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Innovation Excellence | Can Innovation Be a Structured Repeatable Process?
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Innovation Excellence | To Understand Is To Perceive Patterns
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Timothy Prestero: Design for people, not awards | Video on TED.com
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What Difficult Questions about Learning Must We Ask Ourselves? | CurtisUES.info
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How Can We Invite the Voice of Young Students into the Design of Their Learning? | CurtisUES.info
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Important Power Players Assemble To Discuss How Social Media Can Be Used For Good | Fast Company
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I just had an idea. Each one of our companies has some link buried somewhere with best practices for nonprofits. What if we all made a new website that had everyone’s stuff in one place? If there were one site that says, Here’s how you work with Adobe and YouTube and Twitter and how you combine them–that would be amazing.
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Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Zynga – discussing possibility of one common website among them to help people with best practices for non-profits. Wow.
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Successful programs need to have three components: content, community, and a call to action.
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10 Rules for Students and Teachers (and Life) by John Cage and Sister Corita Kent | Brain Pickings
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Usable Knowledge: Education at bat: Seven principles for educators
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4 Lessons The Classroom Can Learn From The Design Studio | Co.Design: business + innovation + design
Architect and K-12 thought leader from Perkins + Will explains what education can learn from the architecture studio: 1) a culture of critical collaboration, 2) interdisciplinary problem solving, everyday, 3) tinkering with solutions and reclaiming failure, and 4) the shared power of the pencil and pixel. Includes stung videos from John Seely Brown, and IDEO’s Design Thinking for Educators.
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Bridging the Reasearch-Practice Divide
Making a call for school-centered research, Jennifer de Forest advocates for independent schools to leverage their traits and culture in order to combine practice with experimental research. The positive outcomes that result: 1) improving their own practice, 2) contributing to the professionalization of teaching, and 3) promoting the greater educational good.
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Exciting, Essential Next Steps: Thoughts on the NMC K-12 Horizon Project Short List « 21k12
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The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age – The MIT Press
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The Creativity Crisis – Newsweek and The Daily Beast
.@jennzia here’s a report on decrease in creativity among US children over recent decades http://t.co/jdeekkI1
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The correlation to lifetime creative accomplishment was more than three times stronger for childhood creativity than childhood IQ.
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Yet there is one crucial difference between IQ and CQ scores. With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect—each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling.
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A recent IBM poll of 1,500 CEOs identified creativity as the No. 1 “leadership competency” of the future.
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solutions emerge from a healthy marketplace of ideas, sustained by a populace constantly contributing original ideas and receptive to the ideas of others.
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lack of creativity development in our schools.
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In effect, it’s left to the luck of the draw who becomes creative: there’s no concerted effort to nurture the creativity of all children.
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When faculty of a major Chinese university asked Plucker to identify trends in American education, he described our focus on standardized curriculum, rote memorization, and nationalized testing. “After my answer was translated, they just started laughing out loud,”
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Overwhelmed by curriculum standards, American teachers warn there’s no room in the day for a creativity class. Kids are fortunate if they get an art class once or twice a week. But to scientists, this is a non sequitur, borne out of what University of Georgia’s Mark Runco calls “art bias.” The age-old belief that the arts have a special claim to creativity is unfounded. When scholars gave creativity tasks to both engineering majors and music majors, their scores laid down on an identical spectrum, with the same high averages and standard deviations. Inside their brains, the same thing was happening—ideas were being generated and evaluated on the fly.
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Herein lies the key…creativity is NOT a class to be taught. Creativity is a foundation to be nurtured in ALL classes, and if those classes are integrated rather than subject-divided…all the better!
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The argument that we can’t teach creativity because kids already have too much to learn is a false trade-off.
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Creativity isn’t about freedom from concrete facts. Rather, fact-finding and deep research are vital stages in the creative process. Scholars argue that current curriculum standards can still be met, if taught in a different way.
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requires first understanding the new story emerging from neuroscience.
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right and left hemispheres of the brain activate together
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A WHOLE new mind! Not “left brain” and “right brain.”
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Creativity requires constant shifting, blender pulses of both divergent thinking and convergent thinking, to combine new information with old and forgotten ideas.
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Highly creative people are very good at marshaling their brains into bilateral mode, and the more creative they are, the more they dual-activate.
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Is this learnable? Well, think of it like basketball. Being tall does help to be a pro basketball player, but the rest of us can still get quite good at the sport through practice. In the same way, there are certain innate features of the brain that make some people naturally prone to divergent thinking. But convergent thinking and focused attention are necessary, too, and those require different neural gifts. Crucially, rapidly shifting between these modes is a top-down function under your mental control. University of New Mexico neuroscientist Rex Jung has concluded that those who diligently practice creative activities learn to recruit their brains’ creative networks quicker and better. A lifetime of consistent habits gradually changes the neurological pattern.
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Creativity is learnable. Great analogy to basketball playing – being tall helps, but all can get better with determined practice.
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improvising
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“Creativity can be taught,”
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What’s common about successful programs is they alternate maximum divergent thinking with bouts of intense convergent thinking, through several stages.
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Along the way, kids demonstrated the very definition of creativity: alternating between divergent and convergent thinking, they arrived at original and useful ideas.
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These paragraphs describe high-quality PBL and design thinking!
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And they’d unwittingly mastered Ohio’s required fifth-grade curriculum
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With as much as three fourths of each day spent in project-based learning, principal Buckner and her team actually work through required curricula, carefully figuring out how kids can learn it through the steps of Treffinger’s Creative Problem-Solving method and other creativity pedagogies. “The creative problem-solving program has the highest success in increasing children’s creativity,” observed William & Mary’s Kim.
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Preschool children, on average, ask their parents about 100 questions a day.
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Why, why, why—sometimes parents just wish it’d stop. Tragically, it does stop. By middle school they’ve pretty much stopped asking. It’s no coincidence that this same time is when student motivation and engagement plummet. They didn’t stop asking questions because they lost interest: it’s the other way around. They lost interest because they stopped asking questions.
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found highly creative adults tended to grow up in families embodying opposites
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Parents encouraged uniqueness, yet provided stability. They were highly responsive to kids’ needs, yet challenged kids to develop skills. This resulted in a sort of adaptability: in times of anxiousness, clear rules could reduce chaos—yet when kids were bored, they could seek change, too. In the space between anxiety and boredom was where creativity flourished.
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also true that highly creative adults frequently grew up with hardship.
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Hardship by itself doesn’t lead to creativity, but it does force kids to become more flexible—and flexibility helps with creativity.
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In early childhood, distinct types of free play are associated with high creativity.
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role-play
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voicing someone else’s point of view helps develop their ability to analyze situations from different perspectives.
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play is a safe harbor to work through forbidden thoughts and emotions.
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In middle childhood, kids sometimes create paracosms—fantasies of entire alternative worlds
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found a remarkably high rate of paracosm creation in their childhoods.
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From fourth grade on, creativity no longer occurs in a vacuum; researching and studying become an integral part of coming up with useful solutions.
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As school stuffs more complex information into their heads, kids get overloaded, and creativity suffers. When creative children have a supportive teacher—someone tolerant of unconventional answers, occasional disruptions, or detours of curiosity—they tend to excel.
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quitting because they’re discouraged and bored, not because they’re dark, depressed, anxious, or neurotic.
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creative people, for the most part, exhibit active moods and positive affect.
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contentment is a kind of complacency creative people rarely have. But they’re engaged, motivated, and open to the world.
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those who do better in both problem-finding and problem-solving have better relationships
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those high in creative self-efficacy had more confidence about their future and ability to succeed.
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