Think Like a Teacher

If there were one thing I would like to model to the teachers I work with and students I teach, it is risk taking. Yes, I know that many teens need no encouragement to take foolish risks. (I raised two kids and taught hundreds, maybe thousands.) Those risks, the physical kind, are not the ones I am advocating. To be real thinkers, we need to be willing to share ideas out loud which might otherwise stagnate in silence inside our skulls — or insolently kick up a lasting intellectual headache.

A day or two ago, I was fortunate enough to hear that one of my presentation proposals was accepted for ISTE 2010 (the conference formerly known as NECC). It should not surprise me that, of my three proposals, this was the one that was the greatest risk: an idea I had never really shared out loud but had held for some time. I don’t know if I have ever even heard or read anyone on the topic. It is just an idea that had been kicking the dirt inside my head for quite a while.

The rush of validation I feel that others thought this idea was “worthy” is a rare occurrence. I can point to times in my life when I have felt the same way, always because I took the risk to step off a creative cliff. I want all teachers to feel that rush, to model it, and to help their students find it.

This may sound as though I am advocating for wholesale disruptive behavior or challenge to authority. Actually, I am simply saying that we, as teachers, need to say those things that we wonder inside. We need to say them to kindergarteners and to high school seniors. Such opportunities should not be reserved for professorial types or op-ed writers. We need to be honest when we question, muse, or mentally hum:

Sometimes I wonder why we teach this…

Was this really the cause of the civil war? The way out of the Depression? The Founding Fathers’ greatest hope?

What would Martin Luther King, Jr. say if he saw me teaching about him this way?

Why is this story the one they chose to put in this anthology?

Why is this work considered a masterpiece? It’s hideous.

I know we cannot confuse students by barraging them with risk-taking ideas when they have no solid ground, but dropping a few into the conversation once in a while is the most honest way we can help them find lifelong curiosity and innovative thinking of their own. Maybe you could raise a flag with a question mark and cliff icon as a signal when you ask them, but you must ask these things aloud.

You never know. You might be asked to speak at a conference among your peers and those you admire. Oh, the presentation topic that was accepted, you ask? “Dimensions of Creativity: A Model to Analyze Student Projects.” Guess I am kind of hooked on this creativity thing.

What teacher is not in favor of making sure our students graduate with these skills?

• Information and media literacy, communication
• Critical thinking, problem identification, formulation, and solution
• Creativity and intellectual curiosity
• Interpersonal and self-direction skills
• Global awareness
• Financial, economic, and business literacy
• Civic literacy

I think you would be hard-pressed to find any educator who is not hoping for these results for each student’s formal education and personal learning. These skills are not new to the 21st century, but they are the skills that we in the 21st century still struggle to build in all students. I read with great disappointment today about a food-fight occurring between the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21) and other groups who question P21’s motivations. At the risk of sounding like a seventh grader: Who cares?

As a teacher, I care about what happens when the rubber meets the road (or the index finger meets the mouse): What happens when I try to incorporate these skills into the discipline(s) I teach? Is there one and only one way to align them with existing curriculum? Does current curriculum go away, to be replaced completely (some of it probably could!)? And most important: how can any organization OWN such ideas? These ideas belong to those who grasp them as they learn, not those who describe them, prescribe them, or trademark special names for them.

I think of the old computer simulation game, Civilization, where you had to design a society and set its priorities. Would the poets and artists survive or die off? What happened if you had no thinkers or philosophers? The solution was always balance. You had to have some of everything to help a society endure.

Today’s Civilization is worldwide, and we need all of it. We do not need people fighting over semantics and who owns the important concepts of creativity, global awareness, etc. We certainly don’t need to know which organization is winning the race for the ear of policymakers. Out here in the classrooms of the world, we need to apply OUR 21st century skills of interpersonal and self-direction,  critical thinking, problem identification, formulation, and solution to continue evolving as teacher-learners and continue to challenge, inspire, and lure our students to self-directed, meaningful learning that lasts. It would certainly be nice to have the food fight end and the sharing begin. Do you ever wish you could just shake a few business people and politicians?

For the past 18 months or so, I have been a big fan of a certain web 2.0 tool that allowed students to create online books that could be viewed interactively and shared by URL. In a big email push this past week, they revised their user agreement. I read it carefuly, but even my skeptical eye did not catch the fact that they had removed the capability to see the book interactively unless you are actually logged into that “personal” account. No longer can teachers have students create books and share them electronically with family and friends at no cost. No longer can teachers create interactive ways for students to understand new content. No longer can all the teachers to whom we have “plugged” this tool use it with their classes in any functional way.

