Do kids know what Creativity means?

After last week's discussion about whether we are schools are killing creativity. That spawned an awesome new approach to the question, "do kids even know what it means to be creative?' What do they think creativity should look like.  I sat down with my 8th grade students this week to discuss what content classes they believe allow them to be their most creative and what exactly in their opinion should a creative classroom look like. What did I find out? My kids really do not understand what creativity means.

Almost all of my students seem to view creativity as doing whatever they want. It's a strange conundrum as in it's most uniform description they are kind of right. Creativity should be allowing students to do what they want in order to show their understanding of a learning target. However, in the way my students presented their responses, they believe that creativity should allow them to do what they want, content-wise, on their own schedule.  I know this fits the Flipped class model or providing pacing that matches up with the students comfort level, but as my kids stated "sometimes we just don't want to do school." That isn't a pacing model that is saying that they value their time more than their education. They want to be able to have "off-days" where they do not do anything. I don't find that creative at all, just lazy. 

As we went on in our conversations we started to discuss what a creative classroom should look like unfortunately my kids only concept of what a creative classroom looks like involves putting their work on display. Once I should them this image of one of the Ron Clark Academy's classrooms, their ideas changed. They couldn't believe that a classroom was allowed to do this. At this point, their imaginations opened a little. I am in the same boat they are, why are we not allowed to do this to our classrooms? If we are truly a student centered teacher then why are we keeping our rooms so sanitary and uniform? We could invite creativity and optimism in to the rooms simply by showing them it's allowed.