Interesting read this morning to follow my last post – an article from Newsweek titled “the Creativity Crisis“. It begins with the assertion that for the first time, research shows that American creativity is declining. This conclusion has been drawn after analysing the lifetime achievements of a group of 400 children who were a part of a study involving a series of creativity tasks designed by E. Paul Torrance back in the 1950s. The research found that those who came up with more good ideas on Torrance’s tests of creative thinking grew up to be entrepreneurs, inventors, college presidents, authors, doctors, diplomats, and software developers.

The Newsweek article cites a recent IBM poll of 1,500 CEOs identified creativity as the No. 1 “leadership competency” of the future. And yet it is declining (apparently), both in society as a whole, and in our schools in particular. The authors identify two of the possible reasons for the decline…

1. the impact of television and the number of hours kids now spend in front of the TV and playing videogames rather than engaging in creative activities
2. the lack of creativity development in our schools, there’s no concerted effort to nurture the creativity of all children.

While it’s easy to blame the school system for all manner of social failings, this is one that I feel we do need to consider more seriously. In her writing about The Neuroscience of Joyful Education, Judy Willis highlights the importance of novelty in our teaching, stress-free classrooms, and pleasurable associations linked with learning as essential pre-cursors to joyful learning and the development of creativity. She goes on to suggest that when planning for the ideal emotional atmosphere we should be mindful of the following;

• Make it relevant – when stress in the classroom is getting high, it is often because a lesson is overly abstract or seems irrelevant to students.
• Give them a break – students can reduce stress by enjoying hobbies, time with friends, exercise, or music.
• Create positive associations – by avoiding stressful practices like calling on students who have not raised their hands, teachers can dampen the stress association.
• Prioritize information – helping students learn how to prioritize and therefore reduce the amount of information they need to deal with is a valuable stress-buster.
• Allow independent discovery learning – students are more likely to remember and understand what they learn if they find it compelling or have a part in figuring it out for themselves.

Others, including Richard Millwood who has written about ‘delight’ in learning, emphasise similar conditions for learning – minimising stress and allowing for more risk-taking, learning from mistakes, discovery and so forth.

This is unlikely to be the case in classrooms (or our school system as whole) where the  emphasis is on high stakes assessment, fear of failure, and “getting it right”. I’m not saying that we oughtn’t be concerned with measuring achievement – but when that becomes the driver of what we are doing the likely result is that the conditions identified for the development of creativity will be less likely to occur.

Here’s my list of current practices in classrooms that need our urgent attention if we are to see the level of creativity increase again…

• a narrowing emphasis on certain sorts of academic work – literacy, numeracy, sciences etc., at the expense of the arts,
• curriculum design that is linear, mechanistic and focused on conformity and standardization
• the classification of human knowledge into things called ’subjects’ which are then taught in isolation
• the breaking up of the learning day into homogenous chunks of time that are then organised into a timetable to determine when certain subjects are learned
• the existence of ‘homework’ as a concept where separate tasks are assigned to be done ‘at home’ – as distinct from considering the flow of learning that can take place at school and continued at home and vice-versa

Student voice is “…about how students come to play a more active role in their education… about forming more open and trustful relationships between staff and students.” (Prof. David Hargreaves)

I had the privilege of spending the day today at Ashby School in Leicestershire. Founded in 1567 (way older than anything we have in New Zealand Ashby School is now a high performing, comprehensive school catering for 1700 students from years 10-13.

On arrival we were taken on a tour of the school by groups of students – very articulate, knowledgeable and obviously engaged at many levels in what the school is about. After that we headed into a series of presentations and discussion with senior staff and students about various aspects of life at this school.

A significant feature of the way this school operates and is managed is the enormous emphasis that is placed on student voice. This is exemplified in a number of ways, and has come about as the result of a significant amount of hard work, research and planning on the part of the staff and students in the school. Key strategies the school uses to ensure that student voice contributes to how the school operates include:

1. input into teaching and learning - including the use of exit questionnaires in every faculty area, focus on assessment for learning strategies, and the development of a teaching and learning group that conducts lesson observations of staff and creates a dialogue between staff and students about best practice.
2. student governance – including an open-forum school council, the involvement of students in the selection of new staff, and a comprehensive ‘house system’ in which students take a very pro-active role in leading.
3. support for each other – provided mostly through the house system and a vertically organised home group system. There are a wide range of opportunities in the house system for student leadership and support – including a senior student leadership team consisting of a head boy and girl and their deputies whose role is to provide leadership of the student body in all matters relating to student life; two house captains for each of the 8 houses in the school, and 20 house prefects in each house – a total of 180 leadership roles.

