Teaching for creativity

Wharton professor Adam Grant talks and writes about creativity and how to nurture it.  In the short video at the end of this post he talks specifically about how to nurture creativity in students.

His three main points are that values should take president over rules; that character is more important than behavior; and that giving kids examples from the books they read  - of kids doing creative things that haven't been done before, are ways to develop creativity.

This is interesting to me.  It speaks to the way we construct the school experience for our students and what we intend for them to gain from it.  It is a question the Parker faculty is always trying to get to the root of - How do we develop creativity, empathy, and purpose in our students - skills that will serve them well for their entire lives?

We strive to inspire curiosity by posing interesting questions and by giving students the ways and means to explore the world around them and topics they become interested in.  We set high expectations and let the children help develop rules, giving them the real responsibility (with adult support) to construct a kind and supportive community.  We set up many experiences where learning has a purpose beyond the immediate classroom, by doing projects that have an impact on others: citizen science, teaching others, coming up with solutions to real world problems, community service.  And everyone is immersed in the arts -  music, dance, instruments, painting, dramatics, public speaking, design and many, many other creative practices.

We also give them time to play and to contemplate.

I like Grant's ideas and hope to expand even further on the question of developing creativity and innovators.  On the evening of April 5 we are having a panel discussion, open to the public, about just this topic.  We have some amazing thinkers lined up - Stay tuned - more information is coming!

Community, passion, involvement: Preparing kids for Yale

• What is a community to which you belong? Reflect on the footprint that you have left.
• Reflect on a time in the last few years when you felt genuine excitement learning about something.
• Write about something that you love to do.

These are essay questions on Yale University's freshman admission application.  According to author Amy Wang in Quartz, more than anything else, colleges are looking for passion and civic engagement.  

When developing these traits, it pays to start early - and Pre K isn't too early!  The habits of engagement and community that lead to passion can't really be authentic if they don't start until a student's junior year in high school. 

Exploring the world in ways that lead to purposeful action is something that teachers intentionally build into the curriculum at Parker.  When our kids are filling out their Yale applications, they won't have to stretch to answer these questions or come up with a canned response.  They will have plenty of material to draw upon because they will have been living it and feeling it for years.

The glow of learning

Have we forgotten how children learn?  Valerie Strauss in the Washington Post thinks so.  Her article, What the modern world has forgotten about children and learning  has much terrific food for thought and discussion.

She says, Watch your child's eyes, what makes them go dull and dead, what makes them brighten, quicken, glow with light.  That is where learning lies.  That can be our guide for every day at school - the glow in children's eyes tells us how we are doing as educators.  

Talk to gifted scientists, writers, artists, entrepreneurs. You will find they learned through keen observation, experimentation, immersion, freedom, participation, through real play and real work, through the kind of free activity where the distinction between work and play disappears.

When I watch children at Parker, I see the brightness of excitement and I hear and feel the energy and passion.  It is the secret of an effective school - one where people say "your graduates are the best, brightest and most interesting people!"

 

Promoting adventure

We have worked in the past with an amazing educator, Ron Berger, and his ideas permeate our school.  He was a teacher for many years in Massachusetts and is now chief education director at Expeditionary Learning (EL Education).  He taught us about the process of critique, of beautiful display of children's work, and of linking classroom learning to real problems and solutions outside of school - the purposeful action we talk about in our mission statement.

The roots of EL Education come from Outward Bound and one of the tenets is "Promoting Adventure" -  the kind that encompasses physical activities in the outdoors, and also the intellectual kind that can involve risk, challenge, and discovery.

EL promotes the kind of adventures that create opportunities for leadership and collaboration as groups of students and teachers face challenges together.  Together, students and adults discover they can do more that they thought was possible, and find aspects of themselves that they didn't know were there.       ~ EL Education Core Practice 30

I love the idea that Adventure is a school goal.  Here is a  Parker example: our STEM Week, where students must work as teams of engineers in a Space Tourism company, to research, design, and build rockets, while making promotional videos for their companies.  Students function like scientists and engineers do, and also entrepreneurs.  They have group goals and individual goals.  They tackle something that is relevant to their lives and is actually happening in the world outside of school.  They reflect on their work afterwards.

