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

I’ve just been viewing this video of John Cleese as I am preparing some thoughts for a workshop I have coming up, in which I want to get people thinking about creativity and the way we create opportunities for its development in our school programmes. Cleese makes a simple point – that time and lack of disruption play an important part in the expression of creative thought. Or to put it another way, constant interruptions to the thought process stifles creativity.

Sir Ken Robinson has had a lot of exposure recently with his provocation on ‘do schools kill creativity?’, with their constant emphasis on assessment in small chunks and the value placed on ‘getting things right’, and not spending time reflecting on mistakes and repeatedly trying things out etc. Again, a key thing here is the ability to devote time to the task in order for real creativity to come through.

Tonight I read an article in the Times Education Supplement about a radical experiment carried out for a two-part BBC2 documentary which found that children taught in an experimental model classroom learned at twice the speed of their contemporaries. It’s difficult to tell exactly from the brief report what exactly was trialed, but there is the hint that one of the key features of this trial was that learners were given the opportunity to spend time completing a challenge, without having to be concerned about the micro-assessments along the way.

All of this leads me to reflect on how desperately we need to work at resolving the tension in the way that we think about and manage the use of time in our schools. The chunking of time into discrete blocks on a timetable must be one of the most debilitating things we so blindly continue with in our schools – just as students are becoming engaged in the way that Cleese, Robinson and the BBC researchers point to, we ring a bell and tell them to move on to the next thing. That, together with the constant interruptions we present to the flow of learning in class time – in the form of micro-assessments, management strategies, teacher talk etc. – conspires to stifle all genuine expressions of creativity.

Time appears to be both the problem and solution. We are always anxious because we don’t have enough of it, often because we feel burdened by expectations of others and compliance issues (it is always the number one excuse I hear from educators for why they can’t embrace a new idea or work with a new approach in their classrooms). On the other hand, I do see some examples emerging where radically different approaches are being taken, such as the ‘impact project‘ day they have at Albany Senior Secondary School where they spend one complete day each week immersed in a particular theme or topic.

If we’re going to take the challenge of Cleese, Robinson et al seriously, then we have to be prepared to be more courageous in our approach. As my grandmother often said to me as I was growing up and would complain to her about my lack of time, “funny how we always find the time to do the things we’re really passionate about or believe are important!” Perhaps there’s simply not enough passion or conviction that this is important enough in our system yet???

With an increasing emphasis on the use of film and media in schools it’s always useful when there’s an opportunity to put those talents to good use as part of a challenge or competition. The NZ National Commission for UNESCO is a project partner in the Outlook for Someday sustainability film challenge for young people aged up to 24 years, making it idea for consideration at the senior secondary or tertiary level.

The challenge is to make a short sustainability related film, in any genre, filmed with any camera and at any length up to a maximum of 5 minutes. Entries can be from individuals, teams, schools, groups of friends etc., so the door is open to all sorts of collaborations.

Full details can be found on the Outlook for Someday website – entries close on 17 September.

Further to my recent post about the 100 ways Google can make you a better educator, Google themselves have published a comprehensive overview of support, tips and tutorials for using the Google apps in education all neatly presented on a LiveBinder. This will be an essential bookmarked site I’d imagine for any teacher who is keen on exploring ways of using these apps with educative purpose. There’s a host of tutorials in the form of video and text, some of which are also graded for beginner, intermediate and advanced. This binder brings together all of the things that you’d otherwise have to delve off into a number of areas to find – and is yet another great example of how LiveBinder can be used so effectively.

While on the topic of using Google in education, yesterday’s post on the RWW titled
When K-12 Moves to the Cloud highlights a point I made in the earlier post – that the use of cloud-based applications such as Google Apps is about more than simply saving money. In their article, the RWW team summarise what is happening in various places in the US, highlighting the fact that in addition to the obvious cost-saving and technical support benefits that come from this move, there is also an emerging cultural shift in schools.

Signs of this culture shift highlighted in the article include:

• increased collaboration between teachers and schools
• participation in personal learning networks for professional growth and development
• resource sharing, including the collaborative development of open-source text books

As Howard Chan, the Director of Technology for K-12 public charter schools in San Diego, California, is quoted, “having a centralized depository for disseminating information has changed the culture of our school. Now there is a platform for distributing information in real time and archiving information for future use.”

