I want you to picture a specific student. The one who drives you a little bit crazy. The one who might talk while you’re talking, who wanders in late, who questions every rule you worked so hard to put in place. The one who may come with a splash of chaos and a dash of rule-breaking.

But here’s the strange part. Deep down, you kind of love that student. You root for them, and you’re not even totally sure why.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe after years of teaching: that student, the one who drives you crazy, is very often the one holding the most creative potential in your entire room. We just don’t always recognize it, because it doesn’t show up the way we’ve been trained to look for it.

This is the seventh action from The Future Creative: Spot Creative Potential.

Here’s the tricky thing about creative potential. It’s hard to see because it’s hidden. Creativity researcher Mark Runco describes it to us this way- Potential exists in everyone, but it stays invisible until it’s expressed. And once it’s expressed, it’s no longer potential; it’s a creative act.

So spotting creative potential isn’t about catching the finished product. It’s about noticing the early glimmer, the spark, before it’s fully formed. Todd Lubart, one of the leading voices in this field, asked us to picture holding an acorn in our hand. An acorn doesn’t look like much. But inside it is an entire oak tree, waiting for the right conditions. Your job as an educator isn’t to manufacture the tree. It’s to notice the acorn and create the conditions for it to grow.

Now, Here’s where it may get a bit uncomfortable but its important. When we’re asked to identify our most capable students, most of us think first of the teacher-pleasers. The ones who cooperate, keep a neat desk, turn things in on time, and make our day run smoothly. And those are wonderful students. But here’s what the research and our guests kept telling us: the straight-A student is not necessarily the one with the most creative capacity.

Creative potential is just as likely to show up in the messy desk. In the offbeat question that makes the whole class turn around. In the kid who won’t stop tinkering with the pencil sharpener until it works better than it did before. It shows up in the risks students take and the ways they stretch past what you asked for.

And this matters for a reason that goes way beyond any single classroom. Too often, opportunities to explore and express creativity are reserved for students who already fit the academic mold or have access to enrichment outside of school. When we broaden our lens and intentionally look for creative potential in every student, we widen the pipeline of thinkers and makers and problem solvers.

So here’s something you can try when you’re back in the classroom. Give every single student the same open-ended challenge. Same starting point, same task, no specialized knowledge required. Something like, “Come up with as many uses as you can for a paperclip,” or “How might we improve the school cafeteria?”

Why does this work? When everyone begins from the same place, individual differences become visible. You start to see who generates the most ideas, who comes up with the most original ones, who connects things in ways you never expected. And here’s the magic: students who would never stand out on a single-answer test suddenly shine. The quiet one in the back. The one who drives you a little bit crazy. The one nobody expected.

Once you’ve done that, take it a step further this year. Pick one student. Maybe the one who challenges you the most. And get curious about them. Invite them to talk. Ask what they geek out about, how they like to spend their time, and what they’d learn more about if they could. Sometimes one conversation, one moment of being truly seen, is the condition that lets that acorn finally take root.

In The Future Creative, we share a whole toolkit of practical strategies for surfacing creative potential. Here’s just one of them: giving students choice in how they show you what they know. Instead of handing all thirty students the exact same one-size-fits-all assignment, you let them choose the medium. A comic strip, a podcast, a model, a piece of art, a performance. When students get to personalize their work, something powerful happens. Their creativity rises to the surface in ways a standard worksheet would never reveal, and you start seeing potential you’d have completely missed.

That’s just one strategy. In the book, we get into open-ended prompts that make potential visible, simple ways to spot it in the first week of school, and even the case for why your school should hand out a creativity award. You’ll find the full set inside.

So this week, start practicing the art of noticing. The next time a student gives you an answer that makes you pause, or asks the question nobody else thought to ask, or drives you a little bit crazy, look closer. There might be an acorn right in front of you.