The staff and students we spoke to and observed were certainly living out the espoused ideas in our brief time observing – but enough to convince us that the emphasis on student voice that this school talks about is genuine and a part of the school culture.

This visit has highlighted for me (again) the fundamental importance of building a positive school culture, one based on trust and mutuality, where student voice is paid more than lip service and tokenistic acknowledgment. This school has achieved that – and now without considerable planning and effort, but the results are certainly worth it if what we saw today is anything to go by.

Perhaps the interesting thing is that all of this was happening in a school that is an amalgamation of buildings and facilities that date back to 1567! Even the new buildings, the most recent opened in 2003, were hard to distinguish from the older ones. These quality outcomes were being achieved in a traditional school environment, without the added bonus of innovative architecture, buildings fit for pedagogy etc.

In an unfortunately titled article in a recent edition of the Examiner Lenn Millbower comments on claims that internet conditioned learners will change how we deliver instruction. Much as I loathe the whole concept of delivering instruction as a description of what our education system is all about, I did bring myself to read the article and found myself pondering two key points in it:

What is the response from teachers generally, and our education researchers and policy makers in particular, to the observations of Social psychologist Dr Aleks Krotoski quoted in the article;

”It seems pretty clear that, for good or ill, the younger generation is being remoulded by the web. Facebook’s feedback loops are revolutionising how they relate. There is empirical evidence now that information overload and associative thinking may be reshaping how they think. For many, this seems to be a bleak prospect – young people bouncing and flitting between a thoughtless, throwaway virtual world.”

Questions this prompts me to consider include…

What are we doing in our classrooms on a daily/weekly basis, using action research or reflecting on action methods, to test these assumptions and claims?

If they prove true, what are the implications of them for how we design learning for the future?

Are these behaviours that we simply need to adapt to and accommodate, or are they things we need to be strategically and intentionally countering in the pedagogical design of our lessions?

Millbower concludes his article with a similarly tough challenge for teachers:

Distilled down to its essence, we learning professionals have two choices.

1. Deliver old style, long and detailed lectures, provide copious reading assignments, and expect focused attention on you; or …
2. Replace lectures with mysteries and problems to be solved, replace reading assignments with topics to be researched via the Internet, and replace focused attention with texting and other social interactions.

We may not want to pick the second option—it will certainly make our professional lives harder—but our choices are adaptation or decreasing relevance. We better make the choice before our learners make it for us.

In my work I make regular use of the internet and Web2.0 technologies on a daily basis, and have regular contact with teachers around the world who are doing so in their classrooms. This article is a timely reminder that we need to be mindful of the boiling frog anecdote, and commit some time to researching the ways in which the use of the internet is shaping our learning behaviour.

Today I presented CORE’s ten trends for 2010 to an audience of around 400 delegates at the Learning@School conference in Rotorua. The ten trends are a collection of themes and issues that have been identified by CORE staff as trends in education that we imagine will impact on the work of teachers and leaders in early childhood centres, schools, and tertiary institutions in NZ in the coming year. While our focus is on the bigger picture of education, there is a focus on trends associated with the use of ICTs in education, reflecting the fact that we are living in a world where nearly everything we do has a digital dimension.

I’ve had a long time interest in using the online environment as a vehicle for promoting debate and engagement in critical issues.

Recently I was invited by Bryan Orme to take a look at CreateDebate, a website he and his colleagues have created to promote discussion and critical thinking in the classroom.

It’s an interesting looking concept – so I’ve created a simple debate based on the theme and issues in my previous blog post and invite anyone to add their thoughts – both pro and con – to the debate.

I’ve titled the debate “blended, virtual and mobile learning should replace face-to-face instruction” Take a look, add your thoughts and send me any feedback on what you think of the usefulness of the site.

