Creativ!ty on the Ides of March

Posted on by
Reply

“Beware the ides of March.” In this case, though, the ides of March brought no foreboding to Julius Caesar, but a hopeful foreshadowing of “warning” about what we need more of in schools (my direct and personal  interpretation and application). And the triumvirate in this case is – openness, process, and persistence. What in tarnation am I talking about? On March 15, I enjoyed the privilege of being a TEDxAtlanta: Creativ!ty attendee! If you are not familiar with TEDx events, I encourage you to get familiar. This was my third live TEDx event, and I tune in regularly to live streams from other TEDx venues. The events at TEDxAtlanta just keep getting better and better! Here is an outline of the Tuesday’s TEDxAtlanta: Creativ!ty (with some added hyperlinks for further exploration)…

Check-In/Lunch
12:00 PM — 12:25 PM
Unboundary

Session 1
12:25 PM — 2:30 PM
TEDx: Opening Video
India.Arie & Idan Raichel: Open Door
Tod Martin: Welcome
Victoria Rowell: The Mentor
Bonnie Cramond: To the Different Ones
Michael Ouweleen: The Day I Became Funny
Sally Hogshead: How to Fascinate
Q&A with speakers

Session 2
3:00 PM — 5:00 PM
Margaret Baldwin: The Power of Dialogue
Elizabeth Turk: The Construction of Emotion
Armin Vit: Think Stupid
Viktor Venson: No Right Brain Left Behind
Q&A with speakers
Linton Hopkins: Creativity vs. Chaos

If you are a Twitter user, you can review the tweets from the event by searching the hashtag: #Creativity2011. And videos by Definition 6, capturing the speakers and their messages, will be posted to TEDxAtlanta.com ASAP. They are ALL worth the watch.

In fact, while each TEDx talk was remarkable in its own individual right, the “magic” of a TEDxAtlanta event, and I imagine the magic of other TEDx and TED events, is the interconnectedness of the talks. Magic because the talks are not coordinated in a prior fashion – beyond being of a common topic, in this case “Creativ!ty.” Throughout the day, the ideas of openness, process, and persistence echoed louder and louder for me. Many of the speakers touched on or focused on the importance of being open to ideas and diversity of perspective. What one person labels as “weird” or “strange” can just be a mis-label for creativity (see also Sir Ken Robinson’s The Element). Yet the connotations of the labels are vastly different. We need to be cautious, skeptical in fact, of placing labels on people. We are complex creatures with the potential for a rich diversity of thought and being. We should nurture that diversity of thinking and shun the human tendency to place people in boxes of “strangeness.”

All of the speakers were woven together by the thread of process. FAILURE is expected…a good thing even. Stupid ideas should be pursued, bad jokes should be made, poor writing should fill our pages and pixels. For out of experimentation comes progress and development. Prototyping creates the opportunity for buds of ideas to become blossoms of great possibility. We have to fall down to learn to walk. We have to get bruised and scraped to learn to ride a bike. We have to talk gibberish to learn to talk. But we will learn, if we concentrate on the process of getting better…of practicing…of persisting.

Persistence is required for creativity. We are ALL creative. We were born creative. However, many of us lose sight of this fact when we let others label us as weird or strange. Others lose sight of this when we think that drawing or painting or writing is a God-given talent alone. That which we practice, we improve upon. That’s the key to creativity. Staying open to ideas and saying YES to possibility rather than NO to crazy-sounding stuff…valuing the process as the art – even more so than the finished product or results…and persisting through failure, which is simply a name for early and consistent attempts at improvement.

On Tuesday, TEDxAtlanta: Creativ!ty was a FORUM for THE GROWTH MINDSET! Want to be creative? Commit to and develop a growth mindset. That’s it in a nutshell. Like most things, creativity is about learning, much more so than about already being. It’s about learning!

A few more Mindset resources:

Dumber or Just Different?

Posted on by
4

This week, a colleague at school circulated the email below to a large number of faculty. The content of the inquiry has caused me to really think about some things. Here are a few of them:

  • Kudos to this educator for soliciting dialogue about an important learning issue! I love that instincts were to create a space for discussion and collaboration.
  • Thanks to this educator (and others who designed the PD day) for identifying a way to use in-service time for self-identified interests and innovations!
  • Could the texts we are asking students to read be part of the issue…rather than the length of the texts?
  • Years and years ago, was a similar message part of a tribal campfire discussion? “Villagers, we are having a harder and harder time getting children to tell stories around the campfire. Their oral memories are terrible! They want to look at these things called books. What should we do?” [please excuse the reductionist, less-than-accurate historical detail here]
  • Don’t people who write long books do so by examining small dollups of thinking? Don’t writers of long texts do so by writing smaller dollups of writing?
  • I read a lot of “sound bites” that I categorize with modern day tools so that I “study” an issue intensely from a number of different, inter-connected perspectives. When we think about a printed, long text, isn’t that exactly what we have access to via the words that the author decided to record – all the synthesized thinking that went into the recording of the text?
  • Why do we educators sometimes assume that just because the “kids don’t do it in school, they must not do it?” I am certain that our students are choosing to read and immerse themselves in some longer, richer texts…not because they are assigned in school, but because they are interesting outside of school.
  • Let’s search for the “both/and solution.” Students – all learners – should be able to do both/and…learn in sound bites and backchannels, as well as in longer, deeper texts, as well as…

Dear Colleagues,

Some of you may have seen Bob Ryshke’s recent posting of Mark Bauerlein’s article on thoughtful reading, “Too Dumb for Complex Texts.”  In a similar vein, I offer you a short blog post called “Are We Really Becoming More Stupid?”  Make sure you read the response, too:

http://www.prelude-team.com/blog/2010/10/05/are-we-really-becoming-more-stupid

The post and the response encapsulate neatly two different arguments about the way we (or some of us?) read today. 

