Tag Archive for ‘Teaching’ at Students 2.0

Tag Archive for 'Teaching'

Of Creativity & Art

Published by Morgante Pell on November 19, 2008 in Meta. 5 Comments

This entry is cross-posted from my personal blog. Please direct your responses there.

What is creativity? I doubt many people, including teachers, could give you a good definition. In simplest terms, it is the ability to create. However, I like to use a more specific definition:

Creativity is the ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns, relationships, or the like, and to create meaningful new ideas, forms, methods, interpretations, etc.

Leonardo da Vinci

Above: Leonardo da Vinci was a master of mixing creativity and art.

The key to creativity is the ability and act of transcending tradition. Using this definition, I think creativity is exceptionally rare in schools. Students are almost never asked to transcend tradition and think outside the box. In fact, doing so is punished. This rarity arises from a confusion about what creativity really is.

If you were to ask most teachers or administrators, you would hear a distinctly different story. Most will says their schools/classrooms stimulate and “unlock” creativityUnlocking creativity is a scary proposition in and of itself. Who locked it up in the first place?. Doing a word search on school mission statements will turn up an inordinate number of references to creativity. Someone should replace 99% of those occurrences with the word “art.”

What many school officials and teachers mean by creativity is really art. Art is all about practice and method. Art is about the perfection of technique. Art is about applying techniques rigorously in pursuit of a goal. In short, art is studied action; artificiality in behavior.

Painting yet another landscape is art, and neither is solving a mathematical equation. Both of them involve substantial practice and application of traditional rules.In many ways, art is very similar to science. Make no mistake: both can be very difficult. The level of effort it takes to perfect any art is astounding. However, this is distinct from creativity. Remember, creativity is all about transcending tradition. In many ways, creativity and art are polar opposites.

Actually, creativity and art are not so much polar opposites as two sides of the same coin.Sick of the casual metaphors yet? Creativity is used to think of new ideas and sources of ideas. Art is used to translate those ideas into presentable forms. To create a brilliant work, both creativity and art must be used.

In many ways, schools fail to recognize this. Art is constantly drilled in schools: when not directly transferring content, teachers often focus on teaching new skillsMost skills are really just a combination of practice and knowledge of method, similar to art.. However, very little attention is paid to the application of those skills in novel ways. Writing thousands of 5-paragraph essays will give you perfect form and will make you a very precise writer, but it will not make you a great and innovative one. Translating notes into a science fair board will, optimally, teach art to a degree. However, none of these things will teach creativity. When schools talk about their wealth of creativity, they usually mean art.

To a certain degree, I do not think creativity can be taught. The very nature of it makes creativity unteachable—you cannot teach someone to positively ignore convention, since in doing so they would simply be internalizing another rule. However, creativity can be practiced. Constantly making new ideas teaches you to see which work and which will not. Searching for pattens helps you to see patterns faster in the future. Luckily, art can be taught—and it should be taught. Without art, nobody will respect your creativity. The point is, creativity can be practiced but not taught.

Train

Above: A great example of tilt-shift photography from Vincent Laforet.

The next time you brag about how much creativity you foster, ask yourself if you really mean art.

Think Different

Published by Sean "The Bass Player" on August 7, 2008 in Teaching. 32 Comments

Think Different

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can praise them, disagree with them, quote them, disbelieve them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They invent. They imagine. They heal. They explore. They create. They inspire. They push the human race forward. Maybe they have to be crazy. How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art? Or sit in silence and hear a song that’s never been written? Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels? We make tools for these kinds of people. While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

Some of you may recognise that as the famous Apple ‘Think Different’ text, others may not, but I guess whether you’ve read it before or have read it for the first time there, we can pretty much all agree that it’s an inspiring piece of text. The thing that surprised me was that when reading through it I realised that all you need to do is change one tiny piece of the text to change the whole context of it.

“We ~~make tools for~~ educate these kinds of people”

In my mind, that’s now one hell of a motto for a better education system.

