essay about creativity in school

Understanding Creativity

• Posted June 25, 2020
• By Emily Boudreau

Understanding the learning that happens with creative work can often be elusive in any K–12 subject. A new study from Harvard Graduate School of Education Associate Professor Karen Brennan , and researchers Paulina Haduong and Emily Veno, compiles case studies, interviews, and assessment artifacts from 80 computer science teachers across the K–12 space. These data shed new light on how teachers tackle this challenge in an emerging subject area.

“A common refrain we were hearing from teachers was, ‘We’re really excited about doing creative work in the classroom but we’re uncertain about how to assess what kids are learning, and that makes it hard for us to do what we want to do,’” Brennan says. “We wanted to learn from teachers who are supporting and assessing creativity in the classroom, and amplify their work, and celebrate it and show what’s possible as a way of helping other teachers.”

Create a culture that values meaningful assessment for learning — not just grades

As many schools and districts decided to suspend letter grades during the pandemic, teachers need to help students find intrinsic motivation. “It’s a great moment to ask, ‘What would assessment look like without a focus on grades and competition?’” says Veno.

Indeed, the practice of fostering a classroom culture that celebrates student voice, creativity, and exploration isn’t limited to computer science. The practice of being a creative agent in the world extends through all subject areas.

The research team suggests the following principles from computer science classrooms may help shape assessment culture across grade levels and subject areas.

Solicit different kinds of feedback

Give students the time and space to receive and incorporate feedback. “One thing that’s been highlighted in assessment work is that it is not about the teacher talking to a student in a vacuum,” says Haduong, noting that hearing from peers and outside audience members can help students find meaning and direction as they move forward with their projects.

• Feedback rubrics help students receive targeted feedback from audience members. Additionally, looking at the rubrics can help the teacher gather data on student work.

Emphasize the process for teachers and students

Finding the appropriate rubric or creating effective project scaffolding is a journey. Indeed, according to Haduong, “we found that many educators had a deep commitment to iteration in their own work.” Successful assessment practices conveyed that spirit to students.

• Keeping design journals can help students see their work as it progresses and provides documentation for teachers on the student’s process.
• Consider the message sent by the form and aesthetics of rubrics. One educator decided to use a handwritten assessment to convey that teachers, too, are working on refining their practice.

Scaffold independence

Students need to be able to take ownership of their learning as virtual learning lessens teacher oversight. Students need to look at their own work critically and know when they’ve done their best. Teachers need to guide students in this process and provide scaffolded opportunities for reflection.

• Have students design their own assessment rubric. Students then develop their own continuum to help independently set expectations for themselves and their work.

Key Takeaways

• Assessment shouldn’t be limited to the grade a student receives at the end of the semester or a final exam. Rather, it should be part of the classroom culture and it should be continuous, with an emphasis on using assessment not for accountability or extrinsic motivation, but to support student learning.
• Teachers can help learners see that learning and teaching are iterative processes by being more transparent about their own efforts to reflect and iterate on their practices.
• Teachers should scaffold opportunities for students to evaluate their own work and develop independence.

Additional Resources

• Creative Computing curriculum and projects
• Karen Brennan on helping kids get “unstuck”
• Usable Knowledge on how assessment can help continue the learning process

Usable Knowledge

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A Creativity Conundrum: Can Schools Teach Students to Innovate?

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Of all the so-called 21st-century skills, perhaps none is revered in both the education and business worlds as much as creativity.

In the past year alone, creativity topped lists of the most valued skills for students to develop in polls of parents and teachers as well as surveys of employers in professional groups like LinkedIn. Even so, experts say schools need to re-examine their view of creativity, reframe it, and think about it more as a core skill to be taught rather than a personality trait or a way to motivate students.

Educators and business people tend to “talk at cross purposes” when it comes to creativity, said R. Keith Sawyer, a professor of educational innovations at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the author of the 2019 book The Creative Classroom .

“Business leaders are saying we need creative employees to invent new products or to identify new markets to sell our products in,” Sawyer said. “A lot of educators think of creativity as something you’d associate with the arts, ... [but] you need creativity in all spheres of life. It’s not something that’s reserved for the arts. It’s something that you find in any discipline.”

University of Georgia creativity researchers Aubra Shepard and Mark Runco argue that creativity also suffers in schools because teachers can’t easily measure it in students. In content areas such as reading, it’s easy to see what the results of a lesson should look like—a student who can comprehend a story and write a concise review of it, for example.

“With creativity, the return on the investment is largely unknown,” Shepard and Runco say in an analysis in the international Journal on Learning, Research and Innovation in Education. “If something is predictable, it is probably not very original but is instead consistent with what came before. Because of this risk, administrators are usually disinclined to invest in creativity.”

‘An AI-Proof Skill’

Those returns on investment are becoming clearer in a post-industrial and global economy.

“I think there’s been a greater emphasis on creativity lately because of the automation scare,” said Megan Fasules, a research economist at the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. “Being able to solve problems using skills that you weren’t taught or approach them differently than how you were taught is seen as a way to secure your job, because machines aren’t able to do that now. So it kind of gives you an AI-proof skill.”

In a forthcoming study, Fasules identifies the intensity of creativity required in various careers—for example, how often a worker has to come up with original products or use unusual ways to solve problems—and how critical creativity is considered to performing the job well. This intensity can look very different from field to field. For example, while a poet and an architect are among the careers requiring the most intense creativity in her research, so are a physicist and a chief executive officer.

Fasules finds that at each education level, jobs that require more intense creativity pay more and yield bigger rewards in the labor market. For example, while computer science and mathematics were not among the top five fields requiring creativity, she finds workers earn a higher-than-average premium for their creative skills in those fields.

J.D. LaRock, the former chairman of the Massachusetts Commission on Digital Innovation and Lifelong Learning, agreed.

“I think we are broadly, as a society, accepting that the world of work really is changing: that technology is reshaping things,” LaRock said. “The fundamental skill sets that will keep young people and new employees engaged as productive employees for a lifetime are much, much less about content mastery and much, much more about adaptability and a creative mindset.”

The Massachusetts commission concluded that most students needed more experiential learning and training in soft skills such as creativity to work with rapidly changing technology in the state.

LaRock now runs the nonprofit Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship, which trains teachers and partners with schools to engage students in entrepreneurship projects. Each year, more than 100,000 mostly Latino and black students across the country research and develop new products and pitch new businesses in local and international competitions through the program.

“Future orientation, the ability to deal with risk and uncertainty, the ability to spot opportunities: These are skills that our schools haven’t been set up to teach well, which is why experiential learning and project-based learning models are important,” LaRock said.

Aligning Practices

In nationally representative surveys of U.S. teachers and students last year, Gallup pollsters asked how often classes included practices which have been shown to boost creativity, such as discussing topics with no right or wrong answer; working on projects that incorporate material from several different subjects; or allowing students to try out different ways to solve a problem, even if they may not work.

Gallup found teachers were significantly more likely to report they were using creative instruction than their students. For example, 52 percent of teachers said they assigned projects based on the real world, twice the rate of their students, and 56 percent of teachers said they discussed topics with no correct answer, versus only 36 percent of students who said the same. However, teachers who reported frequently using creative-teaching practices were more likely than other teachers to have students who demonstrated self-confidence, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills.

In 2021, the Program for International Student Assessment will roll out a new global test of teenagers’ creative skills.

The test will measure creativity in four domains: writing and visual expression and addressing social and scientific problems. For example, students may write captions for illustrations, or suggest potential solutions to water scarcity in a community. Part of showing their creativity will include integrating knowledge across different subjects.

But fields beyond education have different takes on what creativity means:

• Product design: Guidelines list six aspects of creativity: newness, ability to resolve problems, customers’ enjoyment, ability to match needs of customers, importance to the needs of customers, and the level of desirability.
• Business: Over several years of its annual global survey of chief executive officers, IBM has defined creativity as being comfortable with complexity, willing to try new ideas, being unafraid to fail and quick to learn from failure.
• Computer Science/Artificial Intelligence: One classic study defines creativity as synonymous with problem-solving: “We call problem-solving creative when the problems solved are relatively new and difficult.

—Sarah D. Sparks

“As of now, I don’t think we do a good job teaching creativity. In our standardized-testing world, a lot of people are taught to conform,” Fasules said. She recalled tutoring students in math who refused to submit problems they had solved correctly because they had not used the same process they had been taught in class. “To be creative, students have to be allowed the freedom to not conform, to take up new ideas and new ways to do things.”

While competitions and clubs can help to engage students creatively, Sawyer found that depending on arts or extracurricular programs to teach creativity ends up being counterproductive, because teachers in other core subjects like science or math don’t change the way they teach in response.

“If we add a few hours on Friday afternoon focused on creativity, that’s really a Band-Aid,” he said. “If you’re learning knowledge in every subject in a way that results in this shallow, superficial understanding, you just can’t be creative with the knowledge. If we want students to be creative, we really have to change the way we teach every subject—and it’s a much more difficult transformation than adding in arts classes.”

Based on more than a decade of research on creativity and collaboration, Sawyer and his colleagues found schools that have been successful in nurturing creativity in their students use an approach he dubs “guided improvisation,” to borrow a jazz metaphor. Rather than entirely student-led instruction, teachers ground students’ creativity within a domain such as history or science, using a few core concepts to anchor a student’s exploration and teaching students to look for connections to other subjects. A series of studies found students taught this way remembered content-area knowledge equally as well as students whose classes focused on covering more total content, but they performed better at using their knowledge in creative ways and for unfamiliar problems.

Despite the criticism of current teaching practices, U.S. 15-year-olds scored above the international average on a 2012 international assessment of creative problem-solving, the most recent one. And the nation has long been seen as a leader in nurturing creative thinking, when it comes to technology, business, and entertainment, prompting educators from some other countries, such as Japan, to visit U.S. classrooms for clues to boosting creativity in their own classrooms.

And schools can play a role, noted Sawyer. “You’re absolutely not born being more or less creative. It’s ways of acting and thinking that anyone can learn,” he said. “I think that’s an empowering message, especially for those people who have always thought, ‘I’m not a creative person.’ ”

A version of this article appeared in the February 05, 2020 edition of Education Week as A Conundrum Over Teaching Creativity

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Article contents

Creativity in education.

