I’m learning a lot about kindergarten. A novel part of COVID worklife for my wife (who is her own woman) and I is that we get to teach our oldest son kindergarten. Feeling swells of exhaustion, inspiration and humility each week is becoming commonplace as we stand in for our son’s amazing teacher (she creates the weekly lessons for parents and also hosts virtual classes twice a week). We are learning a lot and building stronger creative muscles. Here are three creativity lessons from kindergarten.

To give you a sense of our experience, here are some of the activities we’ve taught and supported over the last three months:

• Draw and label a playground
• Show and tell
• Draw and label a play
• Reflections on books, science experiments and this guy

Playground

Faces

Creativity is something everyone has. I believe that it’s defined more by how we understand the world and less by how we sculpt or write. In many ways, kindergarten is all about creativity (mostly creativity abounds in kids).

Agility

Michelle has gotten good at drawing animals and objects that visualize poems and stories (we don’t have a printer, so we repurpose art supplies). This is one of the many ways that we’ve adapted our knowledge and style to the kindergarten classroom/dinner-table. One of the things that I admire most about my son’s kindergarten teacher – his real one – is how she creates clear and strong structure for the day and can also adapt within the structure. For example, we’ve riffed on her seemingly endless phrases and gestures to redirect a conversation, influence behaviour or answer tough questions.

John Mulaney is good at this, too.

If creativity means problem-solving on the fly with limited resources, then teaching kindergarten at our dinner table is cultivating this skill in our family.

Playfulness

From LEGO Serious Play to unpacking creativity with art, there is a clear connection between playing and unlocking creativity in our brains. According to Bruce Nussbaum, author of Creative Intelligence, play abounds in kindergarten classes, but is underutilized in the world of work:

When we play, we try things on and try things out. We improvise, taking on new roles, imagining what would happen if we possessed new capabilities or behaved differently. We throw away what doesn’t work and build on what does. We can play alone or compete against someone else; we can collaborate with another person or a team against a larger enemy. We may lose a game or a battle, but there is always the chance to start again.

Every team has the capability to build skills through play – Nussbaum argues that it takes trust to create what he calls “the magic circle”, which is a “special place away from normal activity where people trust each other and agree to behave by a different set of rituals.” Sounds like kindergarten to me.

Curiosity

Okay, so show and tell is pretty awesome. In parallel to teaching kindergarten, I’m teaching/coaching a group of senior finance leaders. One of the lessons in the coaching course is about asking powerful questions. Honestly, going forward I might ease learners in by asking them to bring something to show and tell. Great questions asked by curious people can raise awareness and surface insights, but they can also help get to a person’s values (“what makes this special for you?” or “who gave this to you?” or “what made you choose this?”).

I wish more of my colleagues asked “why?” with the enthusiasm, skepticism and genuine sense of wonder that kids do (and they do it with ease).

These days we aren’t sure what’s going to happen next. Creativity played a role in getting us here. I think it will help us move forward into a future we don’t understand because creativity is as important as literacy when it comes to solving humanity’s most intractable problems.

—

This article was originally published on May 27, 2020 – it holds up like creativity in Kindergarten holds up over time.