Category Archives: creativity

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More on Fear

And while we’re on the topic of fear, check out BrendaDee’s post that makes great points about teacher innovation vs tradition:

Once in practice, educators discover that preparing students to be design thinkers, tinkerers, creative problem solvers, leaders etc can be highly abstract and that many of today’s teachers are uncomfortable with the pedagogical changes needed to shift from traditional teaching practices to the education reform required to “make schools places that cultivate creativity” (Florida, 2004).

She also references Nancy Stuewe’s post on teaching and innovation. Powerful questions to ponder:

1. What opportunities do teachers have to make sense of their experiences with innovation and change?

2. We do not make it easy for students to be innovative by making it difficult for teachers to be innovative. Can we describe clearly what is standing in the way of teachers becoming both creative and innovative?

3. Technology changes quickly, teachers regularly come into contact with technology they have no experience with. How do we help them gain this experience and reduce their frustration?

4. To become an architect of learning requires teachers to teach differently than they were taught (we can not give what we do not have). How can we support teachers to build their own profession learning networks during working hours?

5. Given that People not technology will be the solutions to problems, how do we adjust the structure of the working environment to allow for the free flowing exchange of ideas to support their personalized learning?

 

I’ve been wondering about how to make these changes more feasible within the constraints of our working hours as well (though I recognize that traditional “working hours” will be another necessary change). This may be the heart of the matter:

…how do we shift a the system that once discouraged participation to now encourage teachers to engage in mindful, thoughtful interaction with why we have school?

 

image credit

 
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Being Creative

The word creativity has always made me squirm. That’s because I don’t think I am creative.

Not in the sense of being an artist, which is how I had always defined the word. I can’t draw. Or paint.

But last summer, I realized I had limited myself by my own definition so I set out to try to become more creative. I read “Thinkering,” by Michael Michalko, started following Creating Brains, read Fascinate, by Sally Hogshead, and bought myself a Livescribe pen to practice taking notes in a graphic format that I could upload to my blog.

I’m not there yet, but I’m making progress. One idea that resonates with me is the way we need to take two ideas not necessarily connected and find a thread. Reading The Heart of Innovation this morning, I realized this method would also yield good results. He suggests:

WHAT TO DO
1. On a piece of paper, create three parallel headlines — the first, “What Fascinates Me,” the second, “People I Admire,” and the third, “What I Would Do If I Had More Time.”

2. Jot down at least five responses under each headline.

3. Look for connections between your various responses.

4. Write down your inspired ideas. Then circle your favorite.

Read Mitch’s post for a better explanation, and then try it. I’ll post my results and hope you’ll share yours, too.

 
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Mind Over Matter

That phrase has been around for a while. I believe it, and this research helps cement that.

I’m trying to take care of myself this year–focus on good eating, exercise, and meditation. I’ve had good luck with the first two: I am trying to eliminate sugar and processed foods; I am also starting Boot Camp next week. This isn’t just a new resolution. I do this periodically because it makes me feel better.

But I struggle with the meditation, the mindful visualizations that are so important. The Cleveland Clinic lists these benefits to mindful thinking (which is different from positive thinking):

  • Decrease anxiety
  • Decrease pain
  • Enhance sleep
  • Decrease the use of medication for post-surgical pain
  • Decrease side effects of medical procedures
  • Reduce recovery time and shorten hospital stays
  • Strengthen the immune system and enhance the ability to heal
  • Increase sense of control and well-being

That’s where the meditation comes in. I am going to take five to ten minutes each day to sit, eyes closed, music playing in the background, and breathe. We all need time to regroup, and I am starting today.

Wouldn’t it be great to help students find the time to meditate each day? What benefits could we accrue by taking a few minutes with our kids to stop and breathe?

 
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Being Aware

And the walls came tumbling down…

industrial age institutions will continue to expand blindly, unaware of their part in a larger whole or of the consequences of their growth. Presence, Peter Senge
Our church Vestry retreat was this weekend, and I spent time at Roslyn, a quiet Episcopalian retreat center. A speaker yesterday has me thinking more about institutional change, one of my favorite topics. Though he spoke of change in the Episcopalian church, he could have been talking about institutional change in education.
As we talked about ways to build community in our church and offer experiences to meet the needs of our congregation, I also made connections to how we need to change our schools.