• Anne Harris Anne Harris RMIT University
•  and  Leon De Bruin Leon De Bruin RMIT University
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.383
• Published online: 26 April 2018

Creativity is an essential aspect of teaching and learning that is influencing worldwide educational policy and teacher practice, and is shaping the possibilities of 21st-century learners. The way creativity is understood, nurtured, and linked with real-world problems for emerging workforces is significantly changing the ways contemporary scholars and educators are now approaching creativity in schools. Creativity discourses commonly attend to creative ability, influence, and assessment along three broad themes: the physical environment, pedagogical practices and learner traits, and the role of partnerships in and beyond the school. This overview of research on creativity education explores recent scholarship examining environments, practices, and organizational structures that both facilitate and impede creativity. Reviewing global trends pertaining to creativity research in this second decade of the 21st century, this article stresses for practicing and preservice teachers, schools, and policy makers the need to educationally innovate within experiential dimensions, priorities, possibilities, and new kinds of partnerships in creativity education.

• creative ecologies
• creative environments
• creative industries

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How to promote creativity in the classroom

Dean of the Cardiff School of Education, Cardiff Metropolitan University

Disclosure statement

Dan Davies has received funding from the Teacher Training Agency, Education Scotland and the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) in relation to his research in creativity.

Cardiff Metropolitan University provides funding as a member of The Conversation UK.

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Creativity is a big deal in the 21st century classroom. Many countries include it as a core aim for their students in national curricula and even countries such as Singapore that come top of world education league tables are recognising the need for more of it in their schools.

This surge of interest in creativity among teachers, school leaders, academics and governments is partly driven by a growing belief that a fast-paced global economy requires workers with the flexibility of mind to adapt to constant change rather than follow a traditional career path.

We live in a world where increasingly complex problems require creative solutions and where individuals’ lives can be enhanced by the greater sense of agency that comes with having opportunities to explore their own creativity.

Yet, surprisingly few teachers describe themselves as creative . This is perhaps because they have a performance-related, arts-based model of creativity in their minds, such as playing a musical instrument, painting a picture, acting a part in a play, writing a unique song, poem or story. This is in contrast to a broader definition of creativity as the ability to make connections between two previously unrelated ideas or contexts – what has been called “bisociation” by the Hungarian-British writer Arthur Koestler.

In 2013, I led a team undertaking a systematic review of Creative Learning Environments in Education for the Scottish Government. Looking at a number of studies , we found that in order to promote creativity among their pupils, teachers need to unpick their preconceptions about what it means to be creative as part of the professional learning process.

Let teachers be creative

They need to be given permission to innovate and improvise by school leaders, which is risky in a school culture structured around high-stakes testing . Once given this permission and support, teachers can develop creative learning environments for their students. This comprises both the physical environment of the classroom and a teaching environment with the following characteristics:

• students are given some control over their learning
• there is a balance between structure and freedom
• teachers are “playful”
• time is used flexibly
• relationships between teachers and learners include high expectations, mutual respect, modelling of creative attitudes, flexibility and dialogue
• students work collaboratively and assess each other

While each of these characteristics on its own might seem like a description of good teaching, it is their combination which creates the environment to promote creativity.

Two examples I uncovered during my research can help illustrate this. One teacher I observed in Somerset surprised his class by setting up a series of activities on their tables while they were out at break to introduce the topic of “gases”. These consisted of a candle burning, a series of plastic cups containing different numbers of marbles, and pairs of inflated and deflated balls.

The teacher gave no vocal instruction, but there were question cards with the activities, for example:

Watch the candle as it burns, what do you notice? Look at how the marbles are arranged, shake them, what is happening? Squeeze the two rugby balls, what can you say?

Initially bemused, groups of pupils soon began interacting with the exhibits and discussing their ideas. This unexpected start to the lesson – out of the normal routine – together with an invitation to look at everyday phenomena differently, provided the “hook” needed to engage children’s enthusiasm in a new scientific topic.

Abstract concepts, made fun

Another science co-ordinator at a South Gloucestershire primary school used stop-frame animation with plasticine models (like the Wallace and Gromit films) to help children understand forces in real-life situations. Working in groups of two or three, the children were asked to tell a story with their short animations that would involve everyday examples of forces in use.

One group of three girls shot a simple story of two boys having a fight “pushing each other over” and a dog jumping on top of them. They then annotated the resulting short movie on the computer with labels such as “push”, “pull”, “gravity” or “air resistance”. One child commented:

You can be more creative when you do animation, because you can design what you’re going to do, and you get to think things through, like what forces you’re going to use and how the forces work.

Not only did this experience help reinforce children’s understanding of the tricky and abstract conceptual area of forces, it also enabled them to exercise choice, make links with other areas of the curriculum and engage in critical reflection as they viewed the results of their work.

Examples such as these demonstrate how teachers’ own creativity and willingness to take risks can promote creativity in the way their students are learning. Such teaching for creativity is no laissez-faire, easy option – it requires careful preparation. As Thomas Edison said of genius, it’s “1% inspiration, 99% percent perspiration”.

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Essays About Creativity: Top 5 Examples and 7 Prompts

Creativity helps us understand and solve problems in different ways. Discover our top essays about creativity examples and use our prompts for your writing.

Albert Einstein defines creativity as “seeing what others see and thinking what others have not thought.” But what makes it such a popular topic to write about? Every person has a creative view and opinion on something, but not everyone knows how to express it. Writing utilizes ideas and imagination to produce written pieces, such as essays.

Creativity reinforces not only new views but also innovation around the world. Because creativity is a broad topic to write about, you’ll need several resources to help you narrow down what you want to discuss in your essay .

5 Essay Examples

1. way to foster creativity in young children by anonymous on ivypanda.com, 2. phenomenon of creativity and success by anonymous on ivypanda.com, 3. do schools kill creativity: essay on traditional education by anonymous on gradesfixer.com, 4. creativity in dreams essay by writer pete, 5. the importance of creativity in higher education by anonymous on gradesfixer.com, 1. what is creativity, 2. how creativity affects our daily lives, 3. the impact of creativity on students, 4. the importance of creativity, 5. creativity: a product of perception, 6. types of creativity, 7. art and creativity.

“There are different ways to foster creativity in young children. They include different approaches to the problem of making children more self-reliant, more creative, and more interested in the process of receiving education, obtaining experience, achieving certain results in the sphere of self-study.”

The essay delves into the importance of promoting creativity by teaching music to young students. The author says music’s intention, rhythm, and organizational features help people understand performance, improve their mood, and educate them about the world they live in, unlike noise. Music is an important area of life, so it is important to teach it correctly and inspire children.

Since music and creativity are both vital, the author notes that music teachers must find ways to facilitate ventures to enhance their students’ creativity. The author also believes that teachers must perform their duties appropriately and focus on shaping their students’ behavior, personality, and worldview. You might be interested in these articles about art .

“Over the past few decades, creativity has evolved from a characteristic normally associated with artistic activities into a quality that is found in people of various professions. However, in the 21st century, creativity has become a rather controversial issue.”

The author discusses that while creativity dramatically contributes to the success of individuals and companies, creativity in the 21st-century workplace still has mixed reception. They mention that creativity leads to new ideas and innovations, helps solve complex problems, and makes great leaders. 

However, some still see creative people as irrational, disorganized, and distracting in the workplace. This often results in companies rejecting applicants with this quality. Ultimately, the writer believes creativity is vital in all organizations today. Hiring people with this unique trait is highly beneficial and essential to achieving the company’s goals. For more inspiration, check out these essays about achievement and essays about curiosity .

“… the traditional education system has caused much controversy since the beginning of formal education because traditional education can hurt children’s ability to think creatively, innovate, and develop fascinating minds.”

The essay discusses how school rules and norms affect students’ expression of true individuality. The author mentions that today’s schools focus on students’ test performance, memorization, and compliance more than their aspirations and talents, preventing students from practicing and enhancing their creativity.

The author uses various articles, shows, and situations to elaborate on how schools kill a student’s creativity by forcing them to follow a specific curriculum as a means to succeed in life. It kills the student’s creativity as they become “robots” with the same beliefs, knowledge, and values. According to the writer, killing a child’s creativity leads to a lack of motivation and a wrong career direction.

“Creativity is enhanced whether one chooses to pay attention to it, or not. Each person has the capacity to learn much from their creative dreaming, if they would only think more creatively and openly when awake.”

The essay contains various studies to support claims about people being more creative when asleep. According to the author, the human brain processes more information when dreaming than in the waking state. While the brainstem is inactive, it responds to PGO Waves that trigger the human CMPG, which puts images into the dream to move. The author discusses two main perspectives to discuss how creative dreaming occurs.

First, creativity is enhanced when a person sleeps, not through dreaming but because the mind is free from stress, making the brain more focused on thinking and creating images. The second is that the dreaming mind gathers and processes more information than the human brain unconsciously accumulates daily. The author states that creativity helps express feelings and believes people should not take their creativity in dreams for granted.

“When students have the opportunity to be creative, they’ll have the freedom to express themselves however they want, which satisfies them and drives them to work hard.”

The essay focuses on how the role of creativity is getting slimmer as a student enters higher education. To explain the importance of creativity, the author shares their experience showing how elementary schools focus more on improving and training students’ creativity than higher education. Although rules and restrictions are essential in higher education, students should still practice creativity because it enhances their ability to think and quickly adapt to different situations.

If you want to use the latest grammar software, read our guide to using an AI grammar checker .

7 Prompts for Essays About Creativity

Creativity is an important topic that significantly affects an individual’s development. For this prompt, discuss the meaning of creativity according to experts versus the personal interpretation of creative individuals. Compare these explanations and add your opinion on these similarities and differences. You can even discuss creativity in your life and how you practice creativity in your hobbies, interests, and education.

There are several impacts of creativity in one’s life. It improves mental health, strengthens the immune system, and affects one’s ability to solve problems in school and real life. Sometimes, being creative helps us be more open to various perspectives to reduce our biases. 

Use this prompt to write about a specific situation you experienced where creativity made you more innovative, inventive, or imaginative. Discuss these particular moments by pointing out creativity’s impact on your goal and how things would differ without creativity. You may also be interested in learning about the different types of creativity .

Creativity significantly impacts students’ enthusiasm and feeling of belongingness as they share their passion. Additionally, creativity’s effects stretch to students’ career choices and mental health.

Use this prompt to start a discussion of the pros and cons of creativity with students. Give examples where a student’s creativity leads to their success or failure. You can also share your observations as a guardian or a student.  

Sometimes, when we lose touch with our creative side, our viewpoint becomes shallow. Creativity not only works for art but also broadens everyone’s perspectives in life. 

