The bell has just rung.

Students are starting to come into the classroom to begin.

That's class.

One student walks in, visibly upset and starts to unleash this rant about how they feel about education.

I've asked another student, Charles Shoe, to come and perform a monologue of the words of that students shared that day in that classroom trance.

The school system is just like, so rigged, like all it does for me is make me so stressed because it's like we get hours and hours of homework every single night until we have to stay up so late.

Then the next day at school, we fail the test that we can't do the work because we're so tired.

Then your grades drop.

So then the next night you have to stay up even later to do more work and more study and not just creates so many issues like sleep issues, health issues, mental health issues, friend issues and when you really think about in high school, just like one big check box, it's about what you're interested in war, what matters to you.

It's just checking off the list and all these tests like a C.

T s, a T U.

It's about speed and crap.

It's not about what actually meaningful to you when you really think about it.

The only thing that the school system has done to me is making me tired.

Thanks, Charles.

I wish this was an isolated incident, but it's not.

Students tend to share similar stories with me almost on a daily basis.

And my greatest fear is a day that my own Children come home and share the same disillusionment and stress and anxiety with education system.

And I know far too many parents who have among students had to open up creative, uncomfortable, expressive spaces.

Among other things, The creative process utilizes curiosity to make us open to the world, to build meaning through connections with ourselves and others and are multiple intelligences.

It uses imagination as a way to expand our comprehension and everything.

A great deal of evidence as well as my own experiences suggest that creativity is how humans learn and grow, and it will save education as we know it.

Unfortunately, schools are trying to kill creativity, and we know this thanks to certain.

Robinson's most watched talk of all time do schools killed creativity, which is something he confirmed 13 years ago and by many measures, were in a worse situation today that we were then.

This is when creativity is widely considered to be the number one skill needed for the world and for future success, something that was confirmed in a survey of over 1500 CEOs.

I also know that creativity is rarely, if ever taught in our classrooms, definitely not specifically were comprehensively enough.

My own deep dive into the educated into the creative process started about nine years ago, when a student raises him in the class.

After I signed a project, said Mr Sikora, I can't do this project.

I'm not creative, said OK, what is what is creativity, his answer.

Imagination?

Okay, what's imagination, he said, created.

Then he got frustrated and said, I don't know.

It's not light bulb that pops up over people's heads.

That doesn't happen for me now.

Imagination is really important, the creative process.

But this is a magical view of light bulbs popping up over people's heads is how a lot of others view creativity.

And it was this moment when I realized that I wasn't teaching creativity specifically and purposefully enough and that I needed to do something about it.

And there are two major things that I'm concerned about.

People struggled to connect to themselves to others and the information in media in their lives, and they also struggled to think creatively to adapt and embrace change even when they say they want change.

And these two things are links.

And they're part of the check box culture that currently drives education decision making, one in which all the students trying to check off the exact same boxes to get the colleges they think that they want to go to, regardless of their own interests, intelligences, skills or aspirations.

It's also part of, and I think many would agree why we haven't done more to meet the climate prices, which is as much a failure of imagination and empathy for others.

It's why we make students carry around £50 backpacks full of books and photocopy paper, even though we live in the digital revolution and all of the information in the world is in their back pockets.

But this talk isn't about problems.

It's supposed to be about solutions.

We have enough that prove these issues.

In fact, another famous Ted talk by Duncan Mortal on a similar topic, ask of his audience at the end.

What is the opposite of bravery?

Well, it's not cowardice.

The opposite of bravery is the status quo.

Conforming is easy.

It takes courage to break outdated patterns.

So let's be brave.

And let's start by talking about some neuroscience, a great place to begin our the inputs and outputs in the brain.

For example, the inputs and outputs receptors in a mouse's brain are really close together, which doesn't leave a lot of creation.

So if a mouse and counters a stick, it only really has one option go over this.

The human brain, on the other hand, has evolved over time to expand the distance between input and output.

So if a human encounters a stick, it might pick it up.

Happen on a tree to make a south draw with it in the sand, pretend it's a sword or an early hominid experiences.

