Think Like a Teacher

As I prepare to board my flight to China, I read this New York Times article previewing today’s formal announcement of Shanghai’s powerful statement in student achievement scores. There is definitely something going on in China, and we can’t dismiss their education system as inferior in most ways to the U.S. if this test comparison is as balanced and reputable as the Times says it is. The stereotypes many U.S. educators may have about China:

• That Chinese schools do not value creativity
• That Chinese classes and schools operate in lock-step standardization
• That Chinese teachers and students have little freedom of choice
• That all Chinese schools are impoverished

But  things change so rapidly in China that our impressions are probably outdated by more than ten years. Ten years in China at its current rocket-propelled pace is a comparable to half a century of U.S. progress. The challenge for our group of U.S. educators departing today: How do we get a snapshot of a moving rocket of Chinese education (and edtech) with our Instamatic* camera powers of observation?

*For those under age 45, Google it.

I began this post last week and allowed it to “sit,” thereby defying any timeliness whatsoever.

I just read a thoughtful– and occasionally heated– exchange on the role of time zones in fragmenting the world and as barriers to “flat,” global learning. The comment thread is fascinating and well worth a read, even if it is “old” in your time zone!

It makes me wonder: what is the value of  real time interaction and, consequently, of  Twitter, feeds, and blog posts for writers/artists and those who model creative process for our students? Are tweets the carefully crafted mini-poems or snippets we collect in scrapbooks for someday inspiration? Are they advertisements for audience: “I am a writer– listen to me”? Do they need immediate response? How do tweets, feeds, and blogs mesh with the creative value we put on real time interaction  and what we get out of them?

So I share an enigmatic analogy of the way I envision tweets, feeds, and blogs:

Tweets are a quick walk past the shop windows of a thriving shopping district. It may be in daylight and during store hours, or it may be at night when the lights are lower and the “SALE” signs obscured by shadow. But I walk by and stop only to look at those that intrigue me. I could go back and enter the shop another time if I retrace my steps in this vast downtown, and if I want to come during store hours. As I pass by during store hours, I may stop in and speak to a shopkeeper. I may even buy something.  There is no predicting. I send a message of my own to others on the sidewalks by adjusting my scarf or changing my pace, but my message is quick and without depth: surface statement for surface judgment among a busy crowd. If I do fashion a message during off hours, no one sees it.

Checking my feed reader is my extra cup of medium ultra bold coffee-of-the-day, a stop on my walk for a mental cup of coffee, take-out. I enjoy it for a few minutes (perhaps I walk back past more Tweet offerings at the same time). I savor the flavor, but I may not remember to finish the cup if I am too busy with other distractions. I may decide not to stop at all for that take-out cup today.

Writing a post is deliberate coffee-and-conversation with someone else at the cafe table. This is not take-out. This is sit-down. There is a friend or new acquaintance there with me. We may talk about what we saw in the shop windows or not. But the words of the conversation matter. A post is deliberate, though conversational. A blog post is not a full meal– like writing an article or something for “print,” but it is careful and responsive. I may linger. I may even lose track of time because the conversation is so good. If I sit down for coffee alone, I still imagine the other person across the table and word my ideas so he can hear me best.

This analogy of tweets, feeds, and blogs tells the value of how I experience each, rather than the place of each in real time. The enigma is that the timeliness value is the inverse of the relationship value.  If blog posts — the experiences I value most– are cafe conversations,  they should become cold, abandoned cups of coffee when another person cannot hear them at the same time. The feed reader “take out” coffee should yield stale, gray flavor when it is not fresh. And store windows should lure me most because they are there for me any time in real time.  How I  experience each determines its value to me, and “real time” matters the least. Real time does not matter as much as deliberate, lingering time. Time does not matter as much as attention and craft. Maybe real time and time zones do not matter when we take the time to factor full creative process into the exchange. Don’t you do a much better job of saying things when you give the process time?

I began this post last week and allowed it to “sit,” thereby defying any timeliness whatsoever. 

Authentic Task 1

Assignment Title: Design a Media-based Education Summit

Grade level/subject: any subject, grades 6+

Objectives: 

Students will design and plan an Education Summit to promote new thinking and consider new strategies to effectively educate American K-12 students in the 21st century.