For this prompt, speak about how creativity matters and prove its importance by providing a situation. Theorize or discuss how creative people and people who fail to increase their creativity respond to the case. 

Perception is an underlying characteristic of creativity. It interprets what we observe, while creativity allows us to make sense of them. Use this prompt to define perception to the readers through the lens of creativity.

List your experience proving creativity is a product of perception. For example, people can have vastly different interpretations of a painting or sound depending on how they perceive it. 

There are several types of creativity, some people believe creativity is a natural talent, but others say it can be cultivated. In this prompt, briefly define creativity and identify each type, such as musical, artistic, or logical. 

Discuss how creativity can be taught and cultivated, and look into how some people are naturally creative. In your essay , use real-life examples; this could be someone you know who has studied a creative subject or a friend who is a naturally creative songwriter.

When people say creativity, they usually think about art because it involves imaginative and expressive actions. Art strongly indicates a person’s ongoing effort and emotional power. 

To write this essay effectively, show how art relates to a person’s creativity. Briefly explain creativity and art and incorporate the factors that link these two. Note that art can be anything from contemporary dance and music to sculptures and paintings. For help with your essay , check our round-up of best essay writing apps .

Why Creativity Should Be Taught In Schools

Table of Contents

In 2019, LinkedIn published results of a study designed to understand skills that employers are looking for. Out of the 50,000 professional skills analyzed, creativity ranked number one in the “Soft Skills” category.  This is not particularly surprising.  Several studies for more than a decade have pointed to the growth of creativity-based jobs, as automation takes away the more predictable jobs.

In an analysis of what kinds of jobs are disappearing, researchers found that routine jobs (both manual and cognitive) have been declining since the 2000s while non-routine jobs continue to grow. 

Economizing Creativity

Creativity, as psychologists define it, is the ability to come up with novel and useful ideas. Viewed from the economic lens, it’s clear that creativity, which by its very definition makes things non-routine, should be the most important skill to possess. But it’s also a skill in some danger. Since the 1990s, creativity has been declining among students in the US, with the largest decline occurring over the last decade. 

Unfortunately, there are many myths about creativity that continue to persist, including some who claim it’s not even a real skill at all. 

Should Creativity Be A Soft Skill?

The LinkedIn study places creativity into the soft skills category. But what exactly makes a skill soft or hard? 

Is it that a soft skill can’t be evaluated easily while a hard one can? If so, then creativity should not really belong in the soft bucket. The Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (TTCT) was developed around the same time as the Cognitive Ability Test (CogAT). Unlike the CogAT, which evaluates your reasoning skills to arrive at one right answer, the TTCT evaluates your ability to come up with several different solutions to a problem.

The CogAT, being easier to administer,  took off in the education space and is primarily used in identifying gifted students, while the TTCT remains more as a research tool used to understand how the creativity of students is changing.

Misunderstanding the Importance of Creativity

Or is it because we don’t really understand the process of creativity? However, that’s not very different from something as fundamental as memorizing, a skill on the lowest rung of Bloom’s taxonomy . We don’t really understand how memories are stored in our brains and how we remember things.

However, that doesn’t stop us from using it to learn facts like states and their capitals or finding techniques like memory-palace, to improve our ability to memorize. In the same fashion, while we do not really understand how our brain produces creative ideas, we have figured out different creativity techniques that work well in triggering creative ideas. 

AI Proof Skill

By contrast, a skill like machine learning (ML) is considered a hard skill. On the surface this seems reasonable as you can learn and become knowledgeable about concrete ML algorithms. However, in practice when companies hire data scientists, they aren’t just looking for factual knowledge. Instead, during interviews they test whether you can apply your knowledge, take system constraints into consideration, and solve problems in interesting ways. So, ironically, they really test you for your creativity! 

But does it really matter if creativity is considered a soft skill or not? These are just words after all. The problem with labeling creativity as a soft skill is the perception it creates – that it’s a skill we are either born with or not and you can’t really learn to be more creative. It fuels a self-limiting mindset where people take fewer risks and don’t try things that would make them more creative. 

Creativity Can Be Learned

The truth is that one can learn to be more creative. While we may not understand how the brain comes up with a creative idea, we know enough about how to trigger the brain into thinking creative thoughts. Cognitive processes like associative thinking, analogical thinking or reverse thinking seem to play a fundamental role in coming up with creative ideas. 

Before the scientific revolution in the 17th century, abstract reasoning skills were not widespread. In an interesting 1920s study to understand the effect of social environment on cognitive development, Alexander Luria interviewed isolated peasants from rural Russia who had been untouched with scientific advancement of the 20th century. He gave them several different logical reasoning puzzles similar to the one shown in the picture below. 

What advanced us as a society was not believing that logical and abstract reasoning are innate abilities, but by understanding the building blocks and nurturing them early on. Children as young as toddlers are exposed to toys that build skills like sorting and pattern matching and by the time they are in elementary school logical puzzles like the one above become a piece of cake.   

Teaching Creativity Should Start in K12

In a similar vein, if we want to improve creative thinking skills, we can’t wait until our students are ready to start their first job. We should introduce these skills earlier during their K12 years, and give them the tools to think creatively and opportunities to exercise them. Building creativity, like any other skill, takes time and giving students plenty of exposure will better prepare them for the changing workforce. 

In more recent times, our push to introduce STEM into K12 education has been effective in improving knowledge as well as interest in pursuing STEM careers, especially for underrepresented populations. 

Creativity is similar in that respect. Incorporating creativity into the curriculum is shown to improve both creative thinking skills and content learning. When students are challenged to view a subject from different perspectives, it leads to deeper learning. 

In the end, creativity is just another aspect of human intelligence; one that encompasses both linear and non-linear thinking. It’s a much needed skill that can be improved with practice, and teaching it early to students can help them prepare better for the changing workforce. 

Further Reading

• The Guardian – Creativity is the key to the arts and the sciences
• edCircuit – Why Group Brainstorming Is Only One Part of Creative Ideation
• The Hechinger Report – Schools are rethinking classroom design to encourage collaboration, creativity

Pronita Mehrotra is the Founder of MindAntix , a company that develops tools and programs to bring creativity into schools and organizations. Her work focuses on the neuroscience behind creative thinking and leverages cognitive thinking patterns in ideation and decision making. She has participated in several global conferences and conducted creativity workshops for educators and leaders. 

Her work has been featured in leading publications like Harvard Business Review, Geekwire, ASCD and Education Week. MindAntix’s educational product was awarded EdTech Digest’s Cool Tool 2020 Finalist award in the 21st century skills category.

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Do schools really “kill creativity”?

Blog 24 Apr 2018 8 Comments

In the most watched TED talk of all time, educationalist Sir Ken Robinson FRSA claims that “schools kill creativity”, arguing that “we don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather we get educated out of it”. Yet to Robinson, “creativity is as important as literacy and we should afford it the same status”.

My former colleague Tim Leunig FRSA, while working as Chief Scientific Advisor at the Department for Education, delivered a  TEDx talk that tackled Robinson’s argument  head on. “True creativity” he argues, “is based on knowledge which in turn is based on literacy”. Our schools, where children develop the literacy skills on which all further learning depends, are therefore not killing creativity, but cultivating it by providing the “foundations young people need to be properly creative”.

As evidence of how schools kill creativity, Robinson cites the example of a young girl called Gillian Lynne who, at the age of eight, was already viewed as a problem student with a probable learning difficulty due her inability to sit still and concentrate. When her mother sought a medical explanation for Gillian’s constant fidgeting and lack of focus, the doctor suggested they speak privately. As the two adults got up to leave, the doctor turned on the radio. Left alone in a music-filled room, young Gillian began to dance. Observing her through the window, the doctor turned to her mother.  “Gillian’s not sick” he said, “she’s a dancer”. Today, at the age of 92, Gillian can look back on a long career in ballet, dance and musical theatre which saw her become one of the world’s most successful choreographers, with hits like Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s Cats and Phantom of the Opera among her many achievements. Yet her school had all but written her off, mistaking her extraordinary talent for some form of behavioural problem or cognitive impairment.

As evidence of how schools cultivate creativity by imparting the knowledge on which it so often depends, Leunig goes back to the Enlightenment. He talks about the introduction of crop rotation, which allowed more people to live off the produce of England’s soil, a pre-requisite for the mass movement of people from the fields to the factories, mills and mines that powered the industrial revolution. He talks about the great breakthrough that allowed that revolution to happen: the invention of the steam engine by Thomas Newcomen . And he talks about the knowledge that led to this invention –  knowledge of how, when steam condenses in a vessel, a vacuum is produced, and of how therefore, a piston could be forced out of a cylinder when steam is injected into it, and sucked back in again when the steam condenses. And he points out how this one brilliant insight enabled the British to “power the factories, get water out of the mines, and get locomotives running across the country and steam ships taking goods to the furthest corners of the globe”. Not only was this arguably the most important invention in economic history Leunig argues, but it wouldn’t have been possible without knowledge.

Does how we define creativity matter?

What is striking about these two talks is how different are the definitions of creativity on which they are based. To Robinson, creativity is about imagination, self-expression and divergent thinking. In contrast, Leunig’s examples of creativity show how, through the use of logic and the application of scientific principles, existing knowledge can be marshalled to create innovative new solutions to longstanding problems. To Robinson, creativity is natural – something you’re born with. Whereas for Leunig, it is highly dependent on the prior acquisition of biologically secondary knowledge – something you need to be taught. For Robinson, creativity is an alternative to literacy, and is often displayed by those who struggle academically; people who display what Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner would describes as an alternative or non-cognitive form of intelligence (kinesthetic in Lynne’s case). For Leunig, creativity is a cognitive competence that gains form and substance within particular knowledge domains – domains to which which the illiterate cannot gain access. 

Why do these differences matter? And what are their implications for schools, particularly those that put a premium on the cultivation of students’ creativity?

The short answer is that they matter because they illustrate how meaningless it is to talk about creativity in abstract terms, as if the word describes the same thing in different domains when, as Robinson and Leunig’s dispute show, it clearly does not.

As Professor Dylan Wiliam explains in his 2013 paper Principled Curriculum Design :

"A huge amount of research on skill acquisition has found that the skills developed by training and practice are very rarely generalised to other areas and are, in fact, very closely related to the specific training."

It is certainly unhelpful, and probably wrong, therefore, to talk about ‘critical thinking skills’. Critical thinking is an important part of most disciplines, and if you ask disciplinary experts to describe what they mean by critical thinking, you may well find considerable similarities in the responses of mathematicians and historians. The temptation is then to think that they are describing the same thing, but they are not.

