Creativity: A Crucial 21st Century Skill

In 2017, Welda Simousek described creativity as a skill that can be taught and practiced in a few minutes a day, and broke it into fluency, flexibility, originality and elaboration. The article below is published as written. The section after it adds what international testing and recent studies on AI say about creativity as a skill in 2026.

A fundamental ability students will use throughout their lives

There are essential, universal skills today’s students will need both now and in the future. We have seen the list: Communication Skills, Collaboration Skills, Decision-Making Skills, Critical Thinking Skills, Problem-Solving Skills. However, there is ONE SKILL that must be mastered to do any of the skills on that list. That super skill is: CREATIVITY!

Learning and practicing creative thinking skills, plus establishing the environment to encourage the development of those creativity skills is the number one goal for every teacher and student and it can be practiced and have an impact by dedicating even a few minutes each day. Weaving creativity into everything that is done is the best preparation for an unknown future.

Creativity practice can assist and achieve such things as:

• assisting in breaking mindsets
• challenging assumptions
• reinforcing the idea that there is no easy nor one right answer
• learning how to suspend judgment
• learning there is no such thing as a “mistake” in thinking

Divergent and Convergent Thinking

Many students and adults have or develop one answer for many situations. Think of a student on the playground who only has one answer for an issue: if someone hits me, I hit them! Increasing the possibility of other alternatives does not just magically happen! All students deserve the opportunity to explore and share ideas and talk about alternatives and new ideas.

Being stuck with only one answer is considered convergent thinking, and while convergent thinking is needed, it cannot come before divergent thinking. In order to grow students into their future, divergent, creative thinking is necessary to practice.

The Four Creative Thinking Skills

So, what are the creativity skills, and how might the creativity skills be broken down and taught?

These are the four skills to know and practice to do creative thinking:

• FLUENCY — the ability to generate many ideas; brainstorming is about this
• FLEXIBILITY — the ability to generate many different categories of ideas
• ORIGINALITY — the ability to generate an idea unique from all others
• ELABORATION — the ability to go deep into one area and generate many details about it

In what ways might these skills be taught?

First, a non-judgmental environment must be established, by teachers and students:

• No negativity. This includes not reacting to ideas at all; don’t say “good idea” because this can prevent the next person from wanting to contribute in case their idea is not viewed as “good.”
• All ideas are valid at this stage; no such thing as a “dumb” or “crazy” one.
• Build on the ideas of others.
• Quantity, not quality, counts at this stage.
• Everyone Contributes

Practicing and Scoring the Skills in Groups

Secondly, students must be in groups and feel free to respond to a cue question. Students can be put in groups of 4-8 students, around a table, with something to write on and something to write with. The teacher would then give a cue question, such as, “Name everything that grows” (or a cue question that is commensurate with the age of the students). Students will take turns giving his/her answer and writing his/her answer on his/her paper, and keep going around the circle until the time to stop is announced. (Time is dependent on age of students/how much practice, etc.) When the time to stop is announced, students add up how many answers they have as a group. That total is recorded for each group as a baseline number. Remind students it is only a contest for their own group to get more answers the next time, and groups are not competing! This is a FLUENCY SCORE.

In order to find the “FLEXIBILITY SCORE” for the group, the group decides how many categories were mentioned in their answers. If the first person said “flowers” grow, and everyone else names another flower, they would have only one category.

The third score is really fun. The instructor asks the group to use 6-inch voices and choose ONE answer the group believes they have that NO ONE ELSE in the room has. As each group gives their answer, the rest of the class says “yes… we have that answer” with a thumbs down or, if that answer was not given in their group, it is a “thumbs up” and the answer is ORIGINAL.

Practicing the final skill, ELABORATION, takes a little different skill, and you are wanting students to learn to go deeper (perseverate) into a topic. One not only sees who can and does perseverate, but also realizes that with no experience in a particular topic, it is almost impossible to give answers, and that concept needs to be discussed after this activity. Again, record the number of answers for a group.

The SCAMPER Strategy

A strategy that is an “organizer” for thinking, and can be used is called SCAMPER. There is nothing that could be done to create ideas that is not in this acronym:

• Substitute – What can I substitute to make an improvement? [Mint-filled Oreo]
• Combine – What materials, features, processes, people, products, or components can I combine? [Oreo ice cream]
• Adapt – What part of the product could I exchange for something else? [Other cookies started to use filling]
• Modify – What will happen if I change part or all of it, maybe even distorting it? [Double-stuffed Oreos; at holidays, the color of the filling is changed]
• Magnify – What will happen if I enlarge, warp, or exaggerate a feature or component? [Giant Oreos]
• Minimize (or “Minify”) – What will happen if I shrink part or all of the product? [ Mini Oreos]
• Put to other uses – How could this product be used for different purposes? [Crush and make pie crusts]
• Eliminate – What would happen if I removed part or all of a component? [100-calorie packs]
• Rearrange – What if I looked at this from a different angle or perspective, or rearranged parts of it? [Oreo ice cream cones]
• Reverse – What if I did parts of it in reverse or put things in a different order? [White fudge covered Oreos]

After students have been working on fluency or brainstorming for awhile, have them apply the questions from the SCAMPER technique to their ideas. This should help them come up with many new ideas or variations of old ideas. For practice, have the students watch commercials to see how many products have been created through this process. Or, bring in all the samples from the Oreo example.