Let’s face it; the current education system just doesn’t know how to handle these kinds of people. “The round pegs in the square holes,” as Apple refers to them. The system doesn’t understand creativity. It robs all students of their creative consciousness and replaces it with structure, structure, and more structure, only to prepare them for a 9-to-5 job, Monday to Friday, every week of every year for the rest of their lives. Art, Music, Drama… you name it, the current system has a course for it. But that course doesn’t do any form of justice to the many greats that have over hundreds of years created amazing works and done incredible things, demonstrating how beautiful these arts can be. Students aren’t told to let passion drive them forward, or let their inspiration flow and their imagination stop at nothing. They are told to follow the rules, and do whatever it takes to get a ‘pass.’ Where would we be if Bach was told his Brandenburg concertos ‘didn’t quite meet the required standard’? What would have happened if Van Gogh was told his paintings just ‘didn’t make sense’?

It doesn’t stop at the arts. The suppression of creativity is seen in all fields of learning within the current system, giving no room for our real geniuses to shine. And why? Because the system has an obsession with testing, and at the end of the day you can’t test real genius, because you just can’t grade it. Who really has the right to say that a piece of music is an A or B or whatever else? Why should someone sitting in a fancy government office be able to sit there and write the rules that decide whether this piece of writing would make the grade or not? Why can’t the people deciding our futures for us be content with having some classes that have no exams? Classes that are solely there to help stimulate the different skills we all possess, without having to put us under the constant pressure of being bombarded with test after test and grade after grade. Do they see this as ‘non-educational’?

Think Different 2 Think of the wealth of talent that is being and has been squandered due to this system. How many people would have become the next great composer if they had been given just that little bit more leeway? How many people would have had the courage to write their own novel, because they wouldn’t have been told they ‘weren’t good enough’? How many people failed to ever recognise their own potential because they were too busy striving for the best grades possible? Only so they could get a ‘good’ job in an office, with a ‘good’ salary.

Don’t get me wrong, we need the people in offices to do the things that keep our public services running and our economy going, but we also need the people who create, invent, and change things. We need the people who “sit in silence and hear a song that’s never been written,” because Apple is right; they push the human race forward, and have done for as long as the human race has been around. But they can’t continue to do so if we don’t help them realise they are capable of doing so. They can’t invent the cure for cancer, or compose a great symphony, or write a magnificent piece of literature if our education system tells them exactly how everything should be, and what they should learn, and what they are aiming to do with their lives. Give them the opportunity. Let them decide.

We make the mistake of thinking that the people that do well in school are the ‘smart’ ones, but that isn’t always the case. These people may just be good at retaining information and reciting it back under pressure, or may just be good at problem solving. Our schools teach these kinds of people well, because they know how to deal with them. All you need to do with these people is throw facts and figures at them and tell them they need to know them to pass, and get become qualified to get a good job... which is not even proper learning. There is no regard there for our creative ones, or even the ‘smart’ ones who can probably do so much more given the opportunity. There is no other option, no fork in the road, not even a way to have the best of both worlds. Just one path for everyone to follow, with the same goal in mind—to fit in, and become another round peg in a round hole.

Let me make myself clear right now that this is not a dig at teachers, who do a superb job. What it is, however, is a cry out to the people in suits who decide what we learn and how we learn it to change their philosophy. To realise that some people can achieve more, and that the people who will eventually find the cure for cancer, or create the next breakthrough piece of technology, or discover new planets and galaxies are in our schools. These children/students or whatever you want to call them are waiting on these people to realise and do something to help them on their way to greatness. To give them the opportunity to shine, and achieve things that both us and them can’t even imagine yet.

It really is time for our education system to start ‘Thinking Differently.’

The Bass Player

Photo 1 by nilson

Photo 2 by tim7423

21st Century Education: Thinking Creatively

Published by Anthony Chivetta on January 22, 2008 in Teaching. 73 Comments

This was originally written for publication for my school’s newsletter’s edition on “21^st century learning”. I present it to you here not as an attempt to present any new ideas, but in the hope that it might help to pull together many of the ideas that are floating around in online education discussions. Those familiar with Dan Pink might see some of his influence here. Enjoy.