The same is true for creativity. Creativity is not a single thing, but in fact a whole collection of similar, but different, processes. Creativity in mathematics is not the same as creativity in visual art. If a student decides to be creative in mathematics by deciding that 2 + 2 = 3, that is not being creative, it is just silly since the student is no longer doing mathematics…Creativity involves being at the edge of a field but still being within it.

Similar arguments can be made for other ‘21 st Century Skills’ such as problem-solving, communication and learning how to learn. There is some evidence that students who learn to work well with others in one setting may be more effective doing so in other settings, so some transfer is definitely possible. However, the really important message from the research in this area is that if you want students to be creative in mathematics you have to teach this in mathematics classrooms. If you want students to think critically in history, you have to teach this in history.

How should creativity be taught in schools?

Rather than thinking about creativity as something that can be taught as a generic skill, or taught only in the so-called ‘creative subjects’, Wiliam suggests that schools should use it as a “tool for auditing the breadth of the curriculum being offered in each discipline or subject”. This means ensuring that all subjects are taught in what Guy Claxton calls an epistemically broad way. So rather than teaching history “as if it is about fact and dates, it should be taught as an epistemic apprenticeship into the discipline of history involving facts and dates and understanding bias in historical sources and chronology and cause and effect”.

Considering how contested is the question of what and how to teach school children, it is remarkable how broad is the consensus about the indispensability of the disciplines – each with its own structure and rules, language and logic, perspectives and habits-of-mind. Indeed, even Howard Gardiner, in a recent piece entitled “re-imagining learning” which, as the title promises, is highly critical of traditional school models and teaching methods , is clear about the limits of that re-imagining:

“Mastering disciplines, learning to communicate effectively, engaging civilly in discussion and argument – these have been, and should remain, at the forefront of all education. The ancients talked about the importance of understanding what is true (and what is not); what is beautiful (and what is not worth lingering over); and what is good (in terms of being a worthy person, worker and citizen). These educational goals should be perennial”

It is worth dwelling on this briefly. Because in that first statement – about mastering disciplines, learning to communicate effectively, engaging civilly in discussion and argument – Gardiner captures the essence of the Trivium – the three arts of ‘grammar’, ‘rhetoric’ and ‘dialectics’ that Martin Robinson FRSA argues provide the basis for what John Milton once described as “a complete and generous education”. And in the second – about understanding what is true (academics) what is beautiful (aesthetics) and what is good (ethics) – Gardiner encapsulates the essence of what we at the RSA mean when we talk about an education of the “head, hand and heart”.

So. Do schools “kill creativity”?

The short answer is ‘no’, although they certainly can if they forget two important lessons:

First, that if the maximum number of children are to be given the greatest possible chance of realising their creative potential, schools need to provide and rich and broad curriculum that includes the so-called creative subjects that are the visual and performing arts.

And second, that if they are serious about cultivating real creativity across the curriculum, they need to remember that creativity describes a whole collection of similar, but different processes. In other words, they need to understand the central place of the disciplines in education, and take them as their starting point in curriculum design.

The example cited by Robinson is thought-provoking, but it doesn't, in itself, address creativity. Dance is no more creative than writing. It is a medium of expression and as such gives tools to be creative. When the girl in the example found herself at dance school I have no doubt she would have been subjected to rigourous, disciplined training to perfect her plies, her jettes and her pirouettes. Once she had mastered them, I expect she had much more scope to creatively interpret the dances or the music, or to choreograph a new piece. The arts are no more inherently creative than the sciences. We just think of the arts as creative endeavours but creativity is not confined to them.

I'll confine my comments to the opening sentences citing Tom Leuning's arguments:

“True creativity” he argues, “is based on knowledge which in turn is based on literacy”. Our schools, where children develop the literacy skills on which all further learning depends, are therefore not killing creativity, but cultivating it by providing the “foundations young people need to be properly creative.”

1.  "True creativity"? "properly creative"?- anyone who begins and ends any argument with phrases like that needs to examine and justify his concepts .....and the TED talk reveals that Leuning thinks "real creativity" is that which is leads to "making something better", "making something new" - and that these better new things will, for him be practical innovations.  Fair enough, but not the whole story - and one which could go hand in hand with Robinson's arguments - no need to set up these versions of creativity in opposition to each other.

2.  Is all knowledge "based on literacy"? Do the illiterate have no knowledge? 

3. "Our schools, where children develop the literacy skills on which all further learning depends"  - well here we have to question the nature of these "literacy skills" which "our schools" develop. "Our schools" - what and where are they? Some contemporary English schools do indeed help some children develop the kinds of literacy skills which enable them to become enthusiastic readers and writers, collecting, explaining and pursuing knowledge.  Other schools do not - and there are many reasons why some schools do and others do not.  Does "all further learning" really depend on literacy? 

4. "Our schools...... are therefore not killing creativity." That "therefore" springs from a set of unexamined assumptions about what is currently happening in "our" schools.   

Breakthrough ideas - a form of creativity - often emerge from those who have no 'knowledge'. 

I'm sure I'm not the only person who learned literacy at home before starting school, and many widely-acknowledged 'creative people' say they started learning when they left school!

I recall going to the inaugural lecture at 'RSA North' at Dean Clough when Sir Ernest Hall uplifted the audience, with lines like "one moment of inspiration is worth a thousand qualifications".  

I wish The RSA would invest in participative platforms for these kinds of debates rather than relying on channels like the website where an article is written (and promoted in the newsletter 7-8 months after it's published?!) and all Fellows can do is add screened, asynchronous comments. Not particularly creative is it?!

One of the key features of Ken Robinson's argument is that the standardisation and 'industrialisation' of the British schools system (and it's the same in Australia) kills creativity and stifles individual creativity - artistic and all other forms of creative thinking and creative expression. 

Ken is not just advocating for greater priority being given to the visual and performing arts, although he is a strong advocate for the arts. 

However, there is something to be said for 'traditional learning disciplines like reading, writing, grammar and spelling'. For example, it would be more respectful if the article, throughout, had the correct spelling for Howard Gardner!

More seriously, another question that is worthy of debate is whether The RSA - in its relationship with the RSA Fellowship - encourages creativity (if so, what type of creativity?) or kills creativity?  

Plato said something along these lines: “I would teach children music, physics, and philosophy; but most importantly music, for the patterns in music and all the arts are the keys to learning”.

Good analytical thinking, in scientific terms at least, is quite different from insightful thinking, where something 'pops into your head', often whilst in a state of relaxed cognition & undertaking autonomic stage psychomotor activities. These 'aha' moments are the result of new neural connections; they are new thought 'created in the mind' for the first time as new synaptic connection has taken place. 

One thing is broadly agreed by the literature around this, and it is that an examination is a totally inappropriate evaluation metric, due to time constraints and emotional understandings. So therefore, unless we evaluate learner performance to take account of this, how can we argue for or against? 

Another wonderful insight can be found by looking at alternative subjects and the commentaries coming from their potential employers. Sense of initiative? Common Sense? Without curiosity and a willingness to see beyond the obvious, how will our learners ever respond?

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I still remember my own personal essay that I wrote decades ago during my college admissions process. My essay focused on movies and how movies were a conduit of curiosity. It was also about the death of my father and how movies, in part, had provided a common ground for us—a connection. Although my essay, of course, was not the sole determining factor in my admission, it’s a predominant memory from that time of my life. To this day, I feel it had a persuasive effect on my admittance.

In fact, now looking back, I can’t recall my grade point average or my class rank or the final grade that my English teacher gave me on my literary analysis of Heart of Darkness. Even my exact SAT score, back then a real measure of academic aptitude, remains fuzzy to me all these years later, “shaded in wistful half-lights,” as described by Norman Maclean. I can, however, remember nearly every sentence, if not quite every word, of the personal essay I submitted to my first-choice college, which has undoubtedly, for me, over the years remained one of the most important pieces of writing I have ever produced.

The personal essay is an enduring literary genre and an art form that provides often-challenging material in English classes. In my Advanced Placement Language and Composition course, we frequently read works from an array of authors from various eras, including Michel de Montaigne, Virginia Woolf, E. B. White, Joan Didion, André Aciman, Brian Doyle, Dr. Oliver Sacks. These writers function as exemplars for my students to both analyze and model not only for their rhetorical value but also for their stylistic technique and philosophical ruminations.

Power of Personalization

One of the most predominant rhetorical strategies we recognize in these texts is personalization. And so Woolf’s “The Death of the Moth” has impacted my students throughout the years with its frank depiction of psychological tension, addressing philosophical themes on an existential level that never fail to capture their attention—so much so, that a group of students painted a mural on the wall outside my classroom, a visual interpretation of Woolf’s essay that they titled Memento Mori .

The candor and intimacy of Dr. Oliver Sacks’s depiction of his final days before his death from cancer have engendered numerous touching and insightful comments from my students during our Socratic seminars analyzing his almost unendurably moving personal essay, “My Periodic Table.” 

Students respond viscerally, it seems, to the personal. Sadly, many students have been touched by some of the same tragic subject matter that we analyze through these texts. During our seminars and journal assignments, my students have revealed their own personal connections to some of the personal essays we read in class, connecting, I think, to the shared experiences that we have all had throughout human history. 

Our students often find themselves facing a vortex of standardized tests, AP exams, and benchmarks throughout the school year, which often emphasize the formulaic. The active process of personal choice on topic and subject seems lost. So often my students ask me questions when writing an essay, seeking a particular answer, as if literary analysis were calculus. Missing is the creativity, the exploration of writing free from academic constraints like rubrics and scoring guides. Writer-editor Steve Moyer asserts in  Edsitement , “Nuanced thought... requires a greater gestation period than the nearly instant gratification made possible on Twitter.” I have witnessed this impatience from my own students.

There can be a restlessness in the writing process, a hesitancy for revision or drafting. Personal essays require self-reflection and a free-flowing freedom from rigid form that my students embrace in a way that they don’t with an argument or research-based essay. On more than one occasion during parent-teacher conferences, I have had parents tell me that their child used to love creative writing, but somewhere along the way, the rigor of school seemed to have killed it.

Personal essays, then, restore that creativity, since they encourage a freedom from form. Students can experiment with style and figurative language and syntax in ways that the traditional academic five-paragraph essay often thwarts.

