Creativity Requires Something to Be Creative With

I was sitting in a CPD session last Tuesday—the kind where the air conditioning is too loud and the presenter is far too caffeinated—listening to a consultant explain how creativity is developed through “divergent thinking provocations” and expensive, colour-coded resource packs. I looked around at my colleagues, all of them staring blankly, and I thought about my Year 9s in a damp classroom on a Tuesday afternoon. If you think you can buy a sense of wonder in a laminated folder, you haven’t spent enough time in a secondary school. The truth is, we’ve been sold a version of how creativity is developed that assumes we have infinite time and zero behaviour issues, when in reality, it’s usually something much grittier and less polished.

I’m not here to give you a list of high-concept workshops that look great on a LinkedIn post but fall apart the moment a student forgets their pen. Instead, I want to talk about the small, practical shifts that actually work when you’re exhausted and the lesson plan is already fraying at the edges. We’re going to look at how to foster genuine original thought using the tools you already have in your desk, without needing a departmental budget or a miracle.

Divergent Thinking Techniques That Actually Work Mid Lesson

When the lesson is halfway through and you can see that glazed, “I don’t know” look creeping across the room, you don’t need a high-concept brainstorming session. You need a way to pivot. One of my favourite ways to spark divergent thinking techniques without losing control of the room is the “Alternative Uses” sprint. Pick a mundane object from the classroom—a stapler, a broken ruler, a half-empty glue stick—and give them two minutes to list as many uses for it as possible. It’s low-stakes, it’s fast, and it forces their brains to decouple an object from its intended function.

The trick is that this isn’t just a game; it’s a way of hacking their cognitive processes of creativity when they’re stuck in a rut. If they’re struggling with a history source or a math problem, stop the formal task. Use a quick “What if?” scenario instead. “What if the Roman Empire had steam engines?” or “What if this equation resulted in a negative number?” It provides a mental reset. You aren’t looking for the perfect answer; you’re just trying to break the paralysis of the wrong one.

The Role of Domain Expertise Over Academic Fluff

We’ve spent a decade obsessed with the idea that creativity is some magical, innate spark that just happens if you give a child enough coloured pens and a blank sheet of paper. It’s a lovely thought, but it’s rubbish. In my experience, you can’t ask a student to “think outside the box” if they don’t even know what the box is made of. This is where the role of domain expertise becomes the real driver of original thought. You cannot rearrange the furniture of a subject if you haven’t first learned where the walls are.

When we talk about the cognitive processes of creativity, we often forget that they are built on a foundation of stored knowledge. A historian isn’t creative because they have a “creative personality”; they are creative because they know enough about the nuances of the French Revolution to spot a pattern no one else has seen. If we want to move past the academic fluff, we have to stop treating creativity as a separate skill to be “taught” and start seeing it as the sophisticated application of what a student actually knows.

Five Ways to Stop Treating Creativity Like a Special Event

• Stop waiting for the ‘perfect’ creative lesson. Creativity isn’t a standalone unit you slot in between fractions and grammar; it’s how a student uses what they already know to solve a problem they haven’t seen before. If you wait for a dedicated hour of ‘free expression,’ you’ll never find it in a curriculum that’s already bursting at the seams.
• Lower the stakes to raise the output. I’ve seen too many kids freeze up because they think ‘being creative’ means producing a masterpiece. If you want them to actually take a risk, give them something low-stakes—a messy sketch, a three-sentence alternative ending, or a quick verbal debate. They need to know it’s okay to be wrong before they’ll ever try to be original.
• Use constraints as a tool, not a barrier. The ‘blank page’ is the enemy of the classroom. If you tell a Year 9 class to ‘be creative,’ you’ll get blank stares or someone drawing a caricature in the margin. Give them boundaries—’You have to explain the causes of the French Revolution using only five words’ or ‘Design a tool that works using only these three shapes.’ Constraints force the brain to actually work.
• Value the ‘why’ over the ‘wow.’ We get seduced by the flashy projects—the big displays, the expensive art supplies, the stuff that looks great in a school prospectus. But real creativity is the cognitive heavy lifting. If a student can explain why their weird idea actually connects to the topic, that’s worth ten times more than a poster that looks pretty but says nothing.
• Model the struggle, not just the result. We often present creativity as this magical, effortless spark. It isn’t. It’s frustrating, it’s repetitive, and it involves a lot of bad ideas before you hit a good one. Show them your messy first drafts. Show them where you got stuck. If they think creativity is a straight line, they’ll quit the moment they hit a curve.

The Reality Check: What Actually Sticks

Stop chasing “creativity” as a standalone subject; it is a byproduct of knowing your stuff. You can’t ask a student to think critically about the causes of the French Revolution if they can’t remember who the Jacobins were. Build the knowledge base first, or you’re just asking them to make things up.

Forget the high-concept, hour-long “innovation workshops” that look great in a department meeting but die in Period 5. Real creativity happens in the small, messy gaps—the five-minute pivot when a question catches them off guard or the way they reframe a task because they’re bored of the standard way.

If a strategy requires you to spend three hours planning or requires every single student to be in a “flow state” simultaneously, it isn’t a strategy—it’s a fantasy. Aim for low-stakes, high-impact ways to nudge them toward original thought that don’t leave you needing a lie-down before lunch.

The Myth of the Blank Canvas

We keep telling teachers to “foster creativity” as if it’s something you can just sprinkle over a classroom like glitter, but you can’t conjure original thought out of thin air; you build it by giving them the tools, the facts, and the confidence to eventually break the rules you taught them.

Ellery Mwangi-Selkirk

The Reality of the Creative Classroom

So, let’s bring this back down to earth. We’ve talked about moving away from the academic fluff and focusing on the actual domain knowledge that gives students a foundation to build upon. We’ve looked at how divergent thinking isn’t some magical, mystical spark, but a set of practical tools you can deploy even when the bell is about to ring and the kids are restless. It isn’t about adding more to your plate or buying a subscription to some fancy “innovation” platform; it’s about valuing the substance over the spectacle. If you can get them to understand the core mechanics of a subject, you’ve given them the only real lever they have to actually create something meaningful.

At the end of the day, don’t let the theorists convince you that creativity is something you “deliver” to a class like a pre-packaged meal. It’s messier than that. It’s found in the quiet moment a student makes a connection you didn’t explicitly teach, or in the way they tackle a problem when the “correct” answer isn’t obvious. My advice? Stop worrying if you’re hitting every pedagogical milestone for creativity and just focus on the room you’re in. If you provide the expertise and the space to fail safely, the creativity will find its way in. It always does, usually right when you’ve least expected it.

About Ellery Mwangi-Selkirk

Most educational advice is written for a classroom that does not exist — twenty motivated pupils, unlimited preparation time, no behaviour to manage. I write for the room you are actually in. What retrieval practice looks like when marking is already three weeks behind, why the seating plan matters more than the starter activity, and which of the last decade's initiatives left anything behind. Nineteen years taught me that the good ideas survive contact with a wet Wednesday and the rest do not.