You have ideas. Good ones. But somewhere between the lesson plans, the standards, and the stack of things that needed doing yesterday, there never seems to be enough space to actually use them.
If you have been wondering how to bring more creativity into your teaching and into yourself as an educator, you are asking exactly the right question. And the answer might surprise you: creativity is a skill. One that can be developed, practiced, and grown. One that research shows directly connects to how energized and effective you feel in the classroom. And one that, right now, matters more than it ever has before.
The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report consistently ranks creativity among the top two skills required across virtually every professional field. The demand is not coming from the arts. It is coming from every sector, and it is accelerating. For educators, this creates both a real challenge and a genuinely exciting opportunity.
What Does Creative Thinking Actually Mean for Educators?
Creativity is about far more than being artistic or coming up with wild ideas in a brainstorm. At its core, creative thinking is the ability to imagine possibilities that do not yet exist and then take action to bring them into the world.
That second part matters so much. Creativity is the full arc from the spark of an idea to the moment you actually do something with it. It is imagination in motion.
For educators, this shows up every single day. It shows up when you redesign a lesson because a new approach would serve your students better. When you find a fresh way to reach a student you have been searching to connect with for weeks. When you advocate for a change in your school and you have to believe in it long before anyone else does. Teaching, at its best, is a deeply creative act. You already know this. You feel it on the days when everything comes alive in the room.
Why Teacher Training Has Left Creativity Behind
Most of us grew up in a school system that placed its energy on memorizing facts, following rules, and finding the right answer. Students who thought differently or asked unexpected questions were often redirected rather than celebrated. Many of the most creative minds in any classroom learned early to hold that part of themselves back. Breathe for Change co-founder Michael Fenchel is the first to raise his hand and say he was absolutely one of those students.
Researcher Kyung Hee Kim’s landmark analysis of approximately 300,000 Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking scores found that while general knowledge scores rose across the latter half of the twentieth century, creative thinking ability has declined measurably since the 1990s. Schools were preparing students to perform on tests, and the creative capacity that cannot be measured on a Scantron sheet was quietly left behind.
The world those schools were designed for has changed enormously. Technology now handles the kind of recall and retrieval that education once spent years training us for. What technology cannot touch is the human ability to imagine something new, to see a problem from a perspective no one has tried, and to bring an original idea into reality. Those are the skills that matter most right now, and they are exactly what our students are hungriest for.
This matters for you as an educator because you were shaped by that same system. You were trained inside it, and now you are being asked to teach in a world that calls for something more expansive and alive. The beautiful truth is that creativity is a skill, and skills grow. You likely have far more of it than you have ever been given space to express.
Can Creativity Be Taught? What the Research Says
Yes, and the evidence is compelling.
A study published in Frontiers in Education found that professional development focused on teacher creativity directly increased educators’ joy, adaptability, and sense of buoyancy in their work while significantly reducing secondary traumatic stress. Teachers who developed their own creative capacity showed up differently in their classrooms, and their students responded with greater engagement and motivation.
The key insight the research keeps returning to is this one: a teacher has to develop their own creative capacity before they can genuinely cultivate it in students. You cannot model what you have never been given space to practice yourself. This is the educator-first principle at the heart of everything Breathe for Change does, and it is what separates professional development rooted in human capacity from professional development rooted in strategy alone.
The Five Skills That Build Toward Creative Thinking
Creativity grows from a foundation of other skills, each one opening the door for the next. At Breathe for Change, these five competencies form the Cognitive Intelligence layer of our Human Intelligence framework, a research-backed model for whole-person educator development used by more than 10,000 certified educators across all 50 states.
Focus is the ability to direct your attention on purpose in a world that is constantly pulling it elsewhere. Think about what it feels like when you are fully present with a student, really listening, really there. That quality of attention is where everything creative begins.
Critical thinking is the ability to look at the information around you with genuine curiosity, asking where an idea came from, whether it holds up, and what assumptions might be quietly shaping it. In a time when information arrives faster than we can process it, this skill is one of the greatest gifts we can develop in ourselves and pass on to our students.
Decision-making is the practice of choosing how to respond with care rather than simply reacting. Every interaction you have as an educator involves a decision, from the biggest choices about your teaching philosophy to the fraction-of-a-second moments when a student needs something unexpected and you have to find your way toward the response that will actually reach them.
Collaboration is the understanding that our best thinking grows when it is shared. When people bring different strengths and perspectives together, they can imagine things that none of them could have reached alone. Creativity flourishes in community, and it grows when ideas are offered freely and met with a generous yes and.
Creativity is what emerges when all four of these capacities are working together. It is the ability to imagine possibilities that do not yet exist and to take the action needed to bring them into reality.
You Are Already More Creative Than You Know
Think about a moment in your classroom when something unexpected happened and you found your way through it. Maybe a lesson took a turn you had not planned and you followed it somewhere wonderful. Maybe a student said something that reframed everything you thought you knew about how to teach a concept. Maybe you stayed late one afternoon piecing together something new because you could feel it was going to matter.
That was creativity. You have been practicing it all along, often in the very moments that felt most uncertain.
The invitation now is to develop it with more intention and more joy. When teachers feel creatively alive, their students feel it. The energy in the room shifts in ways that are hard to describe but impossible to miss. The students who are watching you start to believe that their own creativity is worth something as well. That ripple matters more than any of us can fully measure.
If you are ready for a structured, community-supported way to develop these five capacities, the Breathe for Change Human Intelligence Certification walks educators through each competency with evidence-based practices, peer collaboration, and real classroom application. It is built to fit your life as a working educator and designed to change how you teach and how you feel about teaching.
Try This Today: A Two-Minute Vision Practice
Find a comfortable position, bring your hands over your heart, and take a slow breath. Let your body settle for just a moment before you begin.
Ask yourself what your big vision is as an educator. Not what is expected of you, but what you genuinely want to create. What kind of classroom do you dream about? What do you hope your students carry with them long after they leave your room? What would make you feel most proud when you look back on this season of your work?
Let the vision be big. Let it be yours. Hold it warmly for a moment, and then ask yourself what one small action you could take this week that moves in that direction.
Creativity begins right here, with the willingness to imagine and the courage to take one step toward what you can see.
To go deeper into all five competencies of cognitive intelligence and hear the practices that bring each one to life in the classroom, listen to the latest episode of A Work of Heart with Breathe for Change co-founders Dr. Ilana Nankin and Michael Fenchel. And if you are ready to do this work for yourself, Breathe for Change’s Master’s program is enrolling now.