Personal essays also allow teachers to really get to know our students, too. The inherent intimacy of a personal essay, the connection between the writer and the reader—in this case, a student and a teacher—provides insight into the concerns, the dreams, the emotions of our students in addition to allowing us to assess how they exercise their compositional skills, including imagery, syntax, diction, and figurative language. Here, then, a teacher has the best of both worlds. We’re able to both connect to our students on an emotional level and evaluate their learning on an academic level. Personal essays also serve as an emotional outlet. 

There seems to be a common assumption that personal essays for high school students serve only the college application process, so the process begins during their senior year. Personal writing, however, should occur throughout a student’s academic experience. The narrative essays that most elementary school students encounter evolve into the more ruminative, philosophical, and reflective personal writing they will encounter during their senior year from many of Common App essay prompts.

Many teachers implement journal writing in their classrooms that provides a firm foundation for the type of personal writing that the college admissions essay requires. In my own class of juniors, the last assignment we complete for the year is a personal essay. My intent is to help prepare them for the college essay they will write, hopefully, during the summer so that they will have a solid draft before the application process begins. 

Teaching our students this strategy in their own writing benefits them in their futures, not only for the imminent college application process but also for job interviews. For example, I was mentoring a student, a senior who had no desire to go to college, about the job interview process he would soon face after graduation. We rehearsed and practiced the types of questions he might encounter from a future employer. I encouraged him to remember the personal details of his experience, personalizing everything in a way that would allow him to ideally stand out as a job candidate.

Through personal essay writing, my overarching, grand ambition is to instill in my students ultimately a love of reflection, looking back on their experience, reminiscing on significant memories that linger, carefully considering the seemingly little moments that, only upon reflection, have an enormous impact on us.

How to Write a Creative Essay: Your Fresh Guide

What Is a Creative Essay

Creative essay is a form of writing that combines elements of fiction, personal experience, and imagination.

Do you ever want to let your imagination loose in your school essays? Creative writing lets you do just that. It allows you to invent characters, places, and stories that might not exist in real life. This type of writing encourages you to play with words, structure, and style to stir emotions, provoke thoughts, or simply entertain your readers.

Unlike more formal writing like journalism or academic essays, creative writing is all about expressing yourself artistically. It gives you the freedom to showcase your personality through characters, stories, and plots that you create.

In this guide, our college essay writer will walk you through everything you need to know, from picking a great topic to putting your ideas down on paper. You'll find examples of creative essays, a template to help you organize your thoughts, and tips on how to make your writing more vivid and impactful.

How to Write a Creative Essay in 6 Steps

Let's go through the key steps for writing a creative essay. By breaking down the process into manageable parts, you'll find it more straightforward to develop engaging ideas and structure your essay effectively.

Meanwhile, check out our special article on how to write in cursive .

Write Freely

When you start writing, whether it's for essays or stories, it's best to sit down and jot down your first thoughts. Freewriting is a common technique among writers. It helps you start thinking and brainstorming ideas.

Freewriting does two main things:

• It keeps your ideas flowing so you don't forget any good ones.
• It improves your ability to write continuously for longer periods.

For essays, you can begin by writing the topic in the center of a page and then creating a mind map with any relevant ideas that come to mind. This can include different aspects of the topic you want to cover and examples or quotes you've come across.

Remember, this brainstorming session shouldn't take too long. Set a timer for about ten minutes, play your favorite music, and let your ideas flow naturally. This initial step is all about getting your thoughts out there without overthinking it.

Tell the Story in Three Parts

In storytelling, we often use a three-part structure: Setup, Confrontation, and Resolution. This approach is widely used in writing, movies, and TV shows. Unlike the acts in a play, these parts flow into each other seamlessly.

• Setup - Introduces the characters, their relationships, and the world they live in. Early on, there's usually an event called an 'inciting incident' (often around 19 minutes into a film) that sets the story in motion. The main character faces challenges and makes decisions that shape the rest of the narrative.
• Confrontation - The central problem emerges from the inciting incident, and the main character strives to resolve it. They encounter obstacles that test their abilities and resolve. For instance, in a detective story, this phase involves the detective uncovering clues and facing setbacks before reaching a breakthrough.
• Resolution - The story reaches its peak as the main conflict is confronted and resolved. Loose ends are tied up, and the characters' journeys conclude, leaving a sense of closure.

This structure helps writers build engaging narratives that keep audiences invested in the characters' journeys from start to finish.

Start with a Hook

In creative writing, it's often recommended to start with an exciting beginning. One good way is to begin with a 'conversation,' jumping straight into a lively talk to grab the reader's interest right away. For example, in a spy thriller, instead of easing into the story, the writer might open with agents arguing about a secret mission, setting the stage for suspense and excitement. The story could then unfold with more dialogue revealing the characters' motives and actions.

This method also works in essays, especially for certain topics. For instance, if you were writing about the ethical issues of cloning, rather than starting with a slow introduction to different viewpoints, you could begin with a conversation between scientists debating the consequences of cloning animals. Showing different opinions and ethical dilemmas through dialogue could engage readers and lead them into the broader discussion of bioethics and scientific advancements. This approach may not follow the usual essay structure, but it can make your writing more engaging and thought-provoking.

Add Rich Details

To keep your reader engaged, add vivid details about settings and locations, much like creative writers do. Essays can become dull if they only focus on academic concepts, but you can make them more captivating by including descriptive details.

While it can be challenging in essays with strict word limits or those focused on scientific topics, you can certainly incorporate relevant details in subjects like humanities, literature, theater, or history. For example, when analyzing a novel by Jane Austen, you might explore how societal expectations of the time shaped her portrayal of female characters.

By including these extra details and snippets of information, you not only maintain reader interest but also demonstrate your depth of understanding and independent study. This approach can impress your reader and potentially enhance your academic performance.

End Clearly

In creative writing, ambiguity can spark debate, but in essays, clarity is key. Unlike creative writing, in which open endings can be intriguing, essays require a clear conclusion.

Always ensure your essay concludes definitively. This shows your examiner what you've learned and your final answer to the essay question. Unlike creative writing, your goal is to demonstrate understanding and reach a clear conclusion to earn marks.

Make sure your conclusion is straightforward and easy to locate. With many essays to assess, clarity helps your teacher quickly identify your final thoughts. Avoid ambiguity or vague language, which can frustrate readers, including your examiner.

Revise and Improve

Most writers don't nail it on the first try. Editing is crucial, especially when trimming down your word count. It can be tough to cut out sections you've crafted carefully.

After completing your first draft, read through it critically. Consider the order of your points and ensure everything makes sense. With modern technology, editing is easier—you can rearrange sections by copying and pasting and refining your wording for smooth transitions. Once you've made these edits, give your essay a final read-through to polish the wording. Don't overlook proofreading to catch any spelling or grammar mistakes.

Outline for Creative Writing Essay

Here is an outline that will help you structure your creative writing essay, whether it's a poem, a personal essay, a short story, or a speech.

Types of Creative Essays 

Creative writing comes in many forms, each a great way to tell stories and express yourself. Here are 5 main types:

• Poetry uses short, powerful words to describe feelings, thoughts, and experiences. It can rhyme and have a beat or be more free-flowing. Poets play with language to create strong emotions and ideas, capturing moments in special ways.
• Personal essays mix memories, reflections, and stories to explore a person's experiences and what they learned. Unlike school essays, they focus on the writer's unique voice, using stories and thoughts to tell a narrative. They can be about almost anything, giving readers a glimpse into the writer's mind and feelings with the goal of connecting through shared experiences.
• Short stories can be very short or complete stories, but they have a word limit. This challenges writers to create interesting characters, plots, and settings using concise storytelling. Short stories come in all sorts of genres, like realistic fiction or fantasy, and aim to build suspense and give a satisfying ending in a short space.
• Novels are longer fictional works with complex characters, plots, and settings. They can be literary fiction, science fiction, romance, mysteries, or anything else, offering in-depth stories that unfold over many chapters. Writing novels requires planning and a strong understanding of storytelling to keep readers engaged with vivid worlds and compelling narratives.
• Speeches are written to be spoken aloud, with the goal of informing, inspiring, persuading, or entertaining listeners. They can be formal addresses or informal talks and use special writing techniques along with storytelling elements. Speechwriting is about crafting messages that resonate with listeners' emotions and minds, using stories and anecdotes to capture their attention and hold their interest.

20 Creative Essay Topics 

Before putting yourself into creative essay writing, you should pick among the creative writing essay topics that you will be talking about. Here, our paper writer prepared some fresh ideas to make your choice easier:

• Write about a time you overcame a challenge. What did you learn from the experience?
• Imagine you can talk to animals. What would you ask your pet?
• Describe a place that brings back special memories. What makes it so special?
• Create a story about a forgotten object. Where did it come from? Who used it?
• Write a letter to your future self. What are your hopes and dreams?
• If you could have any superpower, what would it be? Why?
• Imagine a world without technology. How would your life be different?
• What is the most important lesson you've learned in life so far?
• Describe a dream you'll never forget. What do you think it means?
• Write a story about a character who is very different from you.
• What historical figure do you find most interesting? Why?
• Create a dialogue between two unlikely characters.
• Imagine you could travel anywhere in the universe. Where would you go? Why?
• Write a story about a robot who wants to be human.
• What does friendship mean to you?
• Describe a work of art that you find moving. Why does it affect you?
• What is your favorite thing about nature? Why?
• Imagine you are invisible for a day. What would you do?
• Write a story about a creature from myth or legend.
• What do you think the future holds for humanity?

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Example of a Creative Essay

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Wrapping Up

We hope you now understand what a creative essay is and how to write one. Some people find writing creative essays easier than others. By applying the tips mentioned above, you should be well-equipped to create work that you're proud of.

If you need extra guidance, consider working with our expert coursework writers . They have developed numerous academic essays with professionalism. Place an order today and experience our dedication firsthand!

Are You Short on Creative Writing Topics?

Whether you need a compelling personal statement, a thought-provoking argumentative essay, or a captivating narrative, we've got you covered.

If you feel like some questions were left unanswered, don't you feel disappointed just yet! Our dissertation writers for hire compiled the most frequently asked question on creative essay writing, so take a look for additional information:

What Are the 7 Types of Creative Writing?

What are the 5 c's of creative writing, is creative writing a skill.

is an expert in nursing and healthcare, with a strong background in history, law, and literature. Holding advanced degrees in nursing and public health, his analytical approach and comprehensive knowledge help students navigate complex topics. On EssayPro blog, Adam provides insightful articles on everything from historical analysis to the intricacies of healthcare policies. In his downtime, he enjoys historical documentaries and volunteering at local clinics.

