Project introduces creativity, innovation
Daily Oklahoman
By Jim Stafford
Trade Talk

Sir Ken Robinson borrowed a line from an old Apple Computer advertising campaign Tuesday for a Downtown Rotary Club audience.
"Think different.”

OK, Robinson cleaned up the grammar and used the more proper "think differently” when he launched into a 30-minute monologue on the importance that creativity plays in our lives. Or should play in a world of changes wrought by the digital revolution.

"If we are to embrace (the changes) and prosper in these times, we have to think differently about our talents and abilities,” Robinson said. "And that really begins in education. We have to think very differently about the way we educate our children.

"The way we were educated will not do for the challenges they face.”

A native of England and resident of Los Angeles, Robinson serves as national adviser to the Oklahoma Creativity Project. That is a collaborative, statewide initiative that seeks to establish Oklahoma as a "world-renowned” center of creativity and innovation.

So, the Creativity Project is dreaming up ways to introduce creativity and innovation into Oklahoma's education, culture and commerce. The creative process sometimes flows against the current, especially in education, Robinson said, who is a consultant for governments and industries worldwide.

Consider the unrelenting push to prepare Oklahoma students for standardized tests, he said. Some people call it "teaching to the test.”

"(We) are being hampered, I believe, by our current process of standardized testing assessment, which is having the opposite effect of what we need, which is to encourage innovation and creativity,” Robinson said. "I don't mean to say that standardized tests are bad in themselves, but when they become an obsession in education, they become destructive.

"Teaching is an art form. It's not an assembly line.”

But no one wants their child left behind.

In fact, I listened to Robinson's humorous and very appealing appeal to ensure that creativity and innovation are factored into everything we do and still felt like I had been left behind.

I'm not sure that I got it because I still don't know how creativity can supersede the multiplication tables, for instance.

"In education today we are still in that industrial model where kids are lined up in the desk and there is one answer, and over time it's just ‘let's squelch those ideas out of them,'” said Susan McCalmont, who is involved with the Oklahoma Creativity Project and also is chairman of the Oklahoma A+ Schools, which seeks to introduce the arts into the everyday learning process in schools. "So how do you find ways to work within the parameters of state law, federal law to meet those (testing) requirements but also find ways to encourage creativity and innovation within the classroom?”

Think different. OK, think differently.