Some of the other changes related to content ownership are even more disturbing, but this one is the deal breaker right up front. If it is not free, TeachersFirst cannot review and recommend it. The sad thing is that I thought their business model MIGHT actually work: provide the tool for free, but ask parents and teachers to pay if they wanted a printed copy of the book. In an ordinary economy, it should have worked. Seeing your child’s (or grandchild’s) clever writing would be enough for parents to shell out the bucks. The school library or a teacher  might select the very best books created by a class for actual printing and permanent display on school shelves. Even in an era where reading has become more and more electronic and less tactile, people can be overcome by the urge to make a moment in a child’s life “permanent.” It should have worked.

But the economy strikes again. So we will be removing mention of this once-amazing tool for scaffolded or open writing experiences from over 80 reviews on TeachersFirst. Instead of recommending that students create online books, we will recommend another content-authoring tool…until that one dies, too. Let’s hope the economy improves before it sucks all creativity out of learning. There are enough forces at work trying to do just that. Economics should not be one of them.

I am far behind at checking out all the good things in my Google Reader. This one is weeks old, but as I read it I hear myself let out a satisfied “Mmmmm” as if I were eating a chocolate truffle:  “Schools Adopt Art as a Building Block of Education.” I especially like picturing a little girl explaining that her class is outside learning about lines from the artworks built into their school: ““We’re looking for a slanted or diagonal line.” Life does not imitate art, nor art imitate life. Art is life.

Wait. Adopt it? Isn’t art a building block of learning already?

I think visually. I make visual analogies in my head for any new concept. I have secretly done this as long as I can remember. I just never told my third grade friends how I “pictured” things. A new idea is visual art to me. So sad that the verbal world of school forgets this. I have a decent mastery of words, but chose to use them — whenever possible — to create pictures to help others see what I “see.”  It frightens me that we must ask for extra funds or special initiatives or “differentiate our curriculum for visual learners” just to keep visual stimuli, the chocolate truffles of the eye, in our learning environments.  We would never think to have schools without words everywhere…and a lot of numbers, too. How, then, is it necessary to “adopt” art into schools?

One thing the web has done is spread visual ways of seeing new ideas. YouTube, Flash, Flickr, all the Flickr toys, even  comic creators have made the visual a preferred vocabulary for so many. But we seem to forget that when we go to school. Art is a “special,” a frill, a poor, distant cousin who comes to visit during holidays.

Not everyone needs to be able to speak or study art (though I hope they will). Art is not a foreign language with its own grammar. Images and texture and lines should just be there at every turn like the neatly printed signs for “door” and “Mrs. Smithson” in a first grade classroom.

Please, don’t forget to share the art, even if you do not like it or understand it. Your students will.

I’ve always been fascinated by creativity. What makes it come so easily for some people and as such a struggle for others? Why do some teachers ooze creative ideas and respond to every student question with a different angle on the topic (flexibility) while others can only restate the concept over and over, perhaps in paraphrase? I really don’t think it is an issue of motivation, since many of the latter group of teachers truly admire those who generate new ideas so painlessly. Kids are the same way, especially after about third grade. Some of them go through school with a firehose full of fresh thoughts and project ideas while others follow patterns and templates very well, but — at best — elaborate  or “hitchhike” on their classmates fresh thoughts. It isn’t hard to be pushed by the force of a firehose, though one can only “ride” the stream very briefly.

I have always thought that school freeze-dried most student creativity, except perhaps in those who have veritable “firehoses.” Those with a garden hose or a drinking fountain of creative idea-flow seem to dry up once they have followed rules and procedures long enough to be successful in school.

Yesterday I ran across this article on the brain chemistry of creativity. Apparently neurobiologists have isolated something called  NAA, a chemical that correlates with divergent thinking when found in a certain part of the brain, the “anterior cingulate gyrus (ACG), which regulates the activity of the frontal cortex – implicated in higher mental functions.” So very intelligent people can also have this chemical and be highly creative, as well.

But it’s much more complicated than that. Apparently there is some interplay between intelligence, creativity, and NAA. As a fictitious friend of mine would say, “Holy Idaho!” The scientists have a lot more work to do to sort out this complex interaction.  And I now have even more questions:

Why are some engineers and scientists brilliant in solving things by scientific method (and able to think of alternative paths of scientific inquiry) but look awkwardly stunned when asked to imagine an alternative way to use a spoon (one of the basic creative brainstorming exercises I used to use with second graders).

Why can some people elaborate –adding many, many different and even beautiful versions of an idea, such as different designs and “twists” for using a spoon as a “dipper,” but never get outside of the “dippiness” of spoons to see them as mini-mirrors or vehicles or hair ornaments?

What implications does NAA have for teaching and learning? If we are to differentiate for different approaches to learning, how do we adjust for NAA?

I can’t help thinking that all the web 2.0 tools for creating products could help, especially since there are usually ways for  the spoons-as-dippers-only  types  to start from someone else’s dipper prototype and create a variation while the spoons-as-vehicles students can start from scratch to launch their spoon to the moon or under the sea.

Once again, creativity wins as the most powerful teaching tool. And we should never respond to a brainstorming suggestion by saying “NAAAAAA!”

That’s exactly what it is: NAA!