• Added new examples, topics and FAQs
• Added new writing steps and an outline
• 7 Techniques from Creative Writing You Can Use to Improve Your Essays. (2014, June 21). Oxford Royale Academy. https://www.oxford-royale.com/articles/techniques-creative-writing-improve-essays/  
• (2023). Oxfordsummercourses.com. https://oxfordsummercourses.com/articles/creative-writing-techniques-to-improve-your-essays/  

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Essay Samples on Creativity

As always, it is easier to say than to do, especially if you have to pen an essay that describes being creative or what forces at play make students succeed, or what kind of secret tricks are used by musicians, artists, or athletes to achieve their great results. It does take hours of hard work, yet being creative is an important factor that is studied by most college professors as they aim to inspire students for thinking outside the box. Just remember about Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and the other famous personalities that have reached success thanks to their creativity. As a small contribution, we recommend you to look at our creativity essay examples that will guide you through this particular task and will boost your brain as you write.

What Does Creativity Mean to You

Creativity, an intricate tapestry of imagination and innovation, holds a unique significance for each individual. It is a concept that transcends the boundaries of convention, sparking curiosity and igniting the flames of inspiration. In this essay, we embark on a journey to unearth the meaning...

Discussion on the Relationship Between Intelligence and Creativity

The relationship between intelligence and creativity has been subjected to research for many years. Unfortunately, there is yet no consensus on how these constructs are related. The connection between intelligence and creativity is that they are functions of the brain that handle data to determine...

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Do Schools Kill Creativity: the Issues of Music Education

In the TEDx video entitled, 'Do schools kill creativity?' Sir Ken Robinson discusses what he believes to be the main problem with our education system, providing a series of funny anecdotes and facts appropriate for his argument. After watching this video about 'Do schools kill...

Creative and Critical Thinking: Combining the Achievements of Thought

Creative, one word that can be interpreted in many ways whether in thoughts which is include ways of thinking and actions and also in verbal form. Critical, on the other side refers to the ability to analyse information objectively and make a reasoned judgment. It...

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Culture, Art and Creativity: the Way They Are Related

Art is a reflection of your thinking, your ideas, and your surroundings, the artist adopts his or her surroundings and then by using their imagination, outside thinking and their perspective they present a new face of it in front of the world. Art and creativity...

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The System Of Education: If I Could Change The World

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The Role of Creative Industries in the United Kingdom

In this essay I will go over and talk about the creative industries and the role they play in the United Kingdom, I will look at the history and the development of the Creative Industries and their sectors. I will then look at the wider...

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Comparing The Pros And Cons Of Books And Movies

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Evolution Of The Concept Of Auteur Theory

Auteur Theory is the concept that the director of a film is seen as the major creative force or author of a film more than what the writer of the screenplay is (The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica 2019). Instead of the plotline conveying the message...

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Comparative Analysis of Spike Lee and Yoky Matsuoka

Shelton Jackson Lee popularly known as Spike Lee was born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1957. Spike Lee came from artistic, education-grounded background; his father- Bill Lee was a jazz composer, and his mother, a schoolteacher. He majored in communications at Atlanta’s Morehouse College, where he...

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The UNESCO's Efforts in the Department of Art Education

This paper was written as a resource document to state and prove that the South African department of education has implemented UNESCO’s recommendations for arts education in the foundation phase curriculum. In this writing there are various sources to state and support why I agree...

• Department of Education
• South Africa

Uses of the Cartoon Illustration Style

Abstract This essay explores beloved and widely used cartoon illustration style. The paper depicts history of drawn cartoon style that is used for book illustrations and further evolution of this art that developed into animated movies using researches of Thomas Milton Kemnitz (1973) and Maureen...

What the Art of Origami Means to Me

“Brandon, don’t destroy paper. If you’re bored, get reading,” My mom frowned at the pile of shredded paper on the floor. I wanted to protest, but I knew, like my friends, she would dismiss my new hobby. At first glance, Origami—an ancient Japanese art form...

The Wisdom of Creating Art: Origami

Art is a skill acquired through experience, study or observation and it can also be the branch of coming up with ideas and gaining knowledge. In addition, art is another way of expressing how a person feels about something through an artwork. Art is not...

The Possibility of Doubling a Cube with Origami

Abstract I was first introduced to origami during a series of art and craft classes in kindergarten. Although I stopped doing it as a hobby as the years passed by, I got back into it during one of my CAS experiences, where I made origami...

The Sister Act and Its Comparison to the Broadway Version

Within the production of ‘Sister Act’ performed by University Centre Weston, I received the secondary role of Assistant Choreographer as well as ‘Sister Mary Lazarus’. Before the rehearsals began, I researched the role of a Choreographer to help with the creative process. On a theoretic...

• Dance Performance Review

The Process of Creation of Logos in Graphic Design

The graphic design pathway project revolves around the creation and rebranding of an existing business’ logo. Firstly, a research study was done various aspects and areas in graphic design, throughout the study a research book was compiled. In chapter one of my studies I explored...

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Understanding Relationship Between Time-Pressure and Creativity

Introduction The metaphorical lightbulb that illuminates when a person has a break through creative idea, rarely happens under pressure. Take Isaak Newton, one of the most influential scientists of all time, as an example. As a crucial figure in the scientific revolution, Newton had made...

• Isaac Newton

Depiction of Creativity and Innovation in Business Organizations

It is useful to depict creativity in organizations as intricate, social, political and specialized frameworks. To recognize inventive outlets and execution a lot of systems, the administration in business must have what it takes to acknowledge information at the person, group and business levels all...

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Innovative Associations and Process of Organizational Creativity

It is useful to depict innovative associations as intricate, social, political and specialized frameworks. To recognize inventive outlets and execution a lot of systems, the administration in associations must have what it takes to acknowledge information at the person, group and association levels all the...

Sewing As A Way To Express My Creativity

Creation twinkles with coolness, sparkling in blues and greens. Innovation sparks in metallic tones, bursting with hues of golds and silvers. Renovation is lit with swirls of a warm palette, some red, some yellow. Since I was a child, I’ve always had a deeply ingrained...

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The Theories Of Creativity, Innovation, And Food Entrepreneurship

According to Ward, behind the existed creativity there are several experiments, which include trial and error also from research and observation. To create a big thing we have to put a big effort in the process, therefore, there is no instant result and it goes...

Visual Stimuli And Divergent Thinking In The Mixing Process

Introduction Mixing is an expertly intuitive practice – that activates neural responses that transmit multimodal perceptions, especially audio-visual perception – whereby a mixing engineer is tasked to solve technical disparities surrounding an input signals frequency response, amplitude and spatial image, as well as make creative...

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Best topics on Creativity

1. What Does Creativity Mean to You

2. Discussion on the Relationship Between Intelligence and Creativity

3. Do Schools Kill Creativity: the Issues of Music Education

4. Creative and Critical Thinking: Combining the Achievements of Thought

5. Culture, Art and Creativity: the Way They Are Related

6. The System Of Education: If I Could Change The World

7. The Role of Creative Industries in the United Kingdom

8. Comparing The Pros And Cons Of Books And Movies

9. Evolution Of The Concept Of Auteur Theory

10. Comparative Analysis of Spike Lee and Yoky Matsuoka

11. The UNESCO’s Efforts in the Department of Art Education

12. Uses of the Cartoon Illustration Style

13. What the Art of Origami Means to Me

14. The Wisdom of Creating Art: Origami

15. The Possibility of Doubling a Cube with Origami

• Frida Kahlo
• Jean-Michel Basquiat
• Ansel Adams
• Salvador Dali
• Vincent Van Gogh
• Postmodernism

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June 27, 2024

The Importance of Design Thinking in Education: Sparking Creativity in Children

The Creativity Crisis

Every generation has fond memories of how much better it was when they were kids. Just 40 short years ago, children didn’t come home from playing until the street lights came on. They drank from the water hose, and an advertisement at 10:00 pm reminded parents to make sure their children were home. Kids played make-believe with friends in the sandbox, built forts, and creatively figured out how to not be bored, all while trying not to get into too much trouble.

Today’s youth are very different. Raised in a world of on-demand video, cell phones, and non-stop digital entertainment, kids have little opportunity to be bored. Without boredom, creativity is diminished. However, in today’s rapidly evolving world, creativity is no longer just a desirable skill; it is essential. Many educators and parents are increasingly concerned that children are not developing their creative potential either in school or during play. This deficiency can be attributed to an overly structured educational system and the pervasive influence of instant gratification culture. 

Recent research indicates a worrying decline in children’s creativity. A study by Kyung Hee Kim found that while IQ scores have been rising, creativity scores have been decreasing since the 1990s. This phenomenon, known as the “creativity crisis,” can be partly attributed to the structured nature of modern education systems, which often prioritize standardized testing over creative exploration.

Children today spend less time in unstructured play, which is crucial for developing creativity. Instead, they are often engaged with digital devices that provide constant stimulation and limit opportunities for imaginative thinking. To address this issue, integrating design thinking into education can be a powerful solution.

Understanding Design Thinking

Design thinking is a problem-solving approach that involves empathizing with users, defining problems, ideating, prototyping, and testing. This process, originally developed for the design and business sectors, has been increasingly recognized for its potential in education. Encouraging students to think like designers fosters creativity, critical thinking, and collaboration.

How Design Thinking Can Help with the Creativity Crisis

• Fostering Empathy and Understanding: The first stage in design thinking is empathy. Children learn to understand the needs and perspectives of others, which enhances their emotional intelligence and creativity. By empathizing with end-users, they can develop more innovative and relative solutions to problems.
• Encouraging Problem Definition and Exploration: Design thinking teaches children to define problems clearly. This process involves exploring various aspects of a problem and asking critical questions. The define stage helps children develop a deeper understanding of issues and encourages them to think critically.
• Promoting Ideation and Brainstorming: In the ideation stage, children are encouraged to brainstorm multiple solutions without the fear of failure . This stage is vital for creativity as it allows children to explore a wide range of ideas and approaches without fear of criticism or reproach.
• Hands-On Prototyping and Experimentation: The prototyping stage involves creating tangible representations of ideas. This hands-on approach helps children learn by doing, which is essential for developing creative problem-solving skills. Experimentation and iteration are key components, teaching children that failure is part of the learning process.
• Iterative Testing and Feedback: Testing is the final stage in design thinking. This stage involves testing prototypes and gathering feedback from multiple stakeholders and potential end users. This iterative process helps children refine their ideas and learn from their mistakes, fostering resilience and adaptability.

