I doubt I’ll ever forget the challenge my fourth grade teacher presented to our class: Throw a raw egg off a two-story building without breaking it. Our imaginations were aflame with ways to meet this challenge. We discussed and shared ideas with one another. Each student conceptualized and developed a distinct solution to the singular problem of how to keep the egg intact. Some students used copious amounts of foam and packing material. I employed a parachute. Results varied. Some eggs survived, while others splattered. This experiment was the perfect metaphor for problems I’ve faced since—problems which I cannot resolve with easy answers.

Educational models will better serve students by emulating the egg-drop challenge. We should present students with situations for which there are no easy, prepackaged answers. Such situations are opportunities for the inherent genius within each child to surface and perform. Life will present students with myriad challenges. Kids who are now in grade school will someday lock themselves out of their home, try to find a treatment to heal a patient’s body riddled with cancer, design agricultural methods that enhance soil and maximize yield, and parent a child whose behavior no how-to book adequately addresses.

Inherent in each of these scenarios are problems for which there are no easy answers. It is, in fact, the absence of easy answers that ignites our creativity as we seek to confront challenges. Remember how you felt the last time you locked yourself out of your car or home? If you’re like me, your mind wove multiple possibilities for how you might solve the problem before you. Each educational discipline can and should mirror this kind of process: Present a difficult challenge, give students freedom and parameters within which they can address the challenge, assess students—not on the product (Did the egg break?), but rather on the process (To what extent did the student immerse herself and her creativity in the process that preceded the product?).

Educational models like this exist, but are in the minority. Most often, rather than challenging students with processes that at once agitate and nurture their natural learning sensibilities we fetter students’ native curiosity and creativity by first supplying an answer, then testing them on their ability to furnish that precise answer. This educational paradigm is antithetical to the thrill of learning which I and my classmates experienced in our quest to preserve the integrity of an egg. It would have been far easier for my teacher to merely show us how to build “the ultimate egg-dropper” from a design someone else had created. But this would have been akin to thievery on his part to short-circuit our fourth-grade ingenuity. What a gift it was that he didn’t rob us of our creative process.

Tags: creative process, divergent learning, educational reform