Peter Senge, who speaks and writes about systems change (The Fifth Discipline: School That Learn 2000), explores further the role of learning in one of his books, Presence. An Exploration of Profound Change in People, Organizations, and Society (also by O. Scharmer, J. Jarworski, and B. Flowers .) In the introduction he writes:

When any of us acts in a state of fear or anxiety, our actions are likely to revert to what is most habitual: our most instinctual behaviors dominate, ultimately reducing us to the “fight-or-flight” programming of the reptilian brain stem. Collective actions are no different. Even as conditions in the world change dramatically, most businesses, governments, schools, and other large organizations continue to take the same kinds of institutional actions that they always have. This does not mean that no learning occurs. But it is a limited type
of learning: learning how best to react to circumstances we see ourselves as having had no hand in creating.

So often our institutions want to do more of the same. We find ourselves trying to react to, find solutions to, problems that are beyond the scope of what we’ve always done. Instead, we need to find ways to do things differently. In church, it might be trying to meet the needs of parishioners who can’t make Sunday morning worship. Our speaker talked of focusing on Weekly Average Touches rather than Daily Sunday attendance. He talked of early morning discussion groups, evening speakers, online workshops, and even a Saturday morning Farmers Market held at the church.

In schools, this means meeting individuals’ needs where they are, focusing on deeper thinking, and integrating disciplines across the curriculum to  create moments of authentic learning. It means thinking holistically instead of in parts. For both church and school, we must let go of our “past-driven mentality.”

Senge says:

All learning integrates thinking and doing. All learning is about how we interact in the world and the types of capacities that develop from our interactions. As long as our thinking is governed by industrial, “machine age” metaphors such as control, predictability, and “faster is better,” we will continue to re-create institutions as we have, despite their increasing disharmony with the larger world.

Senge says he and the other authors began to see “presence” as “deep listening, of being open beyond one’s preconceptions and historical ways of making sense.We came to see the importance of letting go of old identities and the need to control…”

And so it is with the church, too. Are we open to these shifts? Are we prepared to let go of preconceived ideas?

The end of the introduction closes in this way:

In the end, we concluded that understanding presence and the possibilities of larger fields for change can come only from many perspectives—from the emerging science of living systems, from the creative arts, from profound organizational change experiences—and from directly understanding the generative capacities of nature.
Virtually all indigenous or native cultures have regarded nature or universe or Mother Earth as the ultimate teacher. At few times in history has there been a greater need to rediscover this teacher.

I’ve simplified his book, but the connections I made between our struggle to shift both education and church, the importance of community in both, and our need to think using the Theory of the U (more on that later) have me thinking.

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Authentic Learning Works

How Liveblogging is Changing Journalism

Reading this article about Amir Abo-Shaeer, the recent MacArthur award winner, took me back a few years. Amir has established an experienced-based learning program for his students.  Fast Company reports he runs the engineering Academy “like a business.”

“Students help write grants; they do PR, and they develop our website.” He calls his approach project-based learning and says the students learn both soft skills and business skills so they are ready “to join the world of work.”

“We are going to be left behind if we don’t see a paradigm shift,” says Abo-Shaeer. He therefore wants to see his project-based learning applied to all subjects and taught across the United States in order to meet the demands of “students as consumers of education.”

I applaud Amir for his work and insight into how students learn best– and what we can accomplish when we create the right design for learning.

Years ago, I taught high school journalism along with the standard English courses. Whenever I stopped to think about the difference in the two courses, I was struck with how much the journalism students gained from their real-life work. They wrote, published (yes, even back in the 1980s we used a Mac and published our newspaper at the local printer), and sold advertising. Working in teams, they learned to lead, collaborate, and share. We had real deadlines, and we stuck to them.

In contrast, my English classes, for the most part, sat in rows quietly, discussing the previous night’s reading or taking a quiz.Unfortunately, I hadn’t yet learned how to transfer what I had designed in my journalism classes to the rest of my day.

The journalism students tended to become better writers than my English students. They also approached their learning eagerly, often spending far more time working on our newspaper than our class guidelines required of them. Students engaged in debate about truth and fairness, they set goals, and they learned communication skills. Each student focused on his or her strength, whether advertising, photography, or writing, and yet, they all learned the skills. Heck we were even blogging back in 2004!

I guess  I am a slow learner because I finally realized I could apply similar principles to my English classes. And, as I’ve written before, much improved  learning came from this approach.