Twenty-first century education won’t be defined by any new technology. It won’t be defined by 1:1 laptop programs or tech-intensive projects. Twenty-first century education will, however, be defined by a fundamental shift in what we are teaching—a shift towards learner-centered education and creating creative thinkers. Today’s world is no longer content with students who can simply apply the knowledge they learned in school: our generation will be asked to think and operate in ways that traditional education has not, and can not, prepare us for.

Education has long tried to produce students who can think (and at times, think critically) and it has, for the most part, succeeded. As we move into a world where outsourcing, automation, and the ability to produce a product, physical or intellectual, at the cheapest cost, become the cornerstones of our rapidly evolving global economy, the ability to think critically is no longer enough. The need to know the capital of Florida died when my phone learned the answer. Rather, the students of tomorrow need to be able to think creatively: they will need to learn on their own, adapt to new challenges and innovate on-the-fly. As the realm of intellectual accessibility expands at amazing rates (due to greater global collaboration and access to information), students of tomorrow will need to be their own guides as they explore the body of information that is at their fingertips. My generation will be required to learn information quickly, use that information to solve new and novel problems, and then present those solutions in creative and effective ways. The effective students of tomorrow’s world will be independent learners, strong problem solvers and effective designers.

If we accept the above to be true, I would argue that there are two types of education that will prepare students for the world of tomorrow: experiential learning and project-based learning.

Experiential learning can be best seen in extracurriculars and in some schools, senior projects. These experiences give students the opportunity to face first-hand the challenges that arise when applying the theoretical knowledge provided by traditional classroom learning to real-world challenges. Light designing for MICDS Theatre has taught me how to take my technical knowledge of lighting and apply it to a creative and artistic end. As issues arise, I must problem-solve within the constraints provided by my technical knowledge and my creative vision—I must think creatively.

Project-based learning is the in-class complement of experiential learning. The concept behind project-based learning is simple: give students the basic tools, then ask them to go above and beyond on their own projects, exploring the information in their own way, and on their own terms. The effect can be awe-inspiring. Our students are diving deeper into subject matter than ever before, and doing so on their own terms in ways that they enjoy. Whether it is through producing a movie on burlesque dance or deriving Kepler’s laws using calculus, students are not only learning, but they are learning how to learn.

Traditional-rote learning has its place too, as a jumping-off point for our intellectual endeavors. We are, however, crippling our students if we don’t give them the tools necessary to be life-long learners.

Update: A recent post on the Generation YES Blog talks about a Lemelson-MIT study showing that students are interested in having the tools to (in my language) think creatively.

Teaching the Process of Design (or, making student videos interesting)

Published by Anthony Chivetta on January 7, 2008 in Teaching. 46 Comments

As I watch students (myself included, as always) work on video projects for their foreign language, English, or other classes, I see a striking similarity between those videos and my family’s home movies. Just like home movies, most of these student videos are lacking a thesis and a design to support them. As technology allows us to integrate creative projects further into our curriculum, we need to give students the tools to funnel their creative efforts into an effective and cohesive whole.

The need to teach students how to design is not a new idea. Dan Meyer has been posting wonderful lessons from his class on Information Design. Scott S. Floyd in his year-end photo post writes:

While we focus on design being important in educating our youth (or their learning), I have begun to pay particular attention in how things look around me. I think that giving our students the opportunity to understand and appreciate the elements of design will allow them to create better finished products to display their learning.

There are many ways that one can approach design. Practitioners of the visual arts might look at it in terms of the principles of design. My background, however, is in theatre and video production. I will also add that my teacher/mentor Mr. Patrick Huber gets full credit for instilling this process in me.

If you asked a director of a theatrical or video production for the thesis of their production, you would surely get a cogent statement of purpose. It might be as simple as “My production is ‘historically accurate’” or a more grandiose theory about the world we inhabit: “by allowing ones’ ambition, not rationality, to take control of the choices we make, we lead ourselves into our failure” (That Scottish Play) or “our perception of our environment is a function of the people in it and our relationships with them” (The Zoo Story). Once a thesis is decided on, a concept for the production is formed that expresses the thesis and every design decision made during the production serves the thesis. This gives directors (or designers, or actors) a basic structure on which to base their production. Used correctly, a thesis can be the most powerful tool in a designer’s arsenal.