Help your staff and students to think creatively. Keep practicing fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration, and you will see a great deal of divergent thinking happening. If you practice this in groups, they will also practice other 21^st Century skills such as communication and collaboration. Enjoy!

1. The Huffington Post – Making Time for Creativity is Crucial for Kids
2. Teacher Magazine – Introducing Creative Education in a school (this link no longer available)
3. The Brown and White – Sir Ken Robinson discusses creativity in the classroom

Creativity as a skill: what the research says in 2026 and how teachers can use it

Is creativity a skill, or a personality trait that some students have and others lack? Welda Simousek takes the first view in the article above, and recent evidence supports it in several ways. Creativity as a skill is now measured in an international test, it can be described in terms teachers can act on, and a growing number of studies look at how new tools such as generative AI interact with it. This section sets out what those sources say, and where they stop.

Creativity is now assessed alongside reading and mathematics

The 2022 round of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), run by the OECD, was the first to test creative thinking. According to Teacher Magazine’s summary of the results, PISA defines creative thinking as generating, evaluating and improving original and diverse ideas. Students answered open tasks with no single correct answer, in four settings: written expression, visual expression, social problem solving and scientific problem solving.

The OECD average was 33 points out of 60. Singapore scored 41, Korea and Canada 38 each, and Australia 37. Twelve of the 64 participating countries and economies scored above the OECD average. Several findings bear on classroom practice:

• About half of the students who excelled at creative thinking did not excel academically, so creative thinking is not simply a by-product of strong reading and mathematics.
• Across the OECD, 60 to 70 percent of students said their teachers value creativity, encourage original answers and give them chances to share ideas, and these students scored slightly higher.
• Students who took part weekly in activities such as art, drama, creative writing or programming scored better than students who did so rarely or daily. This is an association, and the summary does not show that the activity itself caused the difference.
• Only about half of students believed they could change their own creativity. Simousek’s message that creativity can be practiced speaks directly to this belief.
• Students from more advantaged backgrounds scored 9.5 points higher on average than disadvantaged peers, so schools should not assume that creative opportunities are spread evenly.

The report also says teacher training in this area needs strengthening. A note on sources: the figures above come from Teacher Magazine’s account of the OECD report and not from the report itself.

How the four skills in the article fit

Simousek lists fluency (many ideas), flexibility (many categories of ideas), originality (an idea no one else has) and elaboration (detail in one area). These labels come from the long tradition of research on divergent thinking, and the Teacher Magazine summary does not list them. Even so, the PISA emphasis on original and diverse ideas is close to the first three.

The group scoring method in the article is a practical way to make this visible. Students count their answers for fluency, sort them into categories for flexibility, and identify the answer no other group has for originality. Simousek stresses that groups compete only against their own earlier totals, which is a good fit with the finding that many students doubt they can change their creativity: a rising personal baseline is evidence that they can.

One claim in the original deserves a careful reading. Simousek argues that creativity must be mastered before the other skills on the usual list can be done. That is the writer’s view. The sources reviewed for this section do not test whether creativity comes first, and teachers should treat it as an argument for giving creativity regular time and not as a measured sequence.

Creativity and AI: what one 2025 review found

Teachers now ask whether students who use generative AI become more or less creative. A 2025 meta-analysis in the Journal of Intelligence by Yan Zhao and colleagues combined 29 experimental and quasi-experimental studies on generative AI and higher-order thinking. A meta-analysis pools the results of many studies to estimate an average effect. For creativity the average effect was positive (Hedges’s g of 0.444, a moderate standardized difference), but it was the smallest of the three areas studied, behind problem solving (0.745) and critical thinking (0.691).

The details matter for planning. Effects were largest in programs lasting 8 to 16 weeks (0.759) and smaller in shorter and longer ones. Students with strong self-regulated learning skills gained far more (0.863) than students with weak ones (0.284). The authors note limits: the studies covered a narrow range of settings, included only English and Chinese publications, and varied widely, and the studies may lag behind current tools.

The practical reading is cautious. The review does not show that AI harms creativity or that it builds creativity automatically. It suggests that the benefit depends on how long and how well students work with the tool, and that students who can already manage their own learning benefit most. That points to teaching the habits of creative thinking first, which is what Simousek’s article does.

What teachers and school leaders can decide

1. Give creativity short, regular practice, as the article suggests. A weekly fluency round with a cue question takes only a few minutes.
2. Have students generate their own ideas before they see any from a tool. A suggested routine is a fluency round by the group, then a comparison with AI-generated ideas, then a discussion of which ideas are original and why. This is a classroom suggestion and has not been tested in the sources above.
3. Use the SCAMPER questions from the article to improve ideas, whether the ideas came from students or from a tool.
4. Check who gets creative opportunities. If art, drama or project time is limited for some groups of students, the PISA gaps suggest that the difference will show.

For related reading, see edCircuit’s articles Why Creativity Should Be Taught In Schools and Why a Growth Mindset for Creativity Is Essential, and the edCircuit AI in education guide for wider questions about AI in the classroom.

Related reading

• Why a Growth Mindset for Creativity Is Essential
• What Should Learning Look Like When Schools Reopen?
• Why Creativity Should Be Taught In Schools

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