Evidence of Effectiveness

Several studies highlight the benefits of design thinking in education. For instance, a 2010 study by Carroll et al. found that incorporating design thinking into the curriculum improved students’ engagement, collaboration, and problem-solving skills. Another study, this one by Henriksen et al ., demonstrated that design thinking projects enhanced students’ creative confidence and ability to innovate.

Additionally, research by Rauth et al. showed that students who participated in design thinking workshops exhibited greater creativity and critical thinking abilities compared to those who did not participate. These findings underscore the potential of design thinking to reinvigorate creativity in children.

Practical Implementation

To effectively integrate design thinking into education, schools and educators can:

• Encourage Interdisciplinary Projects: Design thinking works best when applied to real-world problems that require knowledge from various disciplines. Interdisciplinary projects help students see the connections between different subjects and develop a more holistic understanding of issues.
• Provide Time for Unstructured Play: Allowing children time for unstructured play is crucial for fostering creativity. Schools can create maker spaces or innovation labs where students can experiment with materials and ideas without the confines of a traditional classroom setting.
• Train Teachers in Design Thinking: Educators need to be trained in design thinking principles and practices. Professional development programs can equip teachers with the skills and knowledge to effectively implement design thinking in their classrooms. Design thinking is not just for STEM or elective courses. It can be integrated into lessons in core content areas, and is a great tool for encouraging students to develop relevant and meaningful connections to content beyond test preparation.
• Incorporate Technology Mindfully: While technology can be a powerful tool for learning, it should be used with educated intentionality to enhance creativity. Educators should look for digital tools that support design thinking, such as 3D modeling software or collaborative platforms.

Creating a Culture of Creativity, Together

In a world where creative problem-solving is increasingly important, design thinking offers a valuable approach to reinvigorating children’s creative potential. By fostering empathy, critical thinking, and hands-on experimentation, design thinking can help address the creativity crisis in education. It encourages children to explore, innovate, and develop the skills needed to thrive in the 21st century. As educators and parents, it is our responsibility to provide opportunities for children to unleash their creativity and become the problem-solvers of tomorrow.

Learn more about design thinking with our training and development resources . 

Also, read our previous blog on free STEM resources , including design thinking lessons.

And if you would like to learn more about resources and programs to integrate design thinking into your school, classroom or homeschool group, please contact us at [email protected] .

Kim Reynolds

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Home — Essay Samples — Education — Education System — How Education Kills Creativity In Students

How Education Kills Creativity in Students

• Categories: Creativity Education System

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Words: 996 |

Published: Dec 16, 2021

Words: 996 | Pages: 2 | 5 min read

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Unsolved dilemma: do schools kill creativity, the education’s entire system needs to be redone.

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Troy students show creativity in Juneteenth arts & essay contest

Troy students create juneteenth artwork.

Although Juneteenth is part of our country’s history, you won’t find it in every classroom’s curriculum.

So teachers in the Troy City School District got creative and made it fun for students with an arts & essay contest.

The winner was a fourth grader who wrote “Inside A Life of a Slave.”

The following is an excerpt from that poem.

Imagine this, you’re at your house, the people come, they chain you up, you try to resist but then you realize they have the will to you.

They put you on a boat, you make a mental note. You see people falling out, people are already withering out. You think I’m going to make it?

But there’s no doubt about it because in your heart, you know, it’s gonna shout it that you are making it. That’s the only thing keeping your soul alive.

This is one of the more than 75 projects submitted this year for Troy school districts’ 2024 Juneteenth Arts & Essay Contest. 

There were 18 winners.

Another one of those winners, Atiqah Umarmukhtar, is working with her teachers on these dolls that are covered in Juneteenth freedom colors.

They are also selling two Juneteenth T-shirts. All the funds from the sales are split and given to the children in the contest.

The contest is one of the initiatives to come from the Troy Teachers Association’s Together We Rise program. Fourth-grade teacher Tina Wilcox and sixth-grade teacher Carrie Dwyer said the district needed this program.

Learn more how the program came together and what it does by watching video of Faith King’s story.

Figurative Language: Enhancing Expression through Creative Words

This essay is about the importance and use of figurative language in writing. It explains how metaphors, similes, personification, hyperbole, imagery, alliteration, onomatopoeia, and symbolism enhance expression by adding depth and vividness to text. By making comparisons, exaggerating, and creating sensory images, figurative language helps convey emotions and complex ideas more effectively. The essay highlights how these techniques make writing more engaging and memorable, showing that mastering figurative language can significantly improve one’s ability to communicate creatively and impactfully.

How it works

Figurative language? It’s like the secret sauce that writers use to spice up their words, making them deeper, more colorful, and downright beautiful. Instead of just stating the facts, it’s all about comparing, exaggerating, and painting pictures with words that go beyond what you see on the surface.

Take metaphors, for instance. They’re like magic tricks with words. When you say “time is a thief,” you’re not saying time literally steals stuff. It’s more about how time sneaks away from us, snatching moments we wish we had longer.

And then there’s similes—like “as brave as a lion.” It’s a cool way to say someone’s courage is as strong as that fearless king of the jungle.

Personification? That’s when you give human traits to things that aren’t human. Imagine “the wind whispered through the trees.” The wind doesn’t really talk, but saying it whispers makes you feel like you’re there, hearing its secrets. It makes the scene come alive.

Now, hyperbole? That’s when you exaggerate big time to make a point. Like saying “I’m so hungry I could eat a horse.” Nobody’s really eating a horse, but it shows how starving you feel. Or “I’ve told you a million times!”—okay, maybe not a million, but you’re trying to say you’ve said it a bunch and they still don’t get it.

And imagery? That’s the good stuff that paints pictures in your mind. Like “the golden sun dipped below the horizon, casting a warm, orange glow over the sea.” You can see it, right? It’s not just describing; it’s making you feel the sunset’s warmth and see the colors.

Alliteration’s when words start with the same sound, like “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.” It’s fun to say and makes sentences sing. Then there’s onomatopoeia, like “buzz” or “clang”—words that sound just like what they mean. They bring sounds to life, adding a realness to what you’re reading.

Lastly, symbolism? That’s when something stands for more than what it is. Like a dove for peace or a storm for trouble. It’s like a secret code in stories that makes you think about bigger ideas without saying them outright.

Figurative language isn’t just fancy talk. It’s how writers make their words sing and dance, making stories and poems come alive. So next time you read, pay attention to these cool tricks. They’ll show you a whole new world in words, where every sentence is a little masterpiece waiting to be felt and understood.

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College essays that worked and how yours can too.

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CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS - JULY 08: A view of Harvard Yard on the campus of Harvard University on ... [+] July 08, 2020 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology have sued the Trump administration for its decision to strip international college students of their visas if all of their courses are held online. (Photo by Maddie Meyer/Getty Images)

The college essay is a pivotal piece of the college application showcasing your individuality and differentiated outlook to admissions officers. What makes an essay truly shine? Let’s dive into the words behind three standout essays highlighted by university websites and a school newspaper's brand studio so you can get into the right mindset for crafting your own narrative.

Embracing Differences: Finding Strength In Uniqueness

Essay Excerpt: ‘Bra Shopping ’ (Harvard)

Featured by the Harvard Crimson Brand Studio , Orlee's essay recounts a student's humorous and insightful experience of bra shopping with her grandmother, weaving in her unique family dynamics and challenges at her prestigious school.

What Works:

• Humor and Honesty: The student's humor makes the essay enjoyable to read, while her honesty about her challenges adds depth.
• Self-Awareness: She demonstrates a strong sense of self-awareness, embracing her uniqueness rather than trying to fit in.
• Resilience: Her narrative highlights resilience and the ability to find strength in differences.

For Your Essay : To write an essay that embraces your uniqueness, start by identifying a quirky or challenging experience that reflects who a key insight into your experience. Think about how this experience has shaped your perspective and character. Use humor and honesty to bring your story to life, and focus on how you have embraced your differences to become stronger and more resilient.

Best High-Yield Savings Accounts Of 2024

Best 5% interest savings accounts of 2024, finding connections: humor and self-reflection.

Essay: ‘Brood X Cicadas ’ (Hamilton College)

As an example on Hamilton's admissions website, Nicholas writes about the cicadas swarming his hometown every 17 years and draws a parallel between their emergence and his own transition to college life. He uses humor and self-reflection to create a relatable and engaging narrative.

• Humor: Nicholas uses humor to make his essay entertaining and memorable. His witty comparisons between himself and cicadas add a unique twist.
• Self-Reflection: By comparing his life to the cicadas’, he reflects on his own growth and readiness for change.
• Relatability: His narrative about facing new experiences and challenges resonates with readers who have undergone similar transitions.

For Your Essay: To infuse humor and self-reflection into your essay, start by identifying an ordinary experience or object and think about how it relates to your life. Write down funny or insightful observations about this connection. Use humor to make your essay more engaging, but ensure it still conveys meaningful self-reflection. This balance can make your essay both entertaining and profound.

Persistence and Multicultural Identity: Life Lessons From Tortilla Making

Essay: ‘ Facing The Hot Griddle ’ (Johns Hopkins University)

In this essay published by Hopkins Insider, Rocio uses the process of making tortillas to explore her multicultural identity and the challenges she has faced. Her story beautifully weaves together her Guatemalan heritage and her experiences growing up in the United States.

• Metaphor and Symbolism: The process of making tortillas becomes a powerful metaphor for the student’s journey and struggles. The symbolism of the masa harina and water mixing parallels her blending of cultural identities.
• Personal Growth: The essay highlights her perseverance and adaptability, qualities that are crucial for success in college.
• Cultural Insight: She provides a rich, personal insight into her multicultural background, making her story unique and compelling.

For Your Essay: To write an essay that explores your identity through a metaphor, start by thinking about an activity or tradition that holds significant meaning for you. Consider how this activity relates to your life experiences and personal growth. Use detailed descriptions to bring the activity to life and draw connections between the process and your own journey. Reflect on the lessons you've learned and how they've shaped your identity.

A winning college essay isn’t simply about parading your best accomplishment or dramatizing your challenges. It’s not a contest for which student is the most original or entertaining. Rather, the essay is a chance for you to showcase your authenticity, passion, resilience, social awareness, and intellectual vitality . By sharing genuine stories and insights, you can create an essay that resonates with admissions committees and highlights your unique qualities.

