of the conditions that research has identified as conducive to creative thinking.
Separating the moments of creation and evaluation so that judgment does not enter the process too early; allowing time to try, discard, and recombine; introducing play and experimentation; collaborating with people who bring different perspectives; and drawing on metaphors, analogies, and narratives are some of them.
Ultimately, creativity needs space. And educating for creativity means building environments in which exploring alternatives, embracing a certain degree of uncertainty, and making mistakes are all part of the learning process.