Amir has created a powerful program for his science and engineering students. His philosophy of education resonates with all of us who have worked to create project-based, authentic learning in our classes. And now he has been rewarded fully with a grant to teach other teachers.

This works.

image credit: By digitaljournal.com

 
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Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

365-6

Recent online conversations about rules and pencils have me thinking about my own teaching career.

My assigned summer reading before college was Ivan Illich’s book, Deschooling Society. That was 1970.

Before I graduated, I had read John Holt, Jonathan Kozol, and Herbert Kohl. As I moved into the classroom, these people shaped me as a teacher. At least in my head.

Yet, the system often wore me down.

That’s not an excuse, though I know it sounds like one. Fitting a square peg in a round hole isn’t easy. So I struggled to find ways to move around the structure and give choice to my curriculum and flexibility to my teaching style.

But now as I look back, I see that I was afraid. I was fearful of breaking rules, coloring outside the lines, of teaching in ways I knew would most benefit my kids.

Mostly, I felt alone. That was before the internet. Before learning communities. Before transparency. It was difficult to find like-minded people who shared my philosophy or desire to practice differently.

And then my world changed.

In 1986 I bought my first computer. A few years later, I began to use computers with students. A Mac to layout our school newspaper, a PC with PowerPoint to enable kids to create presentations, the text-based world wide web that allowed me to chat with someone in Switzerland one day. My teaching didn’t change overnight, and moving to an independent school did give me more flexibility. But having access to technology and the internet is what truly affected my teaching practice.

Jump forward to 2004, and suddenly I was blogging. And finding community. And support.

You know the rest of the story…because it is also your story. The connections have allowed us to find each other. Networking has enabled us to garner support for our “radical” ideas (tell that to Ivan).

My last year in the classroom helped me change even more.

A conversation with my cousin this summer validated my feelings. Her children attended a high school that requires no set curriculum and no grades. This is my niece’s second year in college. And although she struggled somewhat to convince colleges of her merit (she had no traditional AP courses or typical transcript from a standard school), her personal interview and portfolio sold her colleges and gained her acceptance into her school of choice. Her recent Facebook status read: I LOVE my college.

Freedom to learn works. Illich said this in 1971:

educational webs which heighten the opportunity for each one to transform each moment of his living into one of learning, sharing, and caring

Pretty amazing, huh?

We are better together. That’s the mission statement for Powerful Learning Practice, the folks I’m working with now. It’s like I’ve come full circle.

 
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On Their Own

I have to admit to feeling somewhat disconnected this fall. After all, I’ve taught for most of the past 30 years, recently at Fredericksburg Academy as the instructional tech coordinator and an English teacher. Fall can be difficult for ex-teachers who love being in the classroom.

Today, a colleague shared with me an email and screenshot of work her kids were doing. She had sent it out to the entire faculty and then realized I might enjoy seeing what the students were up to. She was right. So cool.

Here’s her email:

Here is a little story about young, independent, tech savvy students overcoming their obstacles and taking responsibility. Blair is absent today, but she emailed me this morning to tell me that she had made arrangements with her partner about the paper that they were supposed to write together in class. Now, during class both students are typing on the same Google doc at the same time and chatting with each other in the Google chat feature. I thought that it was cool that I could check in on and literally watch students as they worked in my classroom, but this is even better. The best part: they set this up on their own.

Thanks, @jclarkevans for keeping me in the loop. I especially enjoy this coming from Blair, a student who claimed she just “didn’t love” using the laptops two years ago when I taught her ninth grade! (However, she was the one most intrigued by my talk about digital identity.) We never know where our students will go when we allow them to figure things out on their own. And teachers like Jennifer allow this to happen.

 
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Tool Geek? No, Learning Geek….

A recent chat with @snbeach, @baldy7, @datruss and Rob from NH on a PLP info session has me thinking. I mentioned that I got “into all this” (never sure how to categorize these huge shifts in thinking and learning anymore) because I loved playing with “tools.”

Tony said that wasn’t the case for him. But I wonder how many are more like me?

I remember the first time I put my hands on a computer. I was taking a re-certification in 1985 to teach high school again after taking off a few years with my children. A local college offered a class in Basic programming, so I signed up without fully understanding what I was getting into.

Actually, I had never touched a computer, and I was an English major (fully avoiding math and science whenever possible).

Three weeks later, I remember the frustration, the uncertainty, and the exhaustion I felt, trying to use the left side of by brain to logically determine what a loop was and how to write a simple piece of code. On my own for the most part, there was no hand-holding in this course.

