Freedom vs. Creativity

This past Monday, we had a professional development day at school.  While I would have much rather had Presidents' Day as an actual holiday, a day off from teaching is still nice plus getting a real lunch is such a treat.  Having an hour and half to eat at Zoe's with other teachers is quite a step up from eating in 25 minutes in a noisy lunchroom while being bombarded by the never-ending questions of students... "Can I get more ketchup? Can I go to the bathroom?"  In addition to these usual advantages to professional development days, I was looking forward to this particular day for another reason: our focus for the morning was writing.  Since I love to write myself and teach writing, I was predisposed to enjoy this training more than most topics.  Rick Shelton came to our school, and he both instructed and entertained us throughout the morning.  I have his book Write Where You Are and use several of his ideas already in my classroom, but I enjoyed the discussions and learning a few new tips on teaching writing.

One thing Shelton mentioned that morning particularly struck me, especially from a philosophical standpoint.  He stated that "Freedom does not equal creativity."  Shelton pointed out that students need parameters in order to be good writers.  If you tell students they can write about anything they want, you will probably get sentences like "I have a dog.  She is brown.  She is nice."  But if you model good writing to students and then ask them for specifics like describing how fast their dog is, you are much more likely to get sentences like "My dog rushes to meet me every day after school.  She is faster than a speeding bullet and licks me in the face before I can even set down my backpack."  In my own classroom, I have certainly seen students be more successful when given a more specific task or topic.  They still are creative and write from their own unique perspective, but they have a direction in which to head initially. 

I also thought about this statement in other areas of life.  To be creative, you do not need absolute freedom.  If I am a mother one day, I do not intend to allow my children to color on the walls of our house.  I certainly will buy them sketchpads and encourage their artistic abilities, maybe even provide art lessons for them.  However, I think they can develop creativity without having unlimited freedom.   Of course, creativity does require some degrees of freedom and the statement does not hold true in every situation.  Nevertheless, it did make me ponder some abstract ideas a little...