Think Like a Teacher

The convergence of two articles about developmental stages inspires me to an interesting mashup. A few weeks ago, I read the New York Time Magazine article on twenty-somethings. The article proposes that perhaps there is an new life stage for those ages 18 to 30 who “take longer to reach adulthood”:

The traditional cycle seems to have gone off course, as young people remain un­tethered to romantic partners or to permanent homes, going back to school for lack of better options, traveling, avoiding commitments, competing ferociously for unpaid internships or temporary (and often grueling) Teach for America jobs, forestalling the beginning of adult life.

The implications of such a stage for the development, recruitment, and mentoring of new teachers is frightening, indeed. If the younger role models in our classrooms are not “grown ups,”  are we perpetuating Peter Pan instead of learning? But this article, while fascinating, is only half the mash.

Today I read about the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE)’s  release of a study  concluding that “too few [teachers] enter the profession with an understanding of the developmental sciences, which research says have a critical impact on students’ ability to learn.” I draw from a press release; the full study is available for a fee. Excerpts from the study’s recommendations include (with my emphasis):

• Revamp educator preparation programs to improve teachers’ knowledge of child and adolescent development.
• Include child and adolescent developmental strategies in standards and evaluation systems…development science should be incorporated into accreditation and new academic content standards and into assessment practices….measures of teacher effectiveness should include measures of an educator’s knowledge and application of child and adolescent development strategies.
• Acknowledge the need to address developmental issues in turning around low performing schools.

Two articles, two concerns about recognizing developmental stages. Some interesting questions arise: if new teachers, presumably — though not always — young, are not “ready to launch” in their twenties, should we be incorporating consciousness of  THAT into teacher ed programs, too? And what about policies on high stakes tests, etc. ? Finally someone verifies what first grade teachers have been screaming about: current testing is not developmentally the best way to assess student growth. And what if the first grade teacher is a twenty-something? Is he/she ready to be assessing or assessed?

I really don’t know what should be done with this confluence, this developmental mash. Yes, it is only through coincidence that I pull them together.  But isn’t it interesting that people are looking at what constitutes adulthood, what prepares a teacher, and how we should be trying to understand the younger ones, both teacher and student, along the way? Sometimes odd juxtapositions can inspire some intriguing questions.

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!

First thing on a Monday, and the first tweet I see is Larry Ferlazzo’s response to today’s New York Times column on Scientifically Tested Tests. Even though my first magna-cup of killer coffee is still just steaming next to me, this one is worth a response. Larry is right that some of the suggestions from Williams College prof Susan Engel are “decent.” I would go so far as saying they are both logical and (sadly) innovative. Using a student’s own writing and using a flexible topic to draw on his/her own expertise in that piece is a terrific way to see student thinking skills, writing skills, and core achievement in language.  Larry is also right that one or two of the suggestions are a bit odd. If we were to “test” reading knowledge through a name-it-and-claim it author contest, the same teachers who teach to the test would make kids memorize lists of authors.

The column suggests two aspects of testing that can make it meaningful (my own emphasis and analogies added):

1.) Writing is a powerful and high-def way to see the details of a student’s accomplishments and understanding. As anyone involved with writing knows, writing is thinking. Writing about reading adds another layer of complexity by using one brain-rich process (writing) to discuss and reveal what is occurring in another (reading). Writing is thinking, and reading is a miracle of the human brain. Put the two together, whether in print, in electronic form, or in some mediated version, and you have a 1080p window into student learning and thinking.

2.)  That there exists a mutually agreed-upon “standard” for what defines  “well-educated children.”  Professor Engel assumes that everyone agrees on the standard she describes. I wonder whether they do. I read standards from states, professional organizations, and Common Core, and most of the time I say, ” Of course we want our kids to be able to do that.” But in the translation to assessing them, we risk either analyzing each standard down to the micron and thus trivializing it or losing the very global nature of thinking (and writing) through subdivision. The whole is greater than its parts, and perhaps this focus is what we have lost.

Larry wonders aloud how such high-altitude assessment can help inform teaching, and that is a good question. Having taught very, very bright kids for many years, I found one of the most stimulating and intellectually challenging parts of my job was analyzing what was going on in each child, his “strengths and needs,” when writing Gifted IEPs. Essentially, I was using global analysis–and a lot of writing, selected portfolio pieces, and regular observations in both my journals and students’ own journals to help describe where this child was now and needed to go next. The decisions were never solely mine. There was input from parents and from the students themselves, too. They were daunted by a 6 by 6 foot banner in my classroom that simply asked, “What do YOU think?,”and they took it very seriously.

But here is the rub: How do you take such a process of analyzing writing, selected student work, anecdotal input, and more, and make it consistent from student to student, teacher to teacher, school to school? How do you make it “scientific”? How do you enter it into a relational database for comparative analysis? How do you find TIME for such difficult depth? And in practical terms, how do you teach teachers and administrators to do it in  way that is meaningful to others beyond your classroom door? Such work requires analytical writing by the adults, a skill that, alas, they may not have learned well in school, either.

I keep coming back to writing as the 1080p view of accomplishment. Now, if we could start asking inspiring kids to write every day instead of once a marking period, perhaps we’d have taken a first step.

