Creativity could be included in PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) rankings in 2021.

WHAT is it?

We all know that the skills that we need in the future are not necessarily the ones we are teaching students. In our current context in which technology and automation are transforming industries, disrupting jobs and changing the skills that employers require, developing creative people is an aim most educational jurisdictions share. The World Economics Forum predicts that creativity will rise from the 10th most sought-after skill in 2015 to the 3rd in 2020.

The challenge is that currently there is no one agreed definition of what creativity is, never mind how it can be assessed.

WHY teach it?

It is not only that creativity is prized by employers - the ability to think critically, solve problems, be inquisitive. It also speaks to the needs of people as human beings. We are creative.

The most viewed TED talk is Ken Robinson's Do Schools Kill Creativity? He argues that the creative talents of people are not necessarily valued in a hierarchical academic-driven education system. It has been watched more than 48 million times. "It's because these issues matter to people - I know they do", says Robinson. Children now are suffering "intolerably high levels of stress ... It's not like the system's working. And the idea that the whole thing can be solved by reducing the curriculum to some narrow idea of academic rigor, which doesn't take into account the full range of children's abilities and their need for achievement in areas that speak to them, is just nonsense." (Tes 15 December 2017).

HOW do we teach it?

Again there is no ONE established idea of how we should teach creativity. However, we can have an approach - being deliberate about putting the skills associated with creativity central stage. The IB calls the approaches to teaching and learning "deliberate strategies". It is the same when teaching creativity. It's not about displacing subject knowledge with a whole new branch of knowledge called 'creativity'. It is about how we teach - it's the deliberate strategies we employ to, for example, using problem-based inquiries to develop inquisitiveness.