Not All Creativity Looks Creative

We talk about creativity in education a lot.

We want students to be creative thinkers. We want classrooms to foster curiosity and experimentation. We encourage teachers to find new approaches, make connections, solve problems, and respond to the learners in front of them.

But there is a question we don't ask often enough:

Are we giving educators the room to be creative themselves?

Educators need room to be creative because teaching itself is creative work. But creativity does not look the same from one educator to another, and the systems we build can either support that creativity or quietly design it out of the work.

After more than thirty years working in education, I have come to believe that teaching is inherently creative work. Not because every teacher needs to design an elaborate project, turn the classroom into a makerspace, or come up with something new every day.

Creativity in teaching can be much quieter than that.

It can be recognizing that yesterday's approach isn't working and trying something different. It can be finding a new way to explain a difficult idea. It can be connecting a lesson to something a student said that morning. It can be changing the pace, reorganizing a group, asking a different question, or noticing a possibility that wasn't part of the original plan.

Sometimes creativity is visible.

Sometimes it looks like good judgment.

And sometimes it looks like simply knowing when to abandon the plan.

Not all creativity looks creative

One of the problems with how we talk about creativity in education is that we often confuse creativity with novelty.

There is an important distinction between creativity as novelty and creativity as useful, purposeful thinking. Something new is not necessarily creative. Something unusual is not necessarily useful. And a teacher doing something differently from the teacher next door is not automatically demonstrating better teaching.

Research on creativity generally recognizes that creativity involves more than generating something novel. Creative ideas also need to be appropriate, useful, or valuable in relation to the problem or context. The OECD, for example, describes creative thinking as generating, evaluating, and improving ideas in ways that can lead to effective and original solutions.

That distinction matters in education.

A teacher who changes an activity simply because it looks more interesting may be doing something new. A teacher who changes an activity because the students need a different way into the concept is exercising professional creativity. These are all creative acts, but they look very different.

The difference is judgment.

Creativity depends on the conditions around it

Research on creative teaching reinforces this idea.

A systematic review by Teresa Cremin and Ana Chappell found that creative pedagogy takes multiple forms. It can involve teaching creatively, teaching for creativity, or both. Their work challenges the idea that there is one particular kind of “creative teaching.”

Other research points to the importance of context. A systematic review of factors influencing teachers' creative teaching found influences at multiple levels, including teachers' beliefs and attitudes, classroom conditions, school environments, and broader educational structures.

That should make us pause.

A 2026 study of 2,335 teachers across 155 secondary schools in Hong Kong found that autonomy was associated with creative pedagogies, but autonomy did not operate as a simple direct cause. Trust and teacher self-efficacy helped explain the relationship. In other words, simply telling teachers, “You have autonomy, go be creative,” isn't enough. The environment has to support their confidence and willingness to act on that autonomy. 

We have to look at the environment we have created for them.

• Do they have time to think?

• Do they have meaningful choices?

• Do they have enough understanding of the purpose to make informed decisions?

• Can they adapt what they have been given to the students in front of them?

• Are they trusted to make professional judgments?

• And perhaps most importantly:

  • What happens when they do something differently from the way we designed it? 

  • What are we doing to create the conditions in which teacher creativity can actually happen?   

    
    

Structure and freedom are not opposites

This is where program design becomes important.

As program directors and people who create programs, products, and professional learning for educators, we face a legitimate challenge.  We need consistency. We need quality. We need to know that an experience is grounded in a clear purpose and that educators have enough support to use it effectively.

But consistency does not have to mean sameness.

A strong design can establish the destination without prescribing every step of the journey. The choice is not necessarily between a completely open-ended experience and a tightly scripted one.

There is a productive space between them.

We can provide structure without removing judgment.

We can provide guidance without eliminating choice.

We can establish a common purpose without insisting that everyone reach it in exactly the same way.

The OECD's work on creativity and critical thinking offers an interesting example. In its international work with schools, teachers were given a shared framework while retaining pedagogical freedom to determine how they would apply it.

That distinction matters.

And this does not mean that fidelity doesn't.

It does.

If we design a program based on particular principles and then everyone uses it in completely different ways, we cannot reasonably determine whether the program worked. We cannot distinguish a problem with the design from a problem with implementation. We cannot know whether the outcomes we see came from the program itself or from the many adaptations made along the way.

Accountability matters. Evidence matters. Consistency matters.

But fidelity is not the same thing as requiring every educator to do everything in exactly the same way.

The more useful question is:

Fidelity to what?

What actually has to remain consistent for the program to accomplish its purpose?

