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Creativity gives students brighter future
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I have been teaching Western kids in a private school for many years — first in Washington State and now at Concordia International School Shanghai. The teaching approaches I experienced as a kid growing up in China were very different from the ones my colleagues and I are using in our daily classroom teaching. From both my personal experience and professional perspective, one of the main factors underlying the difference between the Chinese and Western styles of teaching is the mindset that prioritizes right answers over creativity.
The Chinese teaching style is generally seen as more strict and it puts a tremendous emphasis on the accuracy of answers. As a result, Chinese students are usually more disciplined and more determined when facing barriers. They believe in “practice makes perfect” and never dare to get lazy in honing their skills. After all, the gaokao, or college entrance examination, only opens the door for them once a year. They are competing with millions of other students and time is just too precious to waste on a second try. The stakes are super high.
When the stakes get that high, so does the anxiety level. Unfortunately, for most Chinese students, in their pursuit of maximizing the learning results in the shortest time, they miss out on one tremendously critical quality — being creative. I once asked two very seasoned high school American math teachers to compare the math capability of Chinese students to that of American students. From their observation, Chinese students tend to have stronger foundational skills, such as computational skills, but when presented with a problem that they’ve never seen before, their anxiety level goes up quickly and they seem reluctant to take risks, for fear of being wrong. Being afraid of the uncertain usually prohibits a person’s creativity.
On the contrary, in most Western classrooms I see, teachers have been planting the seeds of creativity, big and small, in a child’s mind from an early age. Teachers create a learning atmosphere where students are engaged in the process of exploring knowledge. They do not feed answers or just ask questions about the facts. Instead, teachers use a more “Socratic approach,” asking students why and how. They leave students with blanks, and they encourage them to use critical thinking and reason to fill in those blanks.
It takes a lot of time, patience, guidance and wisdom to foster creativity. It is a precious gift that sets students on the path to a bright future, but creativity is hard to come by in a pressing, goal-driven environment.
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