Think Like a Teacher

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

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.

Should every web tool try to be all things to all people in order to help the teachers (and school admin) who do not have the time to explore and understand which tool is best suited for which task? In an ideal world, each student, teacher, parent, and administrator (who determines which tools are blocked!),  would select from an endless line of tools so each of us could choose a la Amazon: “those who liked this wiki tool also liked this graphic organizer.” But the reality of eduland is that schools (and reticent teachers just starting to “get on board with technology”) cease upon the first tool introduced/endorsed/unblocked and use that one tool to solve far more than its share of tasks. A wiki ends up being asked to act as a blog, a graphic organizer, a microblogging tool, an individual student portfolio, a group project platform, a parent communication tool, a classroom policy page, an embedding host for endless web-based projects, and a calendar (add your uses here). Somewhere in there, the students ask whether they can use another tool, and they are told, “just use the wiki.” Since the wiki CAN hold unlimited embeds, it can easily be that one-tool-fits-all, but should the tool developers feel obligated to be everything to everyone?

Meanwhile not every web-based tool is going to survive. The rich diversity of tools (look at the number of online comic  makers or presentation/slideshow tools out there!) will eventually diminish as economics run their course. So maybe having some tools try to be all things to all people is a good idea, just so we don’t have to hep people migrate their content to a new place when their favorite tool(s) die.

My personal opinion is that in the next 2-3 years we will see many tools disappear and only the strong survive. The strong may not be the best tools, but rather the ones that are accessible for the one-stop-shoppers who want to learn only one place. Back in the 90s, AOL was all the rage for people who really didn’t “get” the Internet. After 6-7 years, AOL was no longer needed. The one stop tools will help teacher through the transition as education figures out how to get MOST teachers and kids connected and fluent with technologies. Then users will once again vote with their feet and move to the boutique tools.

Walmarts once popped up and thrilled consumers with their easy prices and approximation of meeting consumer “needs,” then the cycle moved on as selected consumers move to the boutiques and specialty options. Right now education is still in the Walmart phase.Teachers and school don’t understand that it all works together. We still have to help all of them, not just the ones who shop with us.

A few days ago, we had an earthquake. At the time, I thought it was the concussion of a distant explosion or possibly  a serious malfunction in one of the systems located beneath my feet in the basement of a house I still do not entirely trust. When I talked with neighbors and others who felt it, each had a different description, but none of us knew at the time that it was an earthquake. Having lived in the San Francisco Bay area as a child, I recalled the rolling tremors that had shaken my toys and books. By comparison,  this was not an earthquake to me.

A short while later, the text messages and phone calls began to roll in. “You just had an earthquake, you idiot!”  pointed out my well-connected but distant offspring. They had the data and coordinates to prove it. The NGS confirmed it. Google Earth measured it: 2.9, centered 6.8 miles from here and 5 miles deep. Cold, hard data. There’s an app for that

Next came the questions: what should we be doing about this? What does the data tell us to do? Are there things we should check? Did it damage anything I/we are responsible for?  What about the dam that holds in the lake we live on? Is there a contingency plan to go with this data?

Shortly after that, a final question: did this earthquake even matter?  We have all sorts of accounts, impressions, and hard data. We have post-surveys, inspections, and discussions. And, when it comes down to it, it really does not matter. But at the time, it did. For a brief period, we needed the data to answer our questions and confirm/deny our worries. Without a more distant perspective, we did not even realize the truth about something potentially major. (BP certainly knows about lacking  perspective from up-close at the time of an event.)

I still wonder which experience is more real: feeling it or measuring it..or combining the feeling with the data after the fact? In a classroom, how do a teacher and a student feel  and measure the earthquakes of learning and know whether they matter?

This is the final episode in a long fable, and perhaps the start of another. Unravel the previous chapters here.

The town of Forwardthink has completely changed. At the stroke of midnight  (about 1 pm Pacific Time) on May 12, the doors of the Town Hall opened, and an arm tacked one final message on the door. From inside, the sounds of music and dancing and jingling keys of gold echoed across the near-empty square. Outside, the few remaining Innovators rushed to read the message.

It was a vaguely familiar sheet of paper with a scrap pasted at the end– pasted onto the same message that had been posted for others in mid-March. The scrap bore a few new words explaining that the winners were already inside the Town Hall, apparently ushered in by a secret passageway several days before.  As the handful of remaining, bedraggled and tired Innovators huddled to read and re-read, a small voice from among them sighed,

“The Elders did not even take the time to cross out the old version of the “go away” message and start a fresh piece of paper to tell us they did not want us. They have simply pasted a scrap of a sentence at the end of an old message. I guess we were not worthy enough to see the Elders or hear their actual words.”

“But look! We can see the Winners through the windows!” cried another as he jumped up and down to see over the high sill and beyond the newly opened blinds.

They took turns for a minute or two, boosting one another by the foot so each could see the party of Winning Innovators. But their energy for jumping drained quickly. The MySciLife Innovators drew away from the window and stepped to the sidewalk together.

“I was SURE you would be among the winners,” came a voice from a passerby. Others who passed hummed in agreement.

Epilogue

Although the Elders of Forwardthink have not invited the MySciLife Innovators  to join the Winners inside the Town Hall, these Innovators did not simply pack their knapsacks. As the small gathering around the Town Hall dispersed, careful ears caught the MySciLifers words, “I heard there may be a different kind of Elders in other villages who may be willing to help. Let’s look at our maps, then set out for the unknown territories. If we stick together, we will find our own key of gold somewhere.”

Moral:

In a tug of war between the wisdom of the crowd and competition, who wins?

[In the spirit of crowdly wisdom, insert your moral here]