So it’s with interest that I browsed the list of 100 Ways Google Can Make You a Better Educator, compiled by the keepers of the Online Education Database. The list is neatly broken down under headings, classifying the various ways in which Google apps can be used, including communications, news, maps, images and tools for organising. For those who are looking for some good ideas for the classroom this list will keep you going for a while

The workshop will begin with a field trip to a new school site, set in the heart of a ‘greenfields‘ site just north of Christchurch – soon to be a new town of over 30,000 people. We’ll use this experience to explore the issues and opportunities for visioning the building of a new school, and cover a range of topics from architecture, interior design and furniture through to curriculum and pedagogical practice. This will all be done through a series of participatory workshops facilitated by myself and Cheryl Doig. Providing expert input and the benefit of their international experience will be Damian Allen and Elain Ayre from the Directorate of Children and Family Services in Knowlsey, Stephen Heppell and Julia Atkin – all of whom have had extensive experience in the visioning and design of new schools.

Workshop dates are Monday 4th and Tuesday 5th October. We will be meeting in the future-focused buildings of Unlimited School in the middle of Christchurch. Places are limited to 35 people, so be quick!

There are still some places available in this workshop which is especially designed for principals, school leaders or boards of trustees members involved in new school design and building. If this sounds like you – or you know of someone who fits the bill – please feel free to download a flier here with all the relevant information, check out the ULearn website for more (scroll down to #12), or download and complete the registration form to register.

The people at eInstruction are at it again, offering a prize of up to $75k (US) to the school that can gather  students and create their very own music video. The video can be a parody of an existing song or you can create one yourself. The key is to make it fun, creative, and focused on the use of technology in the classroom. I’ve blogged about this in previous years, and I know of several NZ schools that have entered, one of which won a significant prize!

The entries in this competition are always worth a view, as they illustrate the amazing diversity there is in the way the theme can be interpreted, and the incredible creativity that is unleashed when you set students an open-ended challenge like this.

This year I’ve had the privilege of being asked to be one of the judges for this event, so I’ll have even more reason to view and consider the entries – so let’s hope there are some NZ ones amongst them

In addition to being a useful personal tool, I can see this being an excellent app to use in the classroom – both as a way of learning about time zones, and also for students to use when scheduling their online interactions as a part of global classroom project work.

One of the ten lessons in particular attracted my attention:

As I reflect on the impact of various politically-initiated initiatives on the education system in New Zealand, in Australia and the UK,the common thread appears to be reform based on a series of targeted interventions – some of which are on a huge scale, but all of which are driven by an ideology that fails, in my view, to be fully supported by a comprehensive, end-to-end approach in their thinking.

While it is easy to sit back and poke borax at political leaders for this sort of failure, we’d do well to consider that it can also be a problem at the local level. In our schools and our regional connections, we must make sure that each intervention we introduce is thought through to ensure that all of the other things it is likely to impact on have been taken into account.

At times I can’t help but wonder where the ‘big picture’ thinking is – where is the ‘joined-up’ system thinking and analysis, that is reflected in the  local and national level policies. The lesson from Iowa is one we do well to reflect on…

Changing only one part of the system while not addressing all of the others that impact the work would be wasted energy.

Shortly after I posted my last post i received a tweet from DK over at MediaSnackers recommending I check out the Dragon dictation app on the iPhone as another example of how changes are occurring in the way we interface with our mobile devices. No sooner had I begun to explore that than my friend Malcolm sent me a link to a new app launched by Google that will let you talk to your mobile phone as if you are asking a friend to do something for you (see video above). It’s called Voice Actions for Android, and provides a series of spoken commands that let you control your phone using your voice.

I guess the real message here is that either way, voice or gesture, we’re beginning to see real signs of alternative forms of human interface with technology becoming more mainstream, and, as with all the other things we’re considering, the question for educators is not “how can we integrate these into our classrooms?”, but “what can we learn from the way these things are adopted and used that might inform how and what we need to be teaching in the future?”