Assessing Creativity and Making it Visible

Assessment is key to learning. However, when done poorly, assessment inhibits curiosity, play, adventure, and other drivers of creativity and learning.  What and how we assess communicates what we value.  Quality assessment based in worthy outcomes of learning, centered around authentic demonstrations of student understanding, and approached with curiosity can help teachers and learners better understand understanding itself.  Revisiting evidence of student learning can surface important information for both students and teachers, leading to new insights that support growth for both parties.

Assessment two ways: On the left, students assess themselves using a rubric for fluency, flexibility, originality, and collaboration. On the right, a teacher uses social media to share responses to the closing assessment prompt “I used to think…Now I think…” as evidence of learning

The purpose of this site is not to delve into the nuances of authentic assessment, or weigh in on debates around the role of assessment in the current national climate.  Many have explored this topic.  Rather, this page shares a variety of examples of assessment approaches that Making Creativity Visible teachers in public school classrooms have employed to 1) better understand what their students are learning, 2) deepen students’ ability to understand and drive their own creative growth, and 3) help the educators themselves better understand the practice of teaching for creativity.

Collecting, shaping, and sharing documentation can help your students build on their learnings from lesson to lesson, help teachers identify and build on growth, and help you school community see students’ authentic understandings. thinking you value. The image on the left shows the result of multi-week unit on third grade social studies standards “change over time.” Documentation (right) helped teachers collaborate and see children’s growth, and was displayed alongside the final product at a family open house in order to showcase the thinking and creativity that characterized the process.

On this page you will find sample assessment rubrics, including some based on CMA’s Thinking Like an Artist framework for creativity, and vignettes of how teachers have used them.  You will also find resources for making students’ creative process visible.

Over the course of this initiative, educators in classrooms and the Museum have experimented with and refined many approaches to making creativity visible – the crux of assessment – and doing so in ways that foster learning rather than labeling.  On this page, the MCV team has attempted to assemble a range of examples that would inspire but not overwhelm. As with every part of the site, please contact the team for any guidance, clarification, or feedback on usability.

Rubrics for “Thinking Like an Artist”

What: The Thinking Like an Artist Evolving Rubric for Educators comprises habits that characterize the creative process in any domain, not just the arts. The rubric identifies creative thinking habits relevant for any discipline, and describes what they might look like in a classroom – from an emergent behavior, to a common state, to a driving disposition that characterizes the learning ecosystem.

Why: While creativity transcends the arts, artists are models of creative and critical thinking. By breaking down their various processes of thinking and making, we can better understand the behaviors that support creativity, and nurture them in targeted ways.

How: Since its initial creation, teachers have posted the rubric as an advocacy tool, used it to guide class reflection, adapted it for student self-assessment, and more. There are many ways to tailor and build on Thinking Like an Artist as a framework; see the below examples for inspiration.

Thinking Like an Artist Evolving Rubric for Educators – click to download as .ppt file

Case 1: Adapting Thinking Like an Artist for self-assessment

High school media arts teacher Marcella Cua appreciated the potential of the Thinking Like an Artist rubric to guide student self-assessment.  However, she knew that the language of the “official” rubric was too dense to engage teens as a useful, stand-alone document.  Ms. Cua adapted the descriptions of each disposition to be more “teen-friendly” and fit in a single column, then added a column with the heading “What is your evidence?” Download the editable document by clicking here: Thinking Like an Artist Student Reflection Rubric

Case 2: Thinking Like an Artist rubric for assessment of group learning, Ms. Risner’s 4th grade

Ms. Risner’s students regularly connect their learning reflections to the TLA rubric. While the students tend to rate the group at the highest phase, Ms. Risner pushes them to explain, “What makes you say that?”

Every month, Britanie Risner’s 4th grade class reviews their learning memories, and assesses their group learning in relation to the dispositions on the Thinking Like an Artist Rubric. Through this process, students noticed that their most powerful understandings often grew from experiences of play. As a result, they collaborated to create a document called “The Value of Play,” which outlines what they have learned through play.

