Dr Jesvir Kaur Mahil · September 2026
Questions are often presented as powerful tools for stimulating creativity. But a question does not create creativity simply because it is open-ended, unusual or positioned at the top of a cognitive hierarchy. Drawing on practitioner research I first conducted in 2013 and revisited in 2026, this article explores the hidden complexity surrounding questioning for creativity. Learners interpret questions through prior knowledge, motivation, confidence, language, assessment expectations and classroom culture. Creative thinking also requires opportunities to generate alternatives, exercise judgement, receive feedback and revise ideas. I therefore argue that the educator’s task is not simply to find the right question, but to create the conditions in which questions can do meaningful intellectual work.
Teachers frequently use questions to stimulate thinking. Yet the assumption that an open or higher-order question will automatically generate higher-order or creative thinking is too simple.
A question is interpreted by a learner through prior knowledge, motivation, confidence, language, expectations about assessment, perceptions of what the teacher wants, and the norms of the classroom.
My 2013 research began with a relatively direct question:
What type of questions can teachers use to develop creative thinking skills in learners studying vocational Business courses?
What emerged was a deeper question:
Under what conditions can questions actually open up creative thinking?
That shift—from finding the “right question” to understanding the conditions surrounding questioning—is the central argument of this updated paper.
Creativity is no longer easily dismissed as a specialist concern of art, design or media education.
The OECD’s first international PISA assessment of creative thinking asked 15-year-olds to generate diverse and original ideas and to evaluate and improve ideas in written, visual, social-problem-solving and scientific contexts.
This reinforces a point implicit in my original Business Studies research: creativity is relevant wherever people need to imagine alternatives, solve problems, communicate differently or innovate.
Recent OECD analysis adds an important nuance. Creative ideas tend to be judged through qualities including originality, appropriateness and value, but the importance of those qualities varies with the task and context.
Creativity is therefore neither a single generic behaviour nor merely the production of something that looks different.
Generative AI makes this educational task still more important.
If technology can instantly produce plausible options, summaries, images and draft solutions, the human educational value increasingly lies in framing worthwhile problems, generating alternatives, challenging assumptions, exercising judgement, improving ideas and deciding what is valuable.
Thirty learners aged 16–18 from three Level 2 and Level 3 BTEC Business Studies classes participated.
The activity asked learners to create an academic poster on a Business subject they understood. It was structured around the revised Bloom taxonomy’s “Create” processes:
Generate → Plan → Produce
Learners first examined an academic poster and were prompted to consider its purpose, audience, creative features and possible improvements.
They were then asked to design and produce a creative academic poster and respond to two questions that were particularly important to the study:
In what ways is your poster creative?
What is the unique selling point (USP) of this poster?
The second question deliberately used familiar Business language. It also presupposed that the poster possessed a USP, just as the first presupposed that it contained creativity.
The intention was to use language to direct attention towards originality.
The classroom observations disrupted several of my assumptions.
At least one learner in each class asked whether the activity was part of the assignment.
The majority jumped quickly to the final “produce” phase rather than investing substantial time in generating and planning.
Fewer than 10 of the 30 learners used online examples to support the generation phase.
Learners generally equated creativity with pictures, colour and layout. Only two interpreted “USP” as doing something their peers had not done.
I also discovered that I had no sufficiently explicit criteria for judging how creative the completed posters were.
The intervention therefore revealed something more useful than a list of successful question stems:
it revealed why a well-intended question can fail to produce the thinking a teacher expects.
When a teacher asks, “In what ways is your poster creative?”, the grammar implies that creativity is already present.
This may encourage a learner to search for evidence of creativity, but it can also produce superficial justification.
A learner can answer “because it has colours and pictures” without reconsidering the underlying idea.
Questions can therefore prompt, constrain, cue, suggest and sometimes lead.
Their wording is not neutral.
The 2013 study exposed a semantic gap.
I was looking for originality in the message and thinking process; many learners were looking for visible decorative difference.
Both were responding to the word “creative”, but not to the same concept.
Before asking learners to demonstrate creativity, educators need to make the construct discussable.
The recurring learner question—
“Is this a part of our assignment?”
—was not simply resistance.
It exposed the incentive system surrounding learning.
When formal criteria reward description, explanation, analysis and evaluation but do not explicitly value originality or idea development, learners can rationally prioritise what earns the qualification.
Questioning pedagogy therefore cannot be separated from assessment design.
If creativity matters educationally but is invisible in assessment, the teacher is asking learners to invest effort in a capability the system appears not to value.
The original activity contained generation, planning and production, but many learners moved straight to production.