Uploaded on May 21, 2009 by Temari 09

By the time I finished,  though, I had learned to write a short grading program that worked.

And I felt a sense of accomplishment.

That one step took me to the next: buying my own computer, figuring out how to manage DOS and Windows apps, and  installing peripherals. I was having so much fun figuring it all out and learning something new, totally in the flow.

And then something amazing happened. I was given a Mac to use in my journalism class, the first computer to be used in the county for any instruction. I began to see the power of turning kids loose and taking control of their own learning. One boy learned Illustrator and shared it with the class; another became a graphics design expert and landed an after-school job. Many began finding other strengths in writing, publishing, and advertising.

In a few short years, I was online in a text-based web, texting with someone from Europe, who jumped onto my screen. The possibilities for my classroom were rumbling around in my head. By 2000, I was back in school in a M.Ed program in Instructional Tech. In 2004, I started blogging (first trying to install Manilla on our school server); then I discovered Twitter in 2007, and my world shifted.

Isn’t this what we want for our students today? To want to work through problems, concepts, or issues? To be curious enough to see how things work? To create?

My circuitous path led me to new ways of thinking about how my students learn and what I want schools to “look like” (if, indeed, we need to have schools at all). It all started with an interest in figuring out a tool, but it’s moved to how these tools–or now these online social technologies–change the way we live in this networked world.

What has changed your thinking? How can our interactions with each other and the tools make meaningful change in the life of our students?

Uploaded on January 16, 2008
by seeks2dream

 
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Curiosity killed the …..

What makes a person curious?

I wonder about this constantly. I especially think about this when I’m teaching as it seems curious children are more successful. And if that’s true, what does that mean in the classroom?

This article and the research it pulls from have challenged my thinking (or at least given me pause). From Professor Steven Dutch’s research:

Curiosity and creativity in the fully adult sense are hard work and are acquired tastes, just like running is an acquired taste….

Even the most creative people spend most of their time tinkering. That’s probably a hallmark of real creativity – a restless curiosity. Noncurious people tinker only occasionally and with only short-range goals in mind. (They pay for it. I once visited a man who spent the entire time lamenting how miserable his life had been and how lonely he was. I looked around the house and saw not a single book or any sign of a hobby. No wonder he was miserable, and lonely too. Who would want to spend time with such a person?) The creative person’s constant tinkering first of all yields lots of unexpected insights, and second sharpens the ability to recognize potentially significant new results.

Since I haven’t come up with the definitive answer (and when I do, I’ll bottle and sell it), I’ll share an opposing view from this blog I found recently called Creating Brains. The author writes about creativity and curiosity, often quoting Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, one of my favorite researchers.

Good stuff.

Original image: ‘curious roy’
flickr.com/photos/51035611977@N01/17200747
by: Stefano Mortellaro
 
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Working Through the Kinks

Our study of the Holocaust is nearly complete. Students read Night by Elie Wiesel, heard a survivor's story during a personal visit, and researched topics of choice on wikispaces. The study is part of a larger unit on Battling Indifference, in which students must try to define, discuss the effects of, and stake a stand on some form of indifference.
Overall, I was pleased as we were able to use Diigo to collect bookmarks, Google Docs to collaborate on research, and Yammer to provide prompts for class discussions. The kids aren't getting Diigo yet, but it's still early in the year. I don't think I've spent enough time showing them how I use diigo and delicious with my network, which is half the benefit. And Yammer will only  effective if they use it–so far it works well when we are in class together, but I don't see much use happening outside class.
We had some interesting discussions about what videos and images would be appropriate for their sites, as the reality of the Holocaust is almost unbearable for most of us to fathom. They also realized giving appropriate credit for research is something they struggle with, and we definitely need to spend more time on this. They seemed to enjoy working collaboratively, and I could see the work as it progressed. Truthfully, we had to spend more time getting the technology mastered than I wanted, and I ended up not spending the time reviewing and editing the actual writing with them. Plus the process of researching took a back seat while I helped them figure out how to embed videos and link to other sources. I am hopeful that now that we've introduced and used these tools, the research/reading/writing component of future work will take center stage and the creating/publishing aspect will work seamlessly.
Unfortunately, because I had them all create their own wikis, they will need to invite all their classmates to join in order to be able to leave comments on the discussion tab, something that has worked so well on my colleague's site.
Sigh, it's a process for me, too.