Students will effectively evaluate, select, and balance agendas of multiple “voices”  in American Education.

Students will state specific reasons for selection of their program “voices.”

Students will create a visual/multimedia “activator” for the summit, including media clips, text explanations, and both visual and verbal content to inspire dialog across all constituencies involved in American education.

(Lesser/optional objective):  Students will brand their summit to attract sufficient advertising income and social media presence to combat competition from such stalwarts as Mad Men, The Onion,  or various YouTube channels.

Task requirements:

• At least thirty diverse voices related to American Education must be selected and included in the summit agenda
• “Voices” must be diverse in all aspects: geographic, socio-economic, political, profession/job/role, life stage, overt and covert agenda, etc.
• All research sources must be cited in an annotated bibliography explaining why they were selected
• Summit agenda/activities must be designed to elicit more than predictable stump speeches of the selected “voices”
• A self-designed rubric to EVALUATE the summit design must be included, along with self-evaluation using this same rubric
• Selection process for  “voices” must include social networking response opportunities

• Additional requirements as determined by the students

Due Date: Friday, September 24, 2010.

Alternate assignment: You may opt for an easier solution and simply post comments on multiple venues discussing and/or critiquing NBC’s  upcoming Education Nation programming/Facebook page/branding effort.  One option: Edutopia. You must present a cohesive “message” replicable as a stump speech on an ongoing basis. In other words, you must convincingly play the role of a potential “voice” for an education summit. Documentation/RSS feed/aggregation of all your comments must be your “deliverable.”

Turn in this assignment by tagging #edunatalternative wherever you wish and tweeting it with this tag.

Ready….set… GO!

I have been observing a three year old grandson play over the last couple of weeks. By far his biggest thrill are the oldest toys in the house: his father’s old Matchbox ® cars from decades ago. They are beaten up, some lack wheels, and all are woefully out of date. So how do old toys take on new tricks? They combine with 2010 On-Demand video and current songs or ride piggy back on top of an electronic airplane that generates its own sound effects (not as well as that little boy mouth does, though!). This three year old creates the equivalent of a toy mash-up. When I ask him it, he has a perfectly logical explanation.This three year old doesn’t know that play is learning, and learning play. He has figured out, however, how to combine any and all tools to create the perfect combo for his (imaginary) situation.

Isn’t this what we really hope teacher and students will do with the available “toys” in their classrooms? There is no need to throw out the old when the newest toys arrive, especially not as budgets make it less and less likely that schools will have the latest and greatest– or anything close to it. But we do want imaginative minds to mash up what works in our class scenarios, even in unlikely or incongruous combinations. Formulas and teacher manuals simply don’t work all the time. Who would have envisioned digital cameras, Matchbox® cars and an iPhone together? If they are in the same room, together they can be tools for learning. I don’t know how we “teach”  teachers what a three year old does naturally: to play with what is available and help students to do the same. Maybe we could try leaving some of the toys out and observing for a couple of weeks, then asking the students to explain it. Yes, I know this is idealistic, but a three year old made me think of it.

Creative Fluency is a flow of ideas– more of tributary, really– but Originality is the full volume and force of the creative river. It has a mind of its own, and you can’t decide to simply “build” a river any more than you can force originality from your students (or yourself). Originality rises and falls on its own. You can try to bound it with dams and levees, but it eventually laughs at such efforts. And if there is no rain, you can’t force it to flow. It can dry up due to climate conditions or slow to a trickle. In fact, it often does dry up as the sediment of school and the sweltering heat of standardized expectations sear the very headwaters into vapor.

Originality is the one of the FFOE skills that can only be cheered and rewarded but can never be “produced.”  We can recognize it, talk about how it might have happened, and even try to NOTICE the conditions that caused it so we might predict it at least as well as NOAA predicts flooding. Yup, that’s a river. It must have come up from last night’s thunderstorm. Do you suppose we’ll have more today?

Originality is risky, too.  Some of the most original thinkers I have ever known suffer daily in their isolation out on the river. Think of news images of a lone soul stranded amid a river’s fury, clutching debris as they become part of the current.