What does it look like to teach and learn globally? I have been thinking about this as I follow tweets from those in Shanghai for a ed conference this week, as TeachersFirst has joined as a partner in the free, online Global Education Conference in November, and even as I talk with friends who are planning or returning from travel to various overseas destinations. I am no world traveler, though I have been to the UK, Switzerland, and — foreign country within the U.S.– Alaska. But I don’t think the teaching globally thing requires world travel experience.

What teaching globally does require — at a minimum — is posing another layer of questions on top of everything that has become routine in our classrooms.  As we discuss the weather in elementary science and talk about changing seasons, how many of us  stop to ask about the opposite hemisphere where the seasons are reversed from ours? How do you suppose the approach of spring feels to those down under as we all talk about pumpkins and raking leaves? What would Halloween feel like in spring? Wait…do they even celebrate Halloween with costumes and gluttonous bags of candy? This might be the global layer of questions in first grade.

In middle school, we teachers are so aware of students’ perceptions of  “cool” and “lame” that we may forget to add the layer of questioning that neutralizes both cool and lame into global. It was cool that suffragettes fought for the right to vote (You mean they didn’t always have it? Lame and stupid.) Where do women live today without the right to vote? That question is not in the tested content, but it is in the global layer of questions for middle school.

In high school, who should pose the global layer of questions? If students heard them in elementary and middle school, could they take over?

Physics class has problems related to motion: calculate ways to make this object land precisely at this point. Launch the water balloon to hit the teacher-caricature squarely and demonstrate using formulas why your catapult had the right design to work. Ask something about this project to give it global dimension. Would this water balloon behave the same way in Tibet? What impact might altitude have? If you were trying to design a physics problem for kids in Iceland, what might you have to change? Would they think it was cool to try to splat the teacher? Does teen sense of humor vary between different cultures?

Now Hamlet. Does it matter that he is a Dane? Do you suppose Danes would have written a tragedy about an English prince? How did Shakespeare know about this prince, anyway? Did he make it up? Did Brits know about stuff on the continent then? What would people know now if they followed Lady Macbeth on Twitter– while she was washing her hands??  How would Shakespeare have used Tweets in his plays? 

Now History. Everybody knows about the Declaration of Independence, right? How much of China’s history do we know? Why do we expect them to know what the 4th of July is? Don’t they manufacture many of the things we use to celebrate it? Are Chinese kids upset that they can’t get at the same stuff on the Internet we can? Isn’t that freedom of speech? Wait–do they have it? Do they WANT it? When I don’t like something my parents say, I tell them. Do they? They say the Chinese want to be like us. Do they? Why would they? What part of us would they hate to be?

What if we asked each high school student to pose a global question in every subject every day, somehow connected to what happened in class that day but also to other places and people? What if they aggregated them where others could see – and generate their own? Is that what one layer of global learning might look like? What a marvelously purposeful digression.

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.

This summer, I have been following a BBC TV series, The Choir. Amid the cacophony of cable TV, this gem showed up during a search for buried On Demand treasure.  The reality series centers on Gareth Malone, a young choral director who wants to bring singing into the lives of schools and students as it was in his own life: a focal point of community and a transcendent experience in teamwork amid challenge. Having grown up in a school where music was such a central nervous system, I can understand Malone’s mission and passion. I had never stopped and thought much about the fact that music does not hold such a place in most schools nor in the out-of-school lives of most kids.

The series aired so far has shared two school immersions for Malone, one in a coed “comprehensive” (high school) and another in an all-boys’ sports-oriented secondary school roughly equivalent to U.S. combined middle and high school. Neither school is in an elite community or  culture where music is revered as part of  the “heritage.” A visit to King’s College, Cambridge to sing together with the fabled men and boys’ choir was the closest these school choirs came to the traditional world of Choral music with a capital C. More typically, the school settings show boys chasing each other on a playground, avoiding Malone, or sharing raps as they declare formal music  “gay.” One of my favorite scenes involved Malone trying to cajole the all male PhysEd staff into singing in a staff choir. Picture the chorus teacher in your school making such a foray into the world of smelly sweat socks!

As a teacher, I see so many messages in The Choir, but the loudest is one of raising student voices. Malone does it by popping his boy-face into places where no sane person would tread and finally winning over a group by recognizing reasonable goals for them and persistently exuding his own passion until the reticent are willing to take similar risks. But how often do we do either: publicly persist in our own passions despite ridicule or help students take risks with their own?

Too often,  curriculum is not centered on risks or passions. It is centered on sameness and uniformity of path. Malone is quick to point out the confidence that comes from finding an individual singing voice and sharing it. But he is not developing soloists. He is raising passionate voices together, voices that grow from within as they risk sucking in air and letting it out with gusto. The sameness of “chorus” is less about being alike and more about blending together. But it cannot work until each individual singer/student risks raising his own voice and hearing it among the others, eventually tuning in to how the sounds blend together. So should curriculum reach resonance. A teacher models the passion, even in a vacuum at times. The students find voice and hear themselves, and the choirmaster/teacher helps in seeing challenges that can work but will take work. The final performance is a recognizable accomplishment — for each raising his own voice.

Watch the choral boywonder-choirmaster on BBC America. As a teacher, you may find inspiration for a new voice of your own.

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