A recent article titled, "Why Every School Needs an Innovation Day" paired with a recent tweet from our Podium system provider, WhippleHill, sparked the importance of creating opportunities for creative capital within our school.



Obvious opportunities for personal expression and creativity exist throughout Proctor's academic schedule; one needs only to look at this blog post, or our thirty-nine art electives to see that.

However, the main points Liz Dwyer makes in this article raise the importance not only of opportunities to engage in creative expression during the academic day, but freedom from a schedule to simply be creative. Dwyer notes, "Google's policy of 20 percent time - giving employees plenty of free time work on whatever they want - is famous for being the birthplace of innovative products…But what would happen if schools gave students a similar amount of unstructured free time and allowed them to take control of their own learning?"



This approach mirrors the approach at my four-year old son's Montessori school where he is given freedom to explore learning opportunities at his own pace and in as much depth as he desires. He learns through exploration, and while the project-based learning that takes place with preschoolers cannot be directly applied to high school students, perhaps we can learn from this model and the type of "Innovation Day" that was piloted at a U.K. elementary school.



Dwyer notes that one school in the U.K. decided to find organize and "Innovation Day" and found that students worked solidly for six or more hours on different projects and fostered their own accountability without any clear expectations of a final product. The outcome? Students loved the day, unearthed new passions and found that allowing longer periods of time for projects gave them an opportunity to truly learn through exploration. Perhaps most importantly, one teacher reflected that students learned it was ok to fail. Successful? I think so.



As I sit and prepare for my AP Economics class I teach next block, I think about the potential contrast between these two approaches to learning. Preparing students to do well on an AP exam is important and is one of the primary goals of my course, but it is the application of the content learned that remains most pertinent to student learning. In previous posts, I've discussed how we try to bridge this dilemma of content filled courses and project based learning in our academic curriculum. My bias tells me we do a pretty good job, but, we also recognize that we can do better.



What would happen if we had an innovation day on campus? Would our students know how to simply be creative? To explore and enrich their creative capital? Or have we trained them to follow a schedule and expect evaluation of their work at all times? As we move into exam week on Monday, keeping this balance in mind for our faculty and our students will be important.



Creative capital and innovation drive progress in our society. Teaching students how to look inward and explore who they are as learners and as creative minds is essential to our role as educators, but in a boarding school setting, this freedom from formal accountability can be scary. What will students do with this freedom? Will they use their time effectively? Do we allow these fears to limit the learning opportunities to which we expose our students? 



We know from prior experience that when we do provide this freedom in various settings on campus, especially within the arts, students quickly engage themselves in learning new skills. Accountability will never disappear, nor should it, but perhaps we can learn from preschoolers in this case, and reteach our students (and faculty) how to operate without quite as much structure - to have a passion for self-guided acquisition of creative capital that will lead to far deeper learning and far more innovation in the end.