For you to have the best possible essay, mindset is key. Here’s how to get into the zone:

• Reflect Deeply: Spend time thinking about your experiences, challenges, and passions. Journaling can help you uncover deep insights.
• Discuss and Share: Talking about your stories with friends, family, or mentors can provide new perspectives and emotional clarity.
• Immerse Yourself: Engage in activities that you are passionate about to reignite the feelings and memories associated with them.
• Draft Freely: Don’t worry about perfection on the first try. Write freely and honestly, then refine your narrative.

The secret to a standout college essay lies in its authenticity, depth, and emotional resonance. By learning from these successful examples and getting into the right mindset, you can craft an essay that not only stands out but also provides a meaningful insight into who you are. Remember, your essay is your story—make it a piece of writing that you will always be proud of.

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Revealed: Harvard Business School’s New MBA Essays For Applicants

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Harvard Business School’s Baker Library.

With just 10 weeks before its first application deadline on Sept. 4th, Harvard Business School today (June 25) revealed a newly revised application for MBA candidates, including a new set of three short essays along with a refresh on how it will evaluate applicants for future classes.

The new prompts?

Business-Minded Essay : Please reflect on how your experiences have influenced your career choices and aspirations and the impact you will have on the businesses, organizations, and communities you plan to serve. (up to 300 words)

Leadership-Focused Essay : What experiences have shaped who you are, how you invest in others, and what kind of leader you want to become? (up to 250 words)

Growth-Oriented Essay : Curiosity can be seen in many ways. Please share an example of how you have demonstrated curiosity and how that has influenced your growth. (up to 250 words)

NEW HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL ESSAYS PUT THROUGH BY NEW MBA ADMISSIONS CHIEF

Eagerly awaited by thousands of prospective students and admission consultants, you can bet that the admissions pages of the HBS website were continually refreshed all morning for a glimpse at the new essay. The Harvard Business School essay prompt for the Class of 2027 was posted at 10:30 a.m. with the opening of the 2024-2025 application online.

This year’s change was put through by Rupal Gadhia , who joined the school as managing director of admissions and financial aid last October. A 2004 Harvard MBA, Gadhia came to the school with no previous admissions experience, having been the global head of marketing for SharkNinja robots.

In explaining the change in a blog post , Gadhia noted that “we have refreshed the criteria on which we evaluate candidates. We are looking for applicants who are business-minded, leadership-focused, and growth-oriented…This is your opportunity to discuss meaningful or formative experiences that are important to you that you haven’t had a chance to fully explore elsewhere in your application…Be authentic, be yourself.”

WHAT HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL IS REALLY LOOKING FOR IN THE NEW ESSAYS

The school added some context to its new criteria for admission, more clearly defining what it means by business-minded, leadership-focused, and growth-oriented.

Business-Minded

We are looking for individuals who are passionate about using business as a force for good – who strive to improve and transform companies, industries, and the world. We are seeking those who are eager to solve today’s biggest problems and shape the future through creative and integrated thinking. Being business-minded is about the interest to help organizations succeed, whether in the private, public, or non-profit sector. This business inclination can be found in individuals with a variety of professional and educational experiences, not just those who come from traditional business backgrounds.

In Your Application: We will look for evidence of your interpersonal skills, quantitative abilities, and the ways in which you plan to create impact through business in the future.

Leadership-Focused

We are looking for individuals who aspire to lead others toward making a difference in the world, and those who recognize that to build and sustain successful organizations, they must develop and nurture diverse teams. Leadership takes many forms in many contexts – you do not have to have a formal leadership role to make a difference. We deliberately create a class that includes different kinds of leaders, from the front-line manager to the startup founder to the behind-the-scenes thought leader.

In Your Application: Your leadership impact may be most evident in extracurriculars, community initiatives, or your professional work.

Growth-Oriented

We are looking for individuals who desire to broaden their perspectives through creative problem solving, active listening, and lively discussion. At HBS you will be surrounded by future leaders from around the world who will make you think more expansively about what impact you might have. Our case and field-based learning methods depend on the active participation of curious students who are excited to listen and learn from faculty and classmates, as well as contribute their own ideas and perspectives.

In Your Application: We will look for the ways in which you have grown, developed, and how you engage with the world around you.

TIGHTER TIMEFRAME FOR ROUND ONE APPLICANTS

The new essay prompts come  nearly two months after candidates to the school’s MBA program would more typically know what was expected of them. Some admission consultants say the delay over the prompt’s release, along with nearly a month’s slow down in releasing application deadlines, is “wildly insensitive” to applicants who will have less time than normal to prepare for the round one deadline of Sept. 4th.

That’s especially true because the most successful applicants to HBS have highly demanding jobs that consume the vast majority of their time. Many candidates go through multiple drafts of their essays to get them as close to perfection as humanly possible. MBA admission consultants are expecting a lot of up-to-the-deadline work this year to help prep candidates for Harvard and other top business schools.

The new application still preserves the post-interview reflection for applicants who are invited to a 30-minute admissions interview. Within 24 hours of the interview, candidates are required to submit a written reflection through the school’s online application system.

REACTION TO THE NEW CHANGE IS MIXED

Early reaction to the change suggests the likelihood of mixed reviews. “This is an uninspired and odd set of questions,” says Sandy Kreisberg, founder of HBSGuru.com and an MBA admissions consultant who closely reads the tea leaves of Harvard’s admissions process. “I don’t know how it’s different from what else do you want us to know about you, frankly,” he adds in a reference to last year’s single essay prompt.

“HBS has certainly moved from the abstract to the concrete,” believes Jeremy Shinewald, founder and CEO of mbaMission, a leading MBA admissions consulting firm. “Some applicants previously felt like they didn’t know where to start and some weren’t sure if they had answered the question, even when they were done. Now, the questions are quite straightforward and all have a cause and effect relationship — one where the applicant discusses the past to reveal the present or future. Smart applicants will understand how to share their experiences and, more importantly, how to relay their values. Some will mistakenly try to whack HBS over the head with stories of their epic feats, but the key isn’t to brag or embellish – the key is to simply create a clear relationship, via narrative, between past experience and true motivations.”

Shinewald found it astonishing that Harvard could not have made the change earlier. “It is, of course, surprising that HBS left applicants on edge until the last minute, all to create very traditional essays,” he adds. “As applicants learn in MBA classrooms, change can be hard and take time. The bottom line here is that these essays are somewhat of an applicant’s dream – they allow the savvy applicant to play to their strengths and draw on their best anecdotes and experiences to create a complete story. Some applicants will lament the absence of a ‘Why HBS?’ prompt, but my guess is that the admissions committee recognized that they would get an almost homogenous collection of essays touting the case method and other well known features. HBS gets some kudos for keeping the focus on the applicant.”

Adds Petia Whitmore of My MBA Path: “I think they reflect one of the traits of this new generation of candidates which is that they don’t handle ambiguity well. So it seems like Harvard had to spell out what they’re looking for way more prescriptively than in the past.”

Some, however, find the new essays a return to the past. “To me, the prompts feel quite regressive, and a return to the more formulaic approach that pervaded MBA applications two decades ago,” believes Justin Marshall, a New York-based MBA admissions consultant. “Because the previous prompt was so open ended, it forced applicants to be introspective and self-aware. You couldn’t just ramble for 900 words; you had to identify themes in your life to show how your personal experiences shaped your values, your leadership style, and your goals. Comparatively, these new prompts are much more paint-by-numbers. Applicants will likely cover the same ground in terms of topic, but there’s very little room for nuance and self-expression. I think it will be harder for applicants with less conventional backgrounds and experiences to differentiate themselves. I’m sure HBS grew tired of reading so many painfully earnest ‘life story’ essays, but I suspect they’ll soon find themselves yearning for essays that have a heartbeat and personality. 250 words just doesn’t allow for that unless you’re a very crafty writer.”

Whatever the case, getting into Harvard’s MBA program is still a daunting exercise. Last year, 1,076 of the 8,264 candidates who applied for admission to Harvard Business School gained admission, an acceptance rate of 13.2%, making HBS the second most selective prestige MBA program in the country after Stanford Graduate School of Business which had an admit rate of 8.4%. Harvard saw a 15.4% drop in MBA applications from the 9,773 it received a year-earlier.

Joint degree applicants for the Harvard Medical School, Harvard School of Dental Medicine, Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Harvard Law School, and Harvard Kennedy School must provide an additional essay: How do you expect the joint degree experience to benefit you on both a professional and a personal level? (up to 400 words)

BIGGEST CHANGE IN HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL ESSAY IN NEARLY A DECADE

Joint degree applicants for the Harvard Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences must provide an additional essay: The MS/MBA Engineering Sciences program is focused on entrepreneurship, design, and innovation. Describe your past experiences in these areas and your reasons for pursuing a program with this focus. (recommended length: 500 words). Applicants will also be able to respond to an optional essay.

In any case, it’s the biggest change in Harvard Business School’s application in nearly a decade. The last time HBS made a major switch, moving to the essay prompt it just eliminated, was in 2016. That change to just one essay with no word limit and a post-interview reflection was made by then admissions chief Dee Leopold.

When Leopold applied to Harvard as an MBA candidate in 1978, she had to write eight essays. Over her years as managing director of admissions, she first cut the essays down to four and then one, making it optional, and finally the one last prompt with a post-interview reflection, saying that applying to HBS should not be a writing contest .

OUR BUSINESS CASUAL PODCAST: The New HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL MBA Application:   Fortuna Admissions’ Caroline Diarte-Edwards and ApplicantLab’s Maria Wich-Vila join P&Q’s John A. Byrne to offer applicant advice on how to answer the new HBS essay prompts

DON’T MISS: 2024-2024 MBA APPLICATION DEADLINES or  HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL WILL NOW UPDATE ITS MBA ESSAY 

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Following last year’s incredible success, we are thrilled to announce the NeurIPS 2024 Creative AI track. We invite research papers and artworks that showcase innovative approaches of artificial intelligence and machine learning in art, design, and creativity. 

Focused on the theme of Ambiguity, this year’s track seeks to highlight the multifaceted and complex challenges brought forth by application of AI to both promote and challenge human creativity. We welcome submissions that: question the use of private and public data; consider new forms of authorship and ownership; challenge notions of ‘real’ and ‘non-real’, as well as human and machine agency; and provide a path forward for redefining and nurturing human creativity in this new age of generative computing. 

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Jean Oh roBot Intelligence Group Carnegie Melon University

Marcelo Coelho Design Intelligence Lab MIT