Use it to pull insects out of a tree to eat.

This space allows for variation, failures, mistakes, unintended consequences, which are responsible for some of the greatest development in human history.

This space allows for an infinite amount of connections, neural connections.

And the more we connect, the better the more we connect to ourselves, our own lives and the lives of others, the better.

And the more that we connect a seemingly different content areas, the more interesting our outputs become.

It's not just the arts.

All subjects matter in the creative process.

Now scientists have also found that artist friends have gone gray matter in them.

So yeah, which is responsible for things like the senses and memory decision making.

So the arts are important as well, and another gap that's important bring up is that between emotional and logical centers.

Simply put, we are emotional beings because those are the parts of our brain that developed first, and a great deal of evidence is showing how important emotional intelligence is on human development.

Hence, the recent and super important focus on socio emotional learning in our schools.

Ignoring emotional intelligence for the sake of academic achievement is pretty wasteful.

It's kind of like asking kids to jump before we teach them to walk.

We feel before we think creativity directly engages all of this, and curiosity is an important part of nurturing that engagement.

In fact, curiosity is the soil for learning.

I can't express enough how important it is and how much it came up when I was reading about development and learning how it came up as a source of mindfulness, which is important of the creative process, the source of creativity and innovation at its core, curiosity is about approaching the world with an open eagerness to learn.

It's it's inquiry, like having a conversation with Karen Friend, whose only interest is to see you grow through thoughtful dialogue.

It's the source of excitement, much like a child anticipating a wrapped present in the mystery of what's inside the sense of awe as we stare into the University of the Unknown and Want board, and that's because it's associated with affection.

We all know how important affection is, thanks to Swiss child psychologist PJ, who went so far as to say that if you're not particularly interested or like what you're learning about, it's pointless because you're not going to learn anything.

Everybody knows that Einstein failed in school, but you know what it's because he couldn't handle the military style approach to learning He eventually switched to a Swiss progressive school, the age of 15 that, he said, nurture his curiosity and he succeeded, flourished.

He's famous for saying, I have no special talents.

I'm only passionately curious.

Curiosity is the soil for learning than imagination.

Is the flight an important fuel source for extending our comprehension, our connections and our empathy?

If I say or you read the words skyscraper, your visual cortex goes to work, forming an image of a tall building that you could make associations with.

That you can connect to imagination is the ability to perceive things without any sensory information.

In front of us Neurosciences, Sameer Zeki went so far as to say in all territories that creativity is the sort.

Is it is an extension of the function of the brain, the ability to form meaning from sensory information or to imagine, in the absence of sensory information, it has been described as the ability to think of things as possible, the source of flexibility and originality in the human brain.

They say that empathy only extends as far as our site.

An imagination has the ability to extend our perceptions in death, which is important because an extensive survey of college students over the past 40 years has shown a great decline in their abilities to imagine and empathize with situations, others.

So what is creativity?

Well at the root it's to create?

Many would say that is the ability to create things of inherent value, but it really goes much further than this.

Creativity is the big human intelligence, that which connects all other forms of intelligence with the goal of actualizing our learning of manifesting our thoughts into something that we can see and use at its core.

It's about copying, transforming and combine.

All life on the earth was created when cells started to coffee, then transform you take over time, and it combined with other cells to make all the complex life ones you see on Earth today.

You should check out Kirby Ferguson's talk.

Everything is a remix for more on those fundamentals, not this process is not linear.

Get abs and flow circling back and forth until our thoughts become creation.

Manifest over learning.

And the shame is a lot of the words that are part of this process are missing from our educational experiences, things like relevance, relationships risk play failure, embracing mistakes, critique and agency for more clarity.

Here are three phases and six steps in the creative process that could be used in an educational curriculum.

The first phase is curiosity, and the first step is influence inspiration.

Sir Isaac Newton once said that creation requires influence.

This is collecting ideas, learning through emulation.

Anybody who has learned to play a musical instrument has learned by playing other people's music my problem.

And then we can start to connect the ideas that we've collected.

In the case of a musician, it could be combining two different sources of music to make a new source of music to filter that make it a different thing to combine ideas.