Current OECD evidence helps explain why this matters.
Tasks asking students to produce multiple different ideas can support divergent idea generation, while learners may still need help evaluating and selecting good ideas afterwards.
Creative thinking involves both:
opening possibilities
and
exercising judgement.
A colourful poster, a novel marketing strategy, an elegant scientific hypothesis and an original interpretation of a text do not demonstrate creativity in the same way.
OECD evidence supports the view that creative performance varies across domains.
The question must therefore connect creativity to disciplinary knowledge and purpose rather than treating “be creative” as a context-free instruction.
Creative thought can require incubation, exploration and revision.
A classroom culture dominated by rapid task completion can work against those processes.
The original observation that many learners finished in less than half the available time is therefore not a trivial behavioural detail.
It points to a deeper tension between:
efficiency and exploration.
Creativity is not the opposite of knowledge.
Learners need enough subject understanding to recognise conventions, make useful connections and know when an idea is genuinely different.
A question can activate and reorganise knowledge, but it cannot substitute for it.
Bloom’s taxonomy remains useful as a vocabulary for designing varied cognitive activity, but my original paper already questioned a simple ladder in which “create” is automatically the highest form of thought.
Understanding, evaluating, imagining, generating, testing and revising often interact recursively.
A better model is an ecology of questioning.
The effectiveness of a question depends on its relationship with:
the learner • the task • prior knowledge • classroom climate • available time • feedback • assessment • opportunity to iterate
A powerful question is therefore not an instructional technique operating in isolation.
It is an intervention in a complex learning system.
Rather than searching for one perfect creative question, educators can use questions for different intellectual purposes.
Purpose: Establish purpose and constraints.
Question: What problem are we really trying to solve?
Risk: Learners may simply restate the brief.
Purpose: Challenge the obvious or habitual.
Question: What are we taking for granted?
Risk: Challenge without knowledge can become random guessing.
Purpose: Generate multiple possibilities.
Question: What are five genuinely different ways we could approach this?
Risk: Quantity can replace quality.
Purpose: Change perspective or boundary.
Question: How would a customer, competitor or outsider see this?
Risk: Perspective-taking can become formulaic.
Purpose: Combine knowledge in new ways.
Question: What could we borrow from a completely different field?
Risk: Connections may be novel but irrelevant.
Purpose: Use limits productively.
Question: What could we do if we had half the budget and twice the impact?
Risk: Constraints can inhibit novices if they are too severe.
Purpose: Apply criteria and judgement.
Question: Which idea is most original, useful and appropriate—and why?
Risk: Premature judgement can close divergence.
Purpose: Iterate rather than settle.
Question: How could we make this idea more valuable or surprising?
Risk: Learners may polish a weak underlying idea.
Purpose: Make the creative process visible.
Question: What changed in your thinking, and what caused it to change?
Risk: Reflection after the event may rationalise rather than reveal thinking.
Rather than asking one supposedly powerful question, educators can deliberately move learners through a sequence.
Agree what creativity could look like in this discipline and task. Show contrasting examples and discuss originality, usefulness and appropriateness.
Make clear that more than one answer is possible and that early ideas do not have to be correct or polished.
Ask what learners already know, what they need to know and what examples or analogies might inform the task.
Require several meaningfully different possibilities. Avoid evaluating the first idea too early.
Change perspective, constraints, audience, scale or assumptions.
Where possible, give ideas time rather than rewarding immediate completion.
Ask learners to compare, combine, select and justify ideas using explicit criteria.
Turn the chosen idea into something that can be examined, challenged or experienced.
Use feedback to revise the idea rather than treating the first finished product as the end.
Ask which question, constraint, example, conversation or piece of feedback changed the learner’s thinking.
Generative AI complicates questioning in two opposite ways.
It can expand the possibility space by rapidly offering alternatives, perspectives and provocations.
But it can also short-circuit the struggle through which learners learn to generate, select and refine ideas themselves.
The educational question is therefore not simply whether AI was used.
It is:
What thinking did the learner remain responsible for?
Useful questions for an AI-enabled creative task include:
What ideas did you generate before consulting AI?
Which AI suggestion was conventional or predictable, and how do you know?
What assumptions are embedded in the generated response?
Which idea did you reject, and on what grounds?
How have you changed, combined or improved the suggestions?
What evidence or disciplinary knowledge supports your final choice?
What is distinctively your intellectual contribution?
UNESCO’s AI competency work positions learners not merely as consumers of AI output but as responsible and creative users and co-creators.
That makes questioning even more central—but only when questions demand judgement rather than merely better prompting.
