Educational research is hard science...very hard

In a 2006 TED talk, Ken Robinson called on us to “rethink the fundamental principles on which we’re educating our children.” Specifically, he wants to change how we think about creativity. Robinson passionately believes that “we don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it.” If so, then the problem for educators like me is not so much to explicitly teach creativity but instead to avoid killing it. Robinson supported this claim with a quote from Picasso who seems to have shared Robinson’s passionate belief. Ken Robinson is charming and very funny, and he attacks a movement unpopular among educators to focus schooling on a core of subjects at the expense of the arts, so I am very much inclined to want to agree with him, but I nevertheless wonder if what he is saying true?

If creativity is, as Robinson later defined it, “the process of having original ideas that have value,” which come about “through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things,” then education seems to me to be essential to creativity, and schools must do more than get out of the way of inherent human creative faculties in order to foster it. At any rate, in order to adjudicate between competing passionate beliefs on education for creativity, what we need is data rather than anecdotes and quotes. I entered this program because I passionately believe that the fundamental principles upon which we educate ought to be informed by research rather than on the passionately held beliefs of the most charming speakers with the most moving anecdotes or based on consistency with political ideologies

When I first applied for teaching jobs 17 years ago, I was frequently asked to include a statement of my philosophy of education. It was to be a statement of what I passionately believe concerning how students learn best. Today the idea of asking for such a statement sounds quite strange to me since researchers have accumulated a lot of actual knowledge about how students learn best. We can approach claims scientifically to help distinguish true beliefs from cherished ones no matter how passionately believed, and we ought to try to do so. That is what I hope to do as an educational researcher.