Why do we need original thinkers? Please tell me you do not even ask this. No human-made object, invention, or artwork around us would be there if someone had not taken the risk to consider it as a possibility. Yet somehow we relegate originality to creative writing or art class. Most academic classes (and most jobs) secure dry land far from the river’s risks, then wonder why life dries up.

We can take students to the river’s edge by posing questions and juxtapositions to force flexibility and possibly enjoy results that are actually original. Place a curriculum concept or event into a different context and ask what would happen. Put a concept to a test by asking questions, using analogies, and making juxtapositions.

• What kind of adaptation could you imagine for a new animal living in the New York subways?
• What kind of invention could we use to make subways safer for human beings?

Even better, encourage students to ask these and better questions. And when you observe something original, celebrate it and ask how it happened. (Often it is the response that made the entire class laugh and may not have been entirely “appropriate.”) Where were you when you thought of that? Do you have great ideas like that a lot when you are [insert the place they mentioned]? What were you doing right before that? If you wanted to design a perfect place to think original thoughts, what would it be like? Does it have chocolate? Water? Music? What kind of light? Laughter? What time of day is it? Who else is there?

Originality is a river.

Modeling: I thought of this analogy while swimming, my best place for creative thinking, preferably before mid-day and outdoors. Original? Maybe, maybe not. But it sure feels good to think this way. I want others to feel this, too.

Where are the headwaters of your originality river?

Creative flexibility is undoubtedly my favorite of the FFOE skills. Nudging people to take a different angle, approach, or point of view always seems to prompt some discomfort (“cognitive dissonance”?) and some marvelous surprises. The best outcome of the discomfort of forcing flexibility is that it is so closely related to originality. More on that later…

Why do we need flexible thinkers?

Flexible thinkers can communicate better with others because being able to put yourself into someone else’s shoes makes you productively empathetic. Not only  can you “see” as they do, but as a flexible thinker, you can engage the brain and produce new ideas from that same place. Imagine if the Taliban could actually see the world as a westerner/Christian or if Americans could plan for Afghanistan’s future through the lens of native Afghanis. What if we looked at humans’ carbon footprints from the point of view of trees or squirrels? What if, instead of making laws prohibiting texting while driving, we could find incentives so people would want to stop on their own? Imagine students who said aloud, “I can’t solve this equation this way. Maybe I should try working it backwards.” Imagine drug manufacturers who asked, “What else could be causing this reaction?” or “How can I sell this more cheaply?”

Think holograms. Those dancing figures in Disney’s Haunted Mansion are a vision of creative flexibility. They project an image in three dimensions because they can “see” it from multiple angles. What would the world be like if we raised a generation who could project conceptual holograms?

How do we stretch for fluency?

Meanwhile, back in our classrooms, we have tests to take and benchmarks to meet.  So who has time for flexibility stretching?

Magic Moments:
In any lesson, there is a moment when you think they “get it,” at least most of them. That is the flexibility moment:

• You just finished demonstrating with manipulatives to show the process of simplifying a fraction. The students then did it themselves successfully. Now is the moment to ask, “What do you think the denominator would say to the numerator if they could talk?”
• You’ve studied the Industrial Revolution, and every group has presented about a major invention of the time period. Now is the moment to ask, “If Bill Gates were alive then, which invention would he have grabbed and promoted?” What about YouTube inventors Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim?
• Your English students have managed to decipher a Shakespeare sonnet. Let them ask a question that the recipient of the sonnet might have sent back to Shakespeare.

Conversations:
In science, we study inanimate or nonverbal forces, things, and creatures. Give them the power of speech by permitting and rewarding your students’ flexibility questions. Let them ask, what would the bottom of the food chain say to the top? What would an electron say to a quark? Let the students ask and speak. Maybe have them record their own versions of the conversations using Podomatic or Voicethread.

Drawings:
As  you assess prior knowledge about gravity or life cycles or verbs, ask students to draw a picture of what they know about it. Maybe have gravity draw a self-portrait? Keep the drawings for students to revisit as they learn. If you save them digitally, students can narrate them on Voicethread or visually annotate them on an interactive whiteboard (and SAVE, of course!).

