Think Like a Teacher

At ISTE I presented on  Dimensions of Creativity, using Guilford’s classic (and OLD) model of divergent thinking as a launch point. A few days later, Newsweek ran an excellent article, The Creativity Crisis, on declining creativity scores among adults and chldren in the U.S. since 1990. The research used for the Newsweek article is also from a classic source on creativity: Torrance’s test that began in the 1950s. Classic? Yes. Old? Definitely. Still powerfully meaningful? Absolutely. But how do we move beyond talk and study about creativity to foster it, use it, value it, protect it, and allow it to thrive among both children and adults? As Newsweek’s companion article points out and every teacher knows, you can’t just say, “Now be creative. You have 42 minutes.”

The companion Newsweek article suggests breaking away from multitasking and screentime, getting moving, exploring other cultures, or following a passion to promote creativity (not formal “creativity training”). This may be generally true and especially true for adults, but there is much more we can do in schools and homes with children and teens to think about thinking, especially to give words to creative process — even with young ones — so we have ways to share, question, and protect our most creative impulses as something that is valued and valuable. Creativity should not be treated as the bathroom of the intellect, the thing polite/serious students and teachers do not talk about in the world of learning. We SHOULD talk about this most important bodily function of the brain. We should make it part of learning at every age and in every subject, not just in Art class.

So, at the risk of being criticized for presenting a formulaic “creativity exercise” approach, I write this series to dig more deeply into FFOE, Guilford’s model and how it fits into any classroom. Future posts will focus specifically on Fluency, Flexibility, Originality, and Elaboration, the components of FFOE.

What if…

• a second grade teacher asked what it feels like when you draw…or sing your own song
  
• a sixth grade teacher thought out loud about why that student’s joke made him laugh
• a science teacher talked about all the lessons she considered using to show how sound waves work and the apparatus she built that did not work–how she even considered having the entire class watch a video of a crowd doing the wave– and doing it in class. What if she DID the wave?
• the same science teacher asked aloud, “I had no trouble being fluent with ways to envision what sound does. How about you?”
• a eighth grader could explain his frustration with school rules, “The principal doesn’t have the flexibility to put himself in our shoes and see how it feels to be rushed at our lockers. We need to consider other ways to solve the hallway congestion.”
• a group of high schoolers working on a civics project:” we may not be completely original in our way of explaining the Constitution, but  some of the ways we elaborate with examples, visuals, and sounds will help kids get it better.”
• in a current events discussion: “BP pulled in all those engineers for their suggestions. You would think that someone would have an original idea, but many of them only have ONE idea to offer instead of being fluent enough to keep on thinking and possibly finding a new way.”
• in English class: “I really had trouble finishing the poem. Trying to think of an image to express how cold that sky looks is hard for me. I need to let it incubate and keep a writer’s notebook to maybe get more fluent.
• in history class, a student says: “I know this is off the wall, but what do you think would have happened if they’d had YouTube in the American Colonies?” and someone responds, “love that original thought!”
• the science lab had a graffiti wall for questions: “Which is more important, oxygen or light?” The handwriting is not the teacher’s.
• every student had a place to ask the questions in his/her head

While this weak attempt to envision talk about creativity and creative process is “lame,” as the middle schoolers would say, that is exactly the point. We need to move beyond the place where creativity is viewed as “lame” in our homes and schools. Let’s at least talk about it.

Next time: Finding Fluency

I nearly cried when I read the story of a Vermont principal who was removed from her job because of a law’s (I hope) unintended results. As teachers, we often see similar situations where the best of intentions generate a classroom or school rule. Later, unforeseen circumstances ultimately bring that rule to cause unintended damage in a horrific reversal of crime and victim. The student who is “caught” is not the one we hoped to punish. Circumstance twists into gut-wrenching injustice.

In the case of this principal, the “crime” was a failing school, deemed “failing” most likely because of the misapplication of a testing protocol on immigrant, special ed, or newly-arrived children. The principal hero-turned-victim must walk away from the progress that was occurring in the school. A tragedy for sure.

The broader question is how to balance consistency with reason for any well-meaning legislator, school board, or even classroom-teacher-maker-of-rules. In a classroom situation, most teachers, when confronted with an unexpectedly inverted instance of a rule violation, will stop and adjust. There may be an informal “appeal” strategy or rewriting of the rule. The most secure teacher will even admit the mistake as he/she changes the rule on the bulletin board. Maybe there is a private conference with the student in the “odd” situation, or maybe the teacher simply “forgets” to apply the rule in this case.  Mr/Mrs Solomon knows justice when he/she sees and applies it. Maybe teachers are so accustomed to differentiating to eschew justice: the right lesson, the right rule, the right way to admonish this student, the right thing for him/her to learn from this experience.

In government, finding the right way to deal with all the exceptions is much harder. I applaud those who truly want to make schools better, but not their rigidity. I recognize that there are schools with huge problems. But maybe we should take lessons from those who design lessons every day. You have to be willing to adjust according to the needs of the learner. If the learner is an entire school, adjust for it. If the rule-writers messed up, ask them to revise and learn, too. Let’s be reasonable.

