We often encourage students to be creative, think outside the box, and find their own voice. But what if one of the best ways to cultivate originality is to begin with imitation? Creativity rarely happens in a vacuum. It grows as we encounter new ideas, study examples, borrow techniques, and eventually remix what we’ve learned into something new. In my latest article and podcast episode, I explore what this looks like.

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Do Exemplars Make Us Less Creative?

It’s my third year of teaching and I’m meeting with a colleague. “I think it helps to give them multiple exemplars but, I don’t know. I worry that they are just copying what they see. So the quality is good but they aren’t finding their voice.“

He nods. “I have the same fear. Are they just imitating the style they see in the best essays they read?” 

“And then what happens when we pull the exemplars away and they are writing from scratch? Will they become so dependent on exemplars and not be able to write independently?” 

At this point we decided to craft our own action research. We did some preliminary reading of a few journal articles that seemed a bit mixed. But we didn’t exactly do a full-scale lit review. Next, we crafted a wholly unscientific experiment. We gave half of our classes exemplars and the other half no exemplars. We controlled for achievement levels and subgroup categories (ELL, Gifted, Special Education). Then we graded their writing on a shared benchmark test with the Six Traits of Writing along with a separate scoring rubric for divergent thinking in writing. 

The result? The group with exemplars had better writing on a benchmark test where they had no access to exemplars. They scored really high on voice. But they also did really well with divergent thinking. 

Later, we tweaked this by including exemplars that were for another genre of writing (creative writing before doing persuasive) as well as multiple prompts of a different topic. We found not only higher divergent thinking but more creative risk-taking. 

One of my key take aways is that consuming is actually vital for routine creativity. I used to believe that creativity began in the mind. Ideas popped in and people responded externally by making things. As a teacher, I was frustrated when students wanted to see exemplars or use templates. I would beg them to take risks creatively. Make something different. Be bold. Branch out even if you screw up. Just be bold.

But what I’ve learned is that creative thinking often begins with a process of observing and even copying our way into something more creative. 

 

The Myth of Originality

There’s a certain kind of novice avant-garde work that I sometimes see with university students. An artist attempts to create a work in an entirely unique style different from any of their previous artistic inspirations. A filmmaker runs with a concept entirely original in a way that eschews any conventional storytelling structure. But then you experience the work and immediately it feels like every other novice avant-garde work. In trying to be original, it somehow lacks originality.  

Meanwhile, some of the most original works of art were created by people who weren’t trying to be different “for different’s sake.” Instead, they were attempting to make something meaningful and chose a different way of getting there. 

Consider the Impressionist painters. They weren’t trying to be original. They were challenging the status quo. The goal wasn’t originality for the sake of originality. Originality was the byproduct of creating something meaningful and thought-provoking. The Impressionists weren’t scratching their heads saying, “How can we be more original?” They were asking, “What if we painted color as we saw it in the moment?” 

 

Consuming Is Necessary for Creating

“We need kids to be creators, not consumers.”

I’ve heard this statement so many times at conference and in social media. I get it. We want students to be creative and they are living in a consumer culture. That’s a reality. But is consumption actually a bad thing?

Every creative person is also a critical consumer. I’ve never met a chef who says, “I really don’t like to eat food and I could care less about what I eat.” I’ve never met a musician who says, “Yeah, I really don’t listen to music.”

People who love making stuff are also critical consumers of the very same stuff they create. Authors read. Chefs eat. Painters go to galleries. Engineers pay attention to the physics of the world around them. Academics read journal articles.

The key piece there is critical consumers. It is not mindless or automatic. These creative thinkers actively scrutinize ideas, approaches, and creative works. Whether it’s an engineer looking at other examples as she solves problems or an artist visiting a gallery to explore a new work, they offer a critical eye that shapes their own approach. 

Creativity depends on what we take in. It doesn’t happen in a vacuum. If it did, it would suck (see what I did there). We collect ideas, knowledge, examples, styles, techniques, and experiences. Then we imitate, combine, remix, and transform them to make them our own. 

Often, there is a cycle where critical consuming leads to inspiration and that then leads to creative work, which helps you become a better consumer and cycle continues. 

So, let’s think about how that works and what this means in a classroom setting. 

 

Knowledge Creates Possibilities.

In the opening story, I shared how shocked I was that both templates and exemplars actually led to improvements in divergent thinking. I assumed that students would simply copy what they saw. However, seeing multiple examples (especially examples that were just different enough from their assignment) helped them see the possibilities. 

I recently mentioned how quantity often leads us into the next adjacent possible. Prior knowledge can do the same thing. The more you understand a domain, the more connections become available.

