Creativity and Cooperation in the Elementary Music Classroom*

The author examines attitudes towards, and the effects of focus on, creativity and cooperation in the elementary music classroom. First, elementary music teachers were interviewed regarding their values towards creativity and cooperation. Then, a curriculum was field tested that utilized cooperative learning and emphasized activities designed to encourage creative thinking and problem solving. A pretreatment-posttreatment study, with experimental and control group, was conducted to measure actual changes in student levels of creativity and attitudes towards cooperation. A follow-up of creativity measures was conducted four years later. Results indicate that elementary music teachers can adapt cooperative learning models to their teaching and can, short-term, influence students' levels of creativity and attitudes towards cooperation. Implications and opportunities for social-psychological creativity research and classroom educators are discussed. In 1983, Goodlad observed that, in general, there was a “gap between the rhetoric of individual flexibility, originality, and creativity … and the cultivation of these [things] in our schools” (p. 241) and that schools provided students with little opportunity to develop “satisfying relations with others based on respect, trust, cooperation, and caring” (p. 240). Goodlad encouraged teachers in the arts to provide opportunities for creative problem solving and to “boldly demonstrate the potentiality for doing through the arts what cannot be done readily through the other fields” (p. 238). His appeal to arts teachers is reminiscent of Maslow (1968):