Case 3: Thinking Like an Artist as a planning and assessment guide

Similar to Ms. Cua’s adaptation above, educators have used the Thinking Like an Artist rubric as a planning and assessment guide to help teachers plan for and notice the development of specific dispositions of creativity.  Here, early childhood educator Cat Lynch adapted the framework to guide co-planning with a preschool group. This is followed by a downloadable, editable guide for you to adapt and try.

This completed form shows one way that a preschool educator used the TLA reflection guide to look for evidence of creative behaviors and plan to extend children’s engagement

Thinking Like an Artist Planning and Assessment Guide (click to download editable .docx file)


Additional rubrics for creative thinking

What we assess signals what we value.  Reimagining rubrics can place value on and develop the habits that will best serve students in their lives and careers. Designing these rubrics to engage learners in the assessment process builds their capacity as agents of their own growth and learning.

What: Fluency, Flexibility, Originality, Elaboration, and Collaboration self-assessment rubric developed by Emily Reiser for students to use after a collaborative project

Why: This rubric invites students to critically reflect on their engagement of thinking habits that the teacher values as key to creativity – three of the classic dimensions of divergent thinking, and collaboration.

How: Over the course of the year, Ms. Reiser used these terms with students, build a shared understanding of their meanings.  Before using this rubric, build a shared understanding of these terms with students.  Let students know that you value these habits and why.

Fluency, Flexibility, Originality, Elaboration, and Collaboration Rubric [click to download as editable .ppt file]

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What: Self- and Peer Assessment Table developed by Todd Elkin of Alameda County Schools (CA)

Why: This rubric supports students to build a critical eye in improving their own work and the work of peers. The questions prompt students to justify their claims, and to identify areas for improvement – both important thinking skills for life, career, and creativity.

How: This rubric is used to aid iteration and improvement over multiple drafts of a work. Students rank their effectiveness toward various criteria of value, and are required to justify that ranking and indicate a way that element could be improved. Finally, students have space to plan how their final draft will be influenced by the analysis they have conducted in the table.

Key elements differentiate this rubric from many, including student selection of most of the criteria (from choices provided by the teacher), a column to indicate how performance in each criteria could be improved, and a space to plan for a revised draft.


What: Documentation is a primary tool of the Making Creativity Visible initiative; MCV takes its name from Making Learning Visible* and other strands of the Project Zero research institute at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education. A central pillar of this work is the practice of documentation, defined as “the practice of observing, recording, interpreting, and sharing through a variety of media the processes and products of learning in order to deepen learning.” (Krechevsky, Rivard, Burton, 2010)  MCV seeks to complement, not recreate, the documentation work of Project Zero.  Rather than duplicate Project Zero’s extensive documentation work and resources, MCV applied those principles to collaborating with teachers to investigate and innovate around teaching for creativity in particular.  In general, this meant 1) using the principles of documentation to become more attuned to looking learning, and 2) apply the strategies of documentation through the lens of “Thinking Like an Artist” to investigate these specific dispositions of creativity.  Below are a couple of examples to inspire and give a flavor of the initiative.  Further resources to support documentation can be found on the Other Resources page of this site.

Why: Documentation involves capturing moments of learning (e.g. quotes, photos, student work), shaping and contextualizing for that others can explore them together, and sharing them with specific audiences in order to learn and deepen learning. Documentation is a way to foster group learning in order to deepen understanding of what is being learned and of understanding itself.  Documentation embodies the potential of assessment to authentically make visible what is understood, and where to further nurture learning and creative development.

How: The Project Zero site of Making Learning Visible and Visible Thinking houses many resources for building a practice of documentation; more resources are on our Other Resources page. This particular document contains examples of documentation approaches “in the wild,” applied to making visible aspects of the creative process and Thinking Like an Artist.

Examples of Making Student Creativity Visible from the physical environments and social media of MCV teachers [click to open pdf]

 

*Making Creativity Visible draws its name and much of its approach from the Project Zero’s Making Learning Visible work, inspired by collaboration with the children and adults of the municipal preschools of Reggio Emilia, Italy.  Mara Krechevsky and Melissa Rivard, lead researchers in this work, provided important consultation on this project, and MCV’s consulting director Dr. Fred Burton spearheaded the Ohio Visible Learning Project that made the documentation of group learning a pillar of the school experience. At the state-level, Nancy Pistone of the Ohio Department of Education has provided important leadership around documentation as assessment.