This type of critical consuming takes time to develop. We typically move through three phases. The first is awareness. Sometimes this is a passive exposure. You hear a style of music being played in the background and it seems unusual. After a few months of it, you find yourself thinking, “I kind-of like this.” Next thing you know, you’re choosing to listen to indie-fused techno-polka. Or maybe not. Other times, it’s more direct. You watch a particular movie or you see a production or you read a book and suddenly you’re hooked. 

As an educator, this is why I will never fully embrace completely choice-driven learning. Sometimes students need to be exposed to new media, topics, themes, and skills. I want to expose them to a novel that they would never have considered before. I want them to learn about topics that they might, on the surface, consider boring. My challenge is to help students see the relevance and built awareness so they can eventually move into the second stage.

The next phase is active consuming. Here you are more likely to seek out the works that you are consuming (whether it is art, music, food, poetry). You aren’t yet a fan, but you start developing a taste for a particular style and you find yourself thinking more deeply about whatever work you are consuming. Notice that the term “consuming” is pretty loose here. A student might “consume” by playing suddenly getting into a new game they learned in P.E.

Sometimes this phase is more focused on the aesthetics and sometimes it is more focused on practical utility. A student might think, “Wow, that’s actually pretty fun” or she might think, “That’s actually kind of useful.” Either way, they are actively seeking out and consuming in this phase.

Eventually, you move into critical consuming. Here, you start becoming an expert. You see the nuances in both form and functionality. It’s in this phase that your taste becomes more refined. You begin to appreciate the craft involved in making what you are consuming. You are able to distinguish between good and bad quality.

Let’s consider this at a classroom level. A student who has only read one type of poetry might struggle to write an original poem. But after encountering haiku, spoken word, free verse, and narrative poetry, that same student suddenly has more possibilities to draw from. This sense of awareness expands into more active consuming until he starts developing a certain stylistic taste. 

Or consider a STEM class where students are designing solutions to reduce plastic waste. By studying existing inventions, students begin making connections they wouldn’t have considered before. A girl who starts exploring one type of invention might slowly start nerding out on a particular approach and slowly become a more active “consumer” of designs. 

Even in math, students who have learned multiple strategies for solving problems are better equipped to develop their own approaches. In each case, we’re not limiting student creativity by providing examples and building background knowledge. We’re expanding the range of possibilities students can imagine.

 

The Creative Act of Curation 

Simply consuming more isn’t enough. Creative people become selective collectors. They notice things, save them, organize them, return to them. Here’s where curation comes in.  Curation goes beyond critical consuming and into a space where we organize and explain. We contextualize information and set up our own categories for creative works or approaches. 

The best curators are the ultimate geeks. They nerd out on key ideas, movements, information, and artistic works. Whether it’s a painting or a mathematical process, they find joy in the process of discovery. While there is an overlap with criticism, curators are more likely to geek out on the subject in a way that is explanatory instead of evaluative. This is often combined with a desire to make a work accessible to the public.

On some level, both curators and critics are the gatekeepers of information. However, while critics are the ones shutting the gates, curators are often the ones who open the gates and convincing people to come inside. At the same time, a true curator is someone who is both a fan and a critic. They are constantly celebrating but also critiquing work.

Curation itself becomes a creative mindset that students develop as they engage in an ongoing curation process:

As an educator, you can do full curation projects. I worked with a high school English teacher who did commonplace books. It was a low-tech, hands-on concept borrowed from a popular practice in the 18th and 19th centuries. Students printed articles and cut out pieces from magazines. Then they annotated these sections and wrote commentary. They had conversations in the margins. I’ve seen students do curation projects in art and history as well. 

But we can also integration curation into the research process for a design thinking project. As students collect ideas, designs, and information, they can organize what they consume and add some commentary and explanations.

 

Imitation as Practice.

Critical consuming and curation are both a critical part of routine creativity. However, ultimately we want students to engage in the creative process. We want them to design and build things. Whether they are solving a complex word problem or painting a canvas, we want students to engage in creative action. 

However, this typically starts with imitation. We learn creative forms by copying them. Writers imitate writers. Musicians learn other people’s songs. Artists reproduce techniques. Kids build LEGO sets before inventing their own.

Over time, though, students move from imitation into a place of modifying and remixing what they’ve been copying. Students in a writing workshop might begin by imitating the sentence structures of their favorite authors before experimenting with their own styles. It tends to happen subconsciously, but you can also ask them to reflect on what they see and then use a similar approach. Or you might craft sentence frames they can borrow that connect to certain stylistic choices they might make. 

In an art class, students might recreate a famous painting to understand the artist’s use of color, perspective, and composition. But then they can move into a space pretty quickly where they create their own variation. 

You can even do this with basic protocols and strategies. So, you might say, “Choose from one of these three graphic organizers but then modify it to make it your own and show me why you changed the graphic organizer.” 

One simple classroom routine is Imitate, Modify, Create. Students begin by closely examining an exemplar and attempting to replicate a particular technique or approach. Next, they modify one or two elements while keeping the basic structure intact. Finally, they create something new, drawing on what they’ve learned but making their own creative decisions. 