My original research identified a structural contradiction: educators and awarding bodies could advocate creative thinking while formal success criteria did not necessarily require learners to demonstrate it.
This remains an important curriculum-design issue.
If creativity is an intended outcome, assessment should make the process as well as the product visible.
Depending on context, evidence might include:
idea generation;
comparison of alternatives;
explanation of originality and value;
response to constraints;
iteration after feedback;
and
reflection on how an idea changed.
Recent OECD work demonstrates that creative responses can be evaluated through structured approaches while also showing that creativity cannot be reduced to one simple measure.
Originality, appropriateness and value matter, but task demands and context also affect judgement.
This strengthens rather than weakens the case for explicit criteria and professional judgement.
The 2013 project was small-scale practitioner research involving 30 learners from one Further Education college.
Opportunity sampling was used; there was no comparison group; the teacher was also the researcher; the intervention occurred over a short period; and the interpretation of creativity was itself one of the contested variables.
My pre-existing belief in the power of questions may also have shaped observation and interpretation.
The study should therefore not be presented as evidence that particular question stems cause creativity.
Its lasting value lies elsewhere:
it exposed the system of meanings, incentives and pedagogical conditions through which questions acquire—or lose—their creative power.
The question I asked in 2013 was:
What type of questions can teachers use to develop creative thinking skills?
The research persuaded me that this question was necessary but insufficient.
There is no magic syntax that makes another person creative.
“What if?”
“How might we?”
“What else?”
“Why not?”
and
“What is unique about this?”
can all open intellectual space, but the response depends on what surrounds the question.
Questions stimulate creativity when learners understand the purpose, possess relevant knowledge, feel permitted to explore, have time to generate alternatives, encounter productive constraints, receive feedback, can revise their ideas, and know that the educational system genuinely values the thinking being requested.
This is why questioning for creativity is complex.
A question is not a key that simply unlocks creativity.
It is one element in a dynamic system of language, knowledge, motivation, assessment, relationships, context and judgement.
The educator’s task is therefore not simply to ask more questions.
It is to design conditions in which questions can do meaningful intellectual work.
Define creativity in relation to the discipline and task before asking students to demonstrate it.
Make the difference between producing something and producing something creative explicit.
Use sequences of questions that separate divergent idea generation from convergent evaluation.
Ask for several genuinely different ideas before allowing learners to settle on one.
Build in time for exploration, incubation, feedback and iteration.
Align assessment criteria with the creative thinking educators say they value.
Use examples and counterexamples to make originality, appropriateness and value discussable.
Treat learners’ questions—such as “Is this assessed?”—as information about the learning system, not merely resistance.
Use generative AI, where appropriate, to provoke comparison and critique rather than replace student ideation and judgement.
Evaluate questioning as part of a wider learning ecology rather than as an isolated teaching technique.
Mahil, J. (2013). The Complexity in Using Questions to Develop Creative Thinking Skills in Learners Doing BTEC Business Studies Courses in Further Education Colleges. Practitioner research paper.
Anderson, L. W. & Krathwohl, D. R. (eds.) (2001). A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing. Longman.
Hattie, J. (2012). Visible Learning for Teachers. Routledge.
Petty, G. (2006). Evidence-Based Teaching. Nelson Thornes.
Ritchhart, R., Church, M. & Morrison, K. (2011). Making Thinking Visible. Jossey-Bass.
Walsh, J. A. & Sattes, B. D. (2011). Thinking Through Quality Questioning. Corwin.
OECD (2024). PISA 2022 Results (Volume III): Creative Minds, Creative Schools. OECD Publishing.
OECD (2025). Seven Questions about Creativity and Creative Thinking: What Do PISA 2022 Data Tell Us? OECD Publishing.
UNESCO (2024; updated 2026). AI Competency Framework for Students.
This article is a substantially revised and updated version of practitioner research I first conducted in 2013 on the complexity of using questions to develop creative thinking skills among learners studying BTEC Business courses in Further Education.
The original empirical observations and research context have been retained and reinterpreted in light of contemporary evidence on creative thinking and the changing educational context.
The updated paper does not claim that the original small-scale study proves causal relationships. Instead, it uses the study as a practice-based lens through which to examine the complexity of questioning for creativity.
Its central proposition is that questions should not be understood as isolated techniques that somehow produce creativity on demand.
Questions create conditions for creativity—but their power depends upon the wider learning system in which they are asked.
Dr Jesvir Kaur Mahil (September 2026)
© 2026 Dr Jesvir Kaur Mahil. All rights reserved.
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