Their learning is an adventure.  It elicits students' enthusiasm, excitement, and motivation.  All the goals we have for learning: cooperation, research, critical thinking, creative thinking, and so many others are embodied in activities like this.

Adventure is what keeps kids craving more and is probably why Parker children love to come to school.  Here is a photo of some kind of summer adventure - a kind that can be categorized simply as "fun"!

The sound of gravitational waves

I am so excited!!!!  The report today in the New York Times of scientists hearing the sound of two black holes colliding a billion light-years away, that proves Einstein's theory of gravitational waves, is just phenomenal!

It took one hundred years, including 40 years of scientific exploration and $1.1 billion investment by the National Science Foundation, to test and prove what Einstein predicted in 1915.

Using two 2.5 mile long "antennas" ending with mirrors hung with glass threads, the LIGO team of physicists detected changes smaller than one ten-thousandth of the diameter of a proton.  And they recorded it.  So you can hear it.  That. is. amazing.

The questioning, striving and passion to continue this work over time; the dedication to an idea and the curiosity and determination to follow through; the serendipity, cooperation, invention and creativity of a team of physicists working together - it is the perfect example of what we are teaching our students to do and be.  Our school's mission  - our equation for education - is to inspire curiosity and a passion to achieve and to cultivate purposeful action. This equation has lead to exciting and wonderful achievements by so many of our graduates.

I love this phenomenal example of the quest to answer questions about the nature of the universe.  I hope you will be as inspired by it as I am!

Play and passion develop purpose

In Most Likely to Succeed, Preparing Our Kids for the Innovation Era Harvard education expert Tony Wagner with Tony Dintersmith contend that there are seven essential skills for kids to develop for future success:

1. Formulate good questions
2. Communicate in groups and lead by influence
3. Be agile and adaptable
4. Take initiative and be entrepreneurial
5. Effective written and oral communication skills
6. Know how to access and analyze information
7. Be creative and imaginative

And I might add another. # 8. Do good in the world

These skills are another way of talking about what educators call the Four C's of 21st Century skills:  collaboration, creativity, critical thinking, and communication.

I would add: # 5. compassion.

These are great goals to strive for in educating students in and out of the classroom.  The trick in school is designing learning activities explicitly around these goals.

Presenting scenarios for humanitarian use of fuel cells (6-7's); preparing for a Show of Work on Hinduism (2-3's); coordinating a hunger awareness event (8th grade); running a "health clinic" for parents and buddies (Pre K 3) - these are examples of activities that build the kind of skills we seek.

The unspoken message is that teachers must possess all of these skills to model and prepare a nuanced and effective program.  There is no better way to say it: When Educators Make Space for Play and Passion, Students Develop Purpose.

Catch the first day buzz...

I love the first day of school!  The eager faces, the excited buzz.  All the possibilities of the wonderful year ahead. 

At our teacher days before school started we read two articles:  How a Bigger Purpose Can Motivate Students to Learn and The Challenges and Realities of Inquiry-Based Learning.  The first reminded us that students who want to make a difference in the world are highly motivated learners.  The second reinforced that students gain social maturity when they learn in a project-based setting. 

As the teachers talked to me about their goals for the year, both of the themes emerged.  Here are a few examples:

• 7th graders will have a weekly STEM workshop for robotics and coding, animation with Google Sketch Up, and game design with Scratch and GameMaker.

• In middle school health class, students will organize a Health Fair to educate the broader community about making healthy decisions and living healthy lifestyles.

• Students in all grades will practice mindfulness habits.  Linda Lantieri, author of Building Emotional Intelligence will help build teachers' skills at a workshop in December.

• In science classes students will practice specific habits of mind such as persisting, listening with empathy, and questioning.

• 4-5's will work on designing an improved, discovery-centered play space for the North Playground by generating ideas, conducting an interest and feasibility survey, and researching costs and funding.

And that's just a sample of what's ahead