All my life, I have been aware that teachers volunteer for everything. Having grown up as the child (and grandchild) of teachers, I saw it in my family and those of  fellow faculty-brat friends. Teachers do church school, coach their kids’ teams, are choir moms, help out with scouts, run neighborhood food drives, and so much more. During summer, we may have a few moments free to fantasize about what else we would do if we weren’t working so hard all through the school year (and most of the summer). If teachers were suddenly independently wealthy and could quit our jobs, what volunteer efforts would we be likely to do? How would all those fantasy volunteers change the world?

I would start an after school program at my neighborhood community center. We have tons of kids and tons of retirees. We could have fun and have a time for kids to get homework done in a cheerful place, maybe with healthy, donated snacks. The cooler kids could use computers to edit digital pictures or show other kids how to make glogs or the like. I would hope I’d be wise enough to help steer the computers on a positive path with cool, creative tools.  (After years in middle school, I can usually sense the inappropriate giggles and actions before they happen). In a couple of hours, all the frenzied parents could come home to find kids who did more that afternoon than watch 25 year old re-runs or defeat yet another level of a video game.  Do I think parents should be responsible for their kids? Yes. Do I know it just doesn’t happen? Yes, again. Besides, the relationships of community would do more than foster parental convenience. It might make the kids less likely to smash a mailbox or defiantly skateboard across the road in front of the “old lady” who read Harry Potter with them a couple of years ago. It might decrease the number of retirees who complain about “those kids.” And it might just let us share some laughter. We might even play music or dance or play basketball together. That’s my fantasy volunteer job.

As the economy makes each of us question whether we will ever be able to retire, I worry that the world will be robbed of all the fantasy volunteers who might otherwise have moved from teaching into important roles as enthusiastic, younger retirees. In my more idealistic moments, I wonder what impact it would have on society happen if we rotated 5% of all teachers into fantasy volunteer roles (subsidized as some sort of sabbatical) once every 20 years or so. What would your community look like?

My creativity presentation at ISTE 2010 was surprising in unexpected ways. After months of anticipation and 30 hours of speechlessness –trying to regain a laryngitis-starved voice — I DID it, croaking into the most powerful mike the techies could find.

The gist of the presentation: using Guilford’s oldie-but-goodie model of creativity as four components (FFOE): Fluency, Flexibility, Originality, Elaboration, as a lens to analyze the tasks we assign and the projects students complete.  What I enjoyed most were the conversations I had after the session was over.

One teacher talked of his concern that the hindrances to creativity in schools are followed by societal pressures in general as kids move up through high school. As kids assimilate into young adulthood, they have even greater barriers to risk-taking in their thinking. He feared that they might even use creative opportunities to reinforce some of those barriers. A valid concern. Together he and I ventured the possibility of challenging  HS kids with this very question: what prevents you from sharing your off-the-wall ideas aloud? What can we do to take down those barriers?

The middle school teacher who cleverly tossed in a divergent response during the presentation stopped me in the hallway to say he planned to use the FFOE terms in rubrics and was excited to have a creativity vocabulary to use. We talked a bit about middle school as a great place to talk about creative self awareness while kids are becoming so aware of their bodies, individuality, and relationships with others.

A HS English teacher wondered aloud how to individualize creativity elements in rubrics for 150+ kids in a standards-based classroom. We hypothesized trying 4-5 rubric elements for everyone with an additional 2-3 agreed upon with individual students for  each marking period. The elements do not even have to have “points” associated with them necessarily. He could discuss them as importnat for real life instead of  grades. (Too bad that grades don’t relate to real life, though!)

During the waning hours of the conference, another middle school person stopped to talk with me at the SFL booth. We brainstormed a bit on what the rubric elements for FFOE might look like. As we talked, ideas began to pop up between us:

• What if you had kids form project groups by FFOE strength? One each string at fuency, flexibility, originality, elaboration? Would you find even numbers of each in a class? Probably not, but it would be an interesting experiment.
• Have kids  contribute copies of brainstorms they did in their own best creative place/circumstance and hang them a bulletin board to celebrate individual creative process. The actual brainstorm materials or decorations should signal  their best creative circumstance: a brainstorm on a scrap of towel or shampoo bottle for shower-thinkers, notes atop music or a CD wrapper for those who find music a creative lubricant, etc. Maybe a brainstorm written on a leaves from your “thinking tree”? We really liked that idea and agreed to stay in touch as she tries including FFOE in her teaching.

Many teachers, many thoughtful reactions. I cannot even relate all the discussions here. All from one hour together while my audience’s creative energy seemed to will my voice back from a painful, empty croak to fully voiced vibration. There was an audible gasp when one word suddenly came out with VOICE behind it, then another … and another. That VOICE is what every classroom community should help every learner feel: the experience of a newfound voice that emerges amid a surprising, vibrating rush.