For example, students might imitate the structure of a poem, change the rhythm or imagery, and eventually write an entirely new poem using techniques from multiple poets. The goal isn’t to produce perfect copies. It’s to use imitation as a form of practice that gradually leads to greater creative independence.

 

Remixing What You’ve Collected

Eventually the influences collide and we start mixing and remixing what we have been imitating. So, Adam Duritz combines certain vocal stylings from Van Morrison and The Band along with jam band guitar rifts from The Grateful Dead or The Byrds. Tame Impala becomes part Lennon, part Flaming Lips, part Queen, part something entirely Kevin Parker. The combination becomes distinctive.

This is true of things we consider to be “artistic,” but you also see it in STEM fields. Engineers copy the styles of multiple approaches but then they mash up inspiration from multiple domains and create something deeply original. Biomimicry is a great example. Engineers have studied the structure of bird wings to improve aircraft design, borrowed the shape of kingfisher beaks to reduce noise in high-speed trains, and examined the tiny hooks on burrs to develop Velcro. 

Other times, creativity happens when we borrow an approach from one field and apply it to another. Behavioral economics emerged when researchers began integrating insights from psychology into traditional economic models. Instead of assuming that people always make rational decisions, psychologists Kahneman and Tversky demonstrated how cognitive biases make us largely irrational in decision-making.

In each case, innovation doesn’t begin with a blank slate. It begins with careful observation and imitation. But the real creativity happens when someone recognizes that an idea from one context might solve a problem in another. What looks like a breakthrough is often the result of connecting ideas that previously seemed unrelated.

 

From Influence to Voice

We often tell people to “find their voice,” as though it’s hiding somewhere inside them. But I’m not sure a voice is something we find so much as develop. True, we need introspection and self-knowledge. We need to tap into our lived experiences in writing or in creating art. We need to be bold in our idiosyncratic approaches. 

And yet . . . we often develop our voice through output. It often starts with copying. We problem-solve in a way that’s similar to other people’s problem-solving. We use other people’s protocols. We find multiple products that we find interesting. We mimic someone’s musical style or writing style. In this phase, you’re developing discernment. You’re figuring out what you like, both in others and in yourself. It’s deeply introspective but also external. 

Over time, we start to mash-up multiple styles. We connect ideas in innovative ways. We apply approaches from one domain from the other. We start to innovate in small ways. We take tiny creative risks and look for the payoffs. In this very iterative way, our voice becomes our own. We continue to branch out into new areas that go beyond those who influenced us. 

Eventually, you look backward across a body of work and notice your voice emerging in a slow and even iterative way. We often imagine artists finding their voice through a solitary and introspective way but often, it’s something we discover by doing.

The goal isn’t to escape influence. It’s to develop such a rich and varied collection of influences that you’re no longer simply copying any one of them. But perhaps you make your way toward a voice in a way that is more outward and even social than you realize. But this requires quantity. The more you create, the more your voice emerges. 

 

Student Blog Projects 

I used to begin the school year with Geek Out Blogs. At first, we started with open choice. Just write what you want to write on any topic you’re into. The problem is students didn’t know much about blogging. So, I shifted toward this model of consuming into creating. 

We began by looking at exemplars from a wide range of topics. We had sports blogs and foodie blogs and fashion blogs. You get the idea. We looked at multiple types of writing, ranging from personal narrative to sharp commentary, to practical how-to articles. At first, students were simply becoming aware of the different possibilities. 

But then they began actively seeking out blogs they enjoyed and curating collections of their favorites. They started noticing the craft behind the writing. Some loved the conversational tone of personal blogs. Others gravitated toward humor, storytelling, or the way certain bloggers used headings, images, and short paragraphs. Here, they were critiquing but also slowly starting to curate.

Next, students practiced imitating some of these techniques in their own writing. They might borrow the structure of an opening paragraph or experiment with a particular style of humor. At times, I had strict rules about what they needed to imitate (you need to create a listical). Other times, they could choose what they wanted to borrow and they would explain their rationale in a short Google Form survey. 

But as they continued writing, something interesting happened. They began mixing and remixing these influences. A student might combine the humor of one blogger with the storytelling of another while developing an entirely different approach to organizing ideas. Over time, their blogs became less like the exemplars they had studied and more like something distinctly their own. They weren’t finding their voice by avoiding imitation. They were developing it through imitation, experimentation, and repeated practice.

In other words, they found their creative voice, not by trying to be original, but by trying to write in a way that fit their own tastes. 

As I think about our current students, a unique voice will be something they need to develop as they face an unpredictable future. In a world of AI slop, they’re unique writing style will stand out. Surrounded by fast automation, a unique approach to problem-solving will help them handle “wicked problems” (problems where the solution has unintended consequences.