Where Learning Meets Creativity: The Promise of Guided Play

Abstract

As the United States and other countries consider "educational reform," the discussion appears to be primarily about fostering basic skills and content knowledge. Our contention is that this approach is not suffi cient. Instead, we argue that for twenty-fi rst century success, we must also foster creativity to prepare today's children to excel and solve tomorrow's problems. In this chapter, we offer a thought experiment on how our educational system could achieve these dual goals. We propose that the answer might come from a clearer defi nition of what creativity actually is and from our attempts to infuse creativity into our classrooms through a peda-gogical approach that we call "guided play."Zosh, J. M., Hirsh-pasek, K., Golinkoff, R. M., & Dore, R. A. (2017). Creative Contradictions in Education. Creative Contradictions in Education, 165–180. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21924-0