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Creative ideas for actualizing student potential

Human creativity is a multifaceted phenomenon with cognitive, attitudinal, intrapersonal interpersonal, practical, socio-cultural, economic, and environmental aspects. It can be challenging to incorporate creativity in classrooms. Teachers tend to inhibit creativity by focusing on reproduction of knowledge, obedience and passivity in class, and correct responses, which are easier to evaluate than creative ones. Teaching in such a way as to discourage creative answers and approaches may lead to higher scores on standardized tests (with all the sociological, marketplace, and political consequences that entails). Teachers claim to value creativity, but to hold negative attitudes toward, and show little tolerance of, attributes associated with creativity, such as risk taking, impulsivity, and independence. When teachers do encourage creativity, it is often the case that neither teacher nor students knows what the expectations are. Moreover, students fear that they will be critically judged if they produce something in which they have invested at a personal level. Despite the potentially threatening aspects of encouraging creative classrooms, no other investment in education could be more important and rewarding. The phrase 'creative potential' is generally used to refer to how likely a given individual is to manifest creative works in the future, as assessed by scores on creativity tests. The concept of potentiality and its relationship to actuality and context has been studied in depth by physicists. This chapter explores how the physical conception of potentiality can shed light on the notion of potential as it applies in the classroom, and in particular, on how we conceive of and actualize students' creative potential. We then discuss methods that will help optimize the creative potential of students in less threatening ways.