A few days ago my friend Dan sent me a link to a story about Dr. Monica Rankin’s “Twitter Experiment” which she explains in the video at the top of this post. It highlighted for me just how easy it can be to begin investigating the potential of some of these web2.0 technologies within the conventional classroom (albeit in this case a university setting.)

Some key ideas that I saw canvassed in the video:

- limitations and opportunities of the 140 character limit

- students using a variety of technologies for contributing

- the ability of people to “join from afar’ (including the lecturer)

- increased engagement of a class of 90 students!

- the ability to review and follow up after class

I couldn’t help but notice that they were using the web interface of Twitter for their contributions, and wonder how much more might be added to the experience if they were to use something like TweetDeck or Seesmic which would provide the opportunity to more directly monitor replies and direct messages for instance.

Dr Rankin has posted some her thoughts on the experiment online that provide a more useful reflection after watching the video.

I applaud her approach to trying something new here, captured in her final comment on the video: “Yes, it’s going to be messy. But messy doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to be bad“.

Ben, a Canadian educator on my Twitter list posted a link to this Mathematics in Movies site, developed by Oliver Knill from the Department of Mathematics at Harvard University. A great resource for maths teachers, particularly at secondary level, with each movie listed linking to the part of the movie with the math focus and a brief explanation of the mathematical aspects being considered.  Each movie is linked in a variety of formats, for viewing on whatever device you may have, including mobiles.

Knill’s website is also worth exploring for anyone interested in the teaching of mathematics and the use of technology in this process. On the site Knill explores some of the pedagogical questions, especially in web pedagogy and the use of technology in teaching which he shares on a pedagogy page.

Thanks Oliver for making such a rich resource available! A classic example of how each of us as educators can enrich the profession by using technology to share what we know and do.

The Learning@School conference is rollicking along in Rotorua at the moment, with keynote speaker on day one, Andy Hargreaves, setting the scene with challenges to us all about the need to take account of the whole context and culture of our school when considering change and development. Pam Hook had the audience spell-bond also with her “Hooked on Thinking” ideas and strategies.

Unfortunately for me I am missing the conference, and have had to rely on my Twitter feeds, text messages and the odd call to keep me posted. Having made it to the opening of the conference I’ve had to return home for family reasons. That didn’t stop the presentation I was scheduled to do from going ahead – with my colleague from the Ministry of Education, Douglas Harre, stepping up to share thoughts, insights and ideas based on CORE’s Ten Trends for 2009. This is the annual list of trends developed by CORE staff to represent a view of some key areas of interest for NZ educators with regards to the impact of ICTs on teaching and learning.

This year’s trends are:

1. Mobile Technologies for learning
2. Netbooks
3. Cloud Computing
4. Learning spaces/environments
5. Open Education Resources
6. High Definition Video conferencing
7. Advanced Networks
8. Cyber-Citizenary
9. Green computing
10. Digital Literacy

The slideshow used at Learning@School is provided here:

For links to other research and lists of trends and predictions for 2009 check out the following:

Horizon Report, 2009

Looking forward to 2009

100 Top Sites for the year ahead

The Future of the Internet III

Horizon report – Australia/NZ edition

Just as Sesame Street helped transform television into a revolutionary tool for learning among young children four decades ago, advances in mobile technologies are showing enormous untapped educational potential for today’s generation.

This report released last month by a research centre based at the Sesame Workshop claims that children’s lives have been caught up in a tide of mobile digital technologies—games, cellphones, and smartphones— and that, if carefully managed, these could significantly boost their learning.

“It is no longer a question of whether we should use these devices to support learning, but how and when,” to use them,” writes Michael H. Levine, the executive director of the New York City-based Joan Ganz Cooney Center, at Sesame Workshop.

This The 52-page “Pockets of Potential: Using Mobile Technologies to Promote Children’s Learning” draws on interviews with a cross-section of research, policy, and industry experts to illustrate how mobile technologies such as cell phones, iPod devices, and portable gaming platforms might be more widely used for learning. More than half of the world’s population now owns a cell phone and children under 12 constitute one of the fastest growing segments of mobile technology users in the U.S. Examining over 25 handheld learning products and research projects in the U.S. and abroad, the report highlights early evidence and examples of how mobile devices may help re-define teaching and learning in the decade ahead.