What can be adapted without changing the thing we are trying to evaluate?

That is harder work for program designers. That requires us to understand what actually makes the program work. We need to know what is essential to its purpose and what is simply one way of getting there. 

When the purpose, evidence, and critical elements are clear, educators can spend less energy wondering whether they are doing it “right” and more energy thinking about what their students need.

That, to me, is where educator creativity becomes powerful.

Not because educators are being asked to reinvent the program. Not because evidence and implementation no longer matter. But because the design gives educators something meaningful to work with and enough room to bring their own expertise to the work.

One educator may make a concept come alive through a story. Another may find a connection to something happening in the community. Another may recognize that students need to slow down, talk it through, or approach the idea from an entirely different direction.

The program provides a foundation. The educator brings the expertise to what happens next.

Those aren't deviations from good teaching.

They are part of good teaching.

The educator is part of the design

This has been a through-line in my work for more than thirty years. I have spent much of my career designing programs, professional learning, and experiences for educators, and I have always believed that the educator cannot be separated from the design. The best programs I have been part of were not simply well designed for educators. They were designed with a deep respect for the expertise, judgment, and individuality educators bring to the work.

Too often, the educator is treated as the person who receives the design.

The curriculum is designed. The professional learning is designed. The product is designed. The implementation plan is designed.

Then the educator is expected to use it.

But educators are not simply users of educational design.

They bring experience, knowledge of their students, knowledge of their community, professional judgment, habits of mind, and their own ways of solving problems.

Two educators can use exactly the same resource and create two very different learning experiences.

That isn't necessarily a problem to solve.

Sometimes it is evidence that the design is doing its job.

Connecting to Play-Based Learning 

This idea takes me back to some of my earlier thinking about play-based learning.

One of the things I found compelling about play was not simply that children enjoyed it. It was the role of the adult.

A good play-based environment isn't simply a place where adults step back and let children do whatever they want.

The adult creates conditions.

The adult observes.

The adult notices.

The adult asks questions.

The adult introduces a new possibility when it is useful.

And then the adult pays attention to what happens next.

There is a structure, but the structure does not determine every move.

That same principle applies to educators.

If we design every decision in advance, we may make implementation easier to control. But we can also remove opportunities for educators to think, adapt, and respond.

We may solve the wrong problem.

The creativity we don't see

There is another reason this matters.

We tend to recognize creativity when it produces something visible.

A new lesson.

A beautiful classroom.

A clever project.

An innovative activity.

But some of the most important creative work educators do leaves no artifact behind.

A teacher notices that a student is frustrated and changes the approach.

A teacher realizes that the group needs another day before moving on.

A teacher connects two ideas that weren't originally connected.

A teacher sees that a strategy that worked last year isn't working with this group.

A teacher finds a way to make a complex idea accessible to one particular learner.

These decisions may never appear in a lesson plan or implementation report.

But they are part of the creative work of teaching.

If our measures only capture what was planned, we may miss much of what makes teaching effective.

What are we designing for?

This is the question I think we should be asking as people who design programs, products, and professional learning for educators.

Not simply:

How can we make this more creative?

But:

Where does this design require educator judgment, and have we deliberately created space for that judgment?

Those are very different questions.

They force us to look at our own work.

Maybe the issue isn't that educators aren't creative enough.

Maybe we have designed creativity out of the experience.

Maybe we have confused fidelity with quality.

Maybe we have created so many required steps that there is no longer room to respond to the people actually using the program.

Maybe we have designed professional learning that asks educators to create engaging learning experiences for students while giving them a highly controlled experience as learners themselves.

And maybe we need to ask a harder question:

What part of this design assumes that our way is the only good way?

I don't think the answer is to remove structure.

Educators deserve thoughtful, well-designed resources. They deserve clear goals, useful tools, good evidence, and meaningful support.

They also deserve room to think.

Because if we want educators to help students become curious, adaptive, creative thinkers, we should probably design experiences that allow educators to practice those same things.

Not every educator will express creativity in the same way.

That is not a flaw in the system.

It may be exactly what we should have been designing for all along.

A question worth carrying into the next design

Before we launch the next curriculum, professional learning experience, implementation plan, or educational product, perhaps we should ask:

What have we left room for?

Not just room for compliance.

Not just room for completion.

Room for judgment.

Room for adaptation.

Room for expertise.

Room for surprise.

Room for the educator to become more than the person who delivers what someone else designed.

Because sometimes the most creative thing a program can do is leave enough space for the person using it to think.

Winnie O'Leary August 2026