Head, shoulders, knees, and toes:
As you learn new terms, ask students to physically “shape” what they might look like in the air with their hands. Maybe some concepts are so large that they stretch from above the head to your toes. Others may fit in the palm of the hand. Do some concepts have a specific texture? Yes, middle school and up would laugh at you for this one, but elementary might find new ways to “envision” a concept through physical “flexibility.” What a great thing to catch on video!

Could your classroom have flexibility stretches? 
Are there magic moments in your teaching pattern? (Do you ever break your teaching pattern?) What would a student say about the way new concepts are “explained” in your classes? Ask a middle schooler or high schooler to role-play the way you would explain gravity (or any basic concept). You will learn a lot about what you always do and say. Can you role-play the way your students react to new units and lessons? Does  it bother you that both you and they are so predictable? What would happen if you tried one of the possibilities above?

Next up: Originality’s river

Why do we need fluent creative thinkers?

If we only need the original ideas, who cares if someone can think of loads of ideas that follow the same patterns that we have come to expect? Need ways to prevent sound from waking the baby? Pad the door, pad the walls, pad the crib, pad the television, pad the phone (or put it on a pillow). We get the idea, so why bother being fluent with all these ways of padding things to solve the noise problem? What we need is the original, different idea, right? Besides, the researchers say that group brainstorming has NOT proven effective at loosening adult creativity.

Stop right there. That research was on adults and groups.  What generates loads of ideas and possibilities is an environment that encourages fluency–or flow– of ideas openly and in quantity. No yeah, buts.

What are some reasons for fluency?

Generating more options to choose from, more options to research/test, more ways of saying things, more ways of drawing things, more colors, more lines or tones, more ways of hearing things, more notes, sounds, harmonies, counterpoints, more tastes, smells, associations, more textures and touches, and getting others caught in the benevolent flood of ideas.

How do we release the fluency flood? (uh-oh, does it need to be controlled?)

Establish places where everyone–young, old, quiet, or bossy– can talk, draw, write, scribble, hum, color, ask, think out loud, tilt their heads, graffiti, offer asides, hitchhike on an idea, paste thoughts, pile up images, collect snippets, value brain scraps, and hoard mental mutterings. Since a classroom usually has far more mouths than attentive ears, give everyone space, virtual or tactile, to gather their tidbits. If the very flood/quantity of ideas is valued, the treasures that float in and on the flood are precious indeed. And be sure that everyone respects the collections of others. Make spaces for shared collections nd personal ones. Some possible collection spaces:

Fluency walls: public places to jot an idea or piece of one. Everything you/we associate with waves during a science unit. Everything you/we know or think about survival stories during a literature unit. Everything you/we think of when we think of weather, or the environment, or the Revolutionary War or triangles or percents or… what do you teach about?

Idea scrapbooks: re-used paper with scribbles, held inside a very important-looking cover What a wonderful way to REUSE and renew! A special place for the turns-of-phrase that intrigue me as a writer. Electronic scrapbooks: Glogs or Scrapblogs or Blogs or Google Docs folders or Evernote “notebooks” [my personal favorite] where I/we can stash the thoughts that float in, even if I/we have no idea what I/we will do with them.

More is better. No tagging, judging, deciding; just collecting.

And definitely no laughing, ridicule, naysaying, or “yeah, but…” The benevolent flood.

Could your classroom have fluency spaces? Could your lessons/units have fluency space/time? Could your student projects begin with fluency stretchers? Are YOU trying to be more fluent? What other spaces can you think of to collect thoughts, images, words, numbers, drawings, and bits of mental music? Are you finding fluency?

 Next: Flexibility is more than toe-touching

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

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.

One week from today I will be presenting at ISTE on Dimensions of Creativity. Wish me luck! See more about the presentation  on the web page support for it here, as soon as I finish it. I hope the people who come have read Jen W’s post on how to attend ISTE.

Between now and then, I will be busy with a board meeting , travel, and one of my favorite events, EduBloggerCon. I had to at least mention it here, since this is the blog I share with folks there. Too bad I am so busy getting ready I can’t  write more about it! Maybe while I am there…