I would argue that the reason watching student videos can at times be excruciatingly painful is that they lack a cohesive design. Often, they represent a hodgepodge of ideas strewn together with very little thought to creating a unified whole. However, when students begin with picking a thesis, and then work from that thesis, a pattern, a design, begins to emerge. When the question for every single decision is “what supports my thesis?” those awkward transitions, strange cuts, and random effects begin to make sense.

Let us take, as an example, foreign language video projects. In my school, it is not uncommon for a foreign language student to be producing a short three- or five-minute video to demonstrate their mastery of the curriculum. Normally, the first “production meeting” starts with the question: “What can our video be about that makes it easy for us to use the required tenses and vocabulary?” And so, a script is written and design decisions are made with one goal in mind: satisfying the requirements. The problem is two-fold: While the video satisfies the requirements, it does so only minimally, and while the students are using the class’s language, they may not be fully expressing an idea with the language.

Rather than simply asking our students to combine video technology with their foreign language, we need to be asking them to use both their foreign language and video technology to express an idea. Asking students to reach beyond the requirements is where the real gold lies: it is when we really start to see how well students can use the tools given to them.

This isn’t, of course, limited to foreign language videos. I would classify student video productions into two categories: (1) videos demonstrating mastery of material (such as the above foreign language example), and (2) videos demonstrating the material (such as a video one might produce for a history class explaining some historical event). In this second case, the purpose of a thesis is simple: to make the video interesting. If students are trying to convey information in a video, they need to hold their audience’s attention. Structuring their video and design decisions around a thesis is a powerful tool for creating a cohesive and powerful piece.

I leave you with a series of questions: How and when do you teach students design skills at your school? What types of design skills do you teach them? Do they have the design skills to effectively utilize the creative mediums you provide them? What attributes have you found make student designs particularly effective?

Edit: Changed the title, and corrected some small errors. ~AJC (2008-01-07)

The difference between “teaching” and “preaching”

Published by Nicole Kim on December 10, 2007 in Teaching. 45 Comments

To me, teaching should be “self-directing” a student. In other words, a teacher is there, but doesn’t interfere with everything; students are allowed to do what they want to do (in our case, we are allowed to put poetry and anything else we’re interested in on our blogs - that’s what allowed me to write my posts on education). Teachers should be there to make sure the students are on the right track and to help them out if there are any problems - like when students meet failure or other obstacles on their journey.

Preaching is what most teachers do today. We sit in classrooms for a certain amount of time listening to the “Teacher’s Bible of Study,” devouring information. Projects are limited to be viewed only by the class, and occasionally meet the hallway display.

I guess that we all agree on the fact that we would never have read Shakespeare if it weren’t for AP Literature. However, I think it’s only our generation who wouldn’t read Shakespeare without a teacher threatening us with a grade book. We can’t learn for ourselves and choose appropriate studies because we always had the teacher by our side to tell us what to do. We’re toddlers that are still refusing to take that third wheel off our bicycles.

If we were left to do what we wanted to do, “learners” who are mature enough will self-guide themselves to read the greatest plays ever written. If we are left alone with responsibilities, young adults will start taking them seriously.

All we need is that first step. Schools are afraid to do something new. The school system is afraid to fail.

It is similar to when you leave home for the first time. You are pushed out of your comfort zone, and you’re the one that has to take responsibility for yourself: you need to pay the bills, you need to do your laundry. At first you stumble, and fail to pay some bills and the house may stink of undone laundry, but after a while, you pick yourself up and start taking responsibility. Maybe it’s not too early to give some of the responsibility to young adults to guide themselves to what they want to learn. We’re not animals; we won’t break out of the “bars” of school like wild beasts freed from a zoo.

Just give us a chance.

Photo by _e.t on Flickr

Students 2.0