My own experience in class over the last 2-3 years has been that of an increasing student unease with spending time with texts or even passages, and I have been wondering whether it is some way related to a rapidly emerging digital culture that privileges sound-bites, personal opinion (not informed judgement), and multi-tasking.  We have even seen some of our faculty peers engaging in technological multi-tasking by tweeting each other during presentations (so-called “back-channeling”).

I would be very interested in participating in a collaborative discussion with some of you about encouraging our students to read slowly and deeply — to give complex texts enough time to breathe.  The next in-service day looks like the perfect time to do this.  Let me know if you’re interested, and let’s start working on a reading list and/or an agenda for the day.

Finally, I thought of this TED talk…

Thanks to Michaelangelo

Posted on by
1

Yesterday, when I got home, I asked my six-year-old about school. “What was your most fun thing today?” He answered that they had seen some slides of a guy who painted, sculpted, designed architecture, messed around in math, and read a lot of books. I asked if he remembered who the “guy” was. My son said, “No, but he painted some chapel ceiling.” I said, “Michaelangelo.” My son said, “Yeah, that’s the guy.”

I am not entirely sure why I love all of the categories (and more!) that my son listed, but I do. I hope someone, someday, will describe me as a Renaissance person. I hope my sons – both of them – seek to learn about the full range of things in the world. Specialization is overrated. I hope my sons find ways to stay integrated in their thinking. PJ found no disconnect that that “guy” did all those things. For now, I am thankful that my kindergartener had an interaction with a Renaissance person today…through his teacher. Thanks, Michaelangelo.

Happy Pi Day – Math, Music, and NPR

Posted on by
Reply

This morning, on my way to my sabbatical internship at Unboundary, I heard this story on NPR. http://www.npr.org/2011/03/14/134492882/how-to-transform-the-number-pi-into-a-song

I was saddened, a bit, when the interviewee uttered the phrase, “I am a music person, not a math person.” How did he come to compartmentalize himself this way? Why doesn’t he see himself as both? Aren’t they two branches of the same tree? My pursuit of understanding integrated studies will hopefully shed more light on this way of thinking about oneself and one’s learning.

Here is the YouTube about “What Pi Sounds Like.”

Riffing, Swirling, and Boarding

Posted on by
Reply

Had I taken my sabbatical more than four years ago, I believe that my time at Unboundary would have seemed like a journey to a foreign land. As it is now, Unboundary is very recognizable and familiar to me because of the work in which I have immersed myself regarding PLCs – professional learning communities.

In The Fifth Discipline, Peter Senge writes:

The tools and ideas presented in this book are for destroying the illusion that the world is created of separate, unrelated forces. When we give up this illusion – we can then build ‘learning organizations,’ organizations where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning how to learn together.

During my first week as a sabbatical intern at Unboundary, I witnessed the power of three collaborative tools: riffing, swirling, and boarding.

  • Riffing is improvisational brainstorming. Often team members will declare that they are riffing. This seems to bring into play a set of unspoken, agreed-upon norms – these next ideas are for building more ideas, so don’t shoot them down and don’t add them to the more-concrete draft yet. Just hear me and think with me. Try to pick up a note that you can riff on, too.
  • Swirling is perspective and feedback seeking. It is asking for input and assessment. It provides evaluation from the standpoint of mixing things up so that new lenses can be applied to the thinking and creation.
  • Boarding is communal mind-mapping. Making boards literally means putting index cards up on a tack-board wall (often movable panels) in order to outline and storyboard an idea. By utilizing a board, big-picture visualization and idea connectivity is facilitated.

Watching an Unboundary team riff, swirl, and board is akin to watching a PLC. In a PLC, team members work through the four questions: 1) what should be learned, 2) how will we know if learning is happening, 3) what will we do if it has already been learned, and 4) what will we do if it is not being learned. In a PLC, this work is accomplished collaboratively through such practices as analyzing student work, establishing SMART goals and essential learnings, engaging in lesson study, and participating in instructional rounds. By working together and breaking out of the traditionally isolated way of working in schools, PLC members are able to riff, swirl, and board their ideas…all for the benefit of learning. WE are smarter than ME. Therefore, schools need to ensure time and space for teachers to work together as lead learners, rather than continuing on the path of the egg-crate culture typical of most schools.

In the 21st century, schools and other businesses – all learning organizations – must partner together to share productive and innovative techniques. We need to expand our capacities to create the results we truly desire, we need to nurture new and expansive patterns of thinking, we need to set free our collective aspirations, and we need to learn how to learn together. We need to riff, swirl, and board…together. We need to unboundary ourselves and strive for more significance…together. Imagine the thinking that school and business could do as a team. Imagine the thinkers we would facilitate in schools – thinkers who would grow into the business leaders of tomorrow. Imagine the learning that could happen!

– Senge, Peter. The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. New York: Currency Doubleday. Accessed via e-copy on Amazon Kindle App for iPad.