Then we get to the innovations thing.

We really start to use our imaginations to filter these connections through our own lives, ourselves and our experiences.

This is what we start to like build on the things that have been created before to transform all we're really doing.

When we make something is innovating, something that exists, and then we get to the creation things, immersive experiences.

Taking our emotional thoughts are logical thoughts and putting that into the physical so we can see it and hold it.

And we start with the prototype, which is testing our assumptions, be it through sketching, drafts, modeling.

We start to connect the head, the heart and the hand, putting this end of the world so that other people can see it.

And this is a great time to get feedback off our creations and our ideas because other people can see it before we move to the work step, which is the hard part that 10,000 hours of practice needed to master something.

This is meaningful rigor because we're connected to it, not busy work.

This is where we create an inner dialogue with the process where we make something reflect on that respond and make something else, then leading to the quarantine stuff.

His critique things and it's the last phase, but it really shouldn't have.

You really shouldn't wait till the end and should happen throughout, and it often sends us back to the beginning.

This is reflection, qualitative assessment, thinking about our learning meta cognition and its inherently collaborative, because we need other people's points of views to see our creations more objectively to challenge our biases and work against our egos with the name of a Russian for the greater good.

So here's my call to action.

But six steps.

13 years since the most watched talk without much change, I think we can do better than that.

And I think the first step is to start called Cultivating a Culture of Curiosity.

And we should begin with teachers.

Let's give teachers collaborated.

I cannot preface in how powerful it is to work with another content area specialist who sees learning differently than I do working on a daily basis to build new forms of learning together.

Let's have a professional development that teaches teachers how to bring creativity into their classroom.

We need visionary leadership.

That prize is this being through coaching, mentor, ship or workshops.

This will begin toe work against the check box culture that currently pervades the status full of medication.

And then let's take a step of building classes that are created.

If creativity is considered the number one skill needed in the world, maybe we should have a class that just teaches creativity.

Having all this technology, spending all this money on this technology that we haven't schools is kind of wasteful for not giving students the ability to use it creatively.

It's like we're all GPS units running around without any sense of direction.

Let's create interdisciplinary Cho talk classes that break the current silos that we've created on learning.

Connections are the telltale sign of learning, and fragmentation and isolation are opposites and the next step.

And this is a really big one student on time, students need choice and control over their learning.

I'm not saying that they need 100% freedom because they don't, but they need to be able to form the connections that build the relevance that they need to really learn and actualize that experience.

And as such, our assessment should be more focused on the process rather than the result.

Test should not be dictating what students learn, and we really shouldn't want everybody learning the exact same thing anyway.

Everybody having the exact same ideas about the world is a terrible idea for the creative process.

One of my favorite parts about creativity is that it's inherently differentiate.

Any parent of two or more Children knows that every child is different with the unique intelligence, with unique needs and aspirations in ways of actualizing they're learning.

Let's start to build an education system that recognizes that, and then we can get to the big change.

I'm talking structural.

Sze changed the big step things like graduation requirements, the schedule, time and space graduation requirements.

You're probably in the least be cut in half.

Students need that space to be able to take the classes that they want to take that are important for their futures.

Now that somebody decided 10 years ago or 100 years ago is important for that.

Student schedules are so packed and they're full of things that displaced other experiences that we know enhanced human development.

Things like reading for pleasure, having dinner with their families.

We're just exploring the world with their friends.

We all know that students are not meant toe.

Wake up and be a school by 8 a.m. In the morning, then work through a military style schedule of 50 minutes and map.

Now stop 50 minutes in English.

Now stop.

When did they have time to process the information, let alone make the connections?

In their busy day, these steps will start to work against the disillusionment.

The fear the anxiety, the negative stressed, that pervades what students feel on a daily basis.

We have to be willing to fail and then try again learned from our failures and then do something new.

Remaining stagnant is negligent at bus, expecting different results.

The creative process engages these things and asks us to make changes.

The world has been changing around us and we have not kept up.

Thought must produce action.

We can take some steps.

Thank you.