Inventiveness in the 21st-Century Classroom

So once upon a time the industrial revolution thrust society's economic power into the hands a of a very few entrepreneurial men.  These men in turn created thousands of strenuous factory jobs that required little to no creativity for their execution, thereby limiting the importance of creativity as skill for centuries to come.  Now the forces of this century have amassed together to renew that importance.  The outsourcing of factory jobs overseas and the emergence of electronic mediums such as the internet have shifted the US economy from industrial to service/information, where communication and creativity are the keys to success.  Greater communicative abilities have allowed for the free flow of ideas and the recognition of societal complexities by a growing number of people.  This awareness has in turn made businesses/governments realize that innovative ideas can come from anywhere, therefore making inventiveness an essential skill in business, service, and citizenship. 

The problem is that educators are ill-equipped to teach creativity.  It is, after all, impossible to teach creativity under any direct instructional approach.  Creativity is an internally developed skill that cannot simply be relayed to students.  Social constructivist approaches must be adopted as teachers realize they can only give students the tools and opportunities to create, not the skill itself.  In English courses we can teach literature/media studies/grammar/writing techniques, but the students must be given the opportunity to do something with it.  Literature exemplifies creativity; grammar provides the framework; writing/media allow for effective communication, but students must be able to use these tools to create.

In my reasoning, there are currently two ways in which English teachers can encouragement student creativity: written and oral communication.  Writing can be analytical, creative, or practical, and students can communicate orally through presentations, debates, or performance.  In all of these cases, since the student is responsible for the work, creativity can be encouraged.  And right now, there seem to be only two main obstacles: 1) rubrics are too specific, and 2) information/resources are not readily available.  So as teachers wishing to encourage creativity, we should not make rubrics unnecessarily specific.  We give them guidance but allow for opportunities to explore and create.  An academic example might be starting as essay question with 'what is the significance of...', knowing that what is significant will be different for each student and allow for many different approaches in answering the question.  That being said, resources and information must be readily available to students to make the creative/exploratory process as painless as possible.  Students should not feel forced to create.  And teachers should reward every facet of creativity - originality, complexity, initiative, etc.  Whether that reward should be a grade is a much trickier question.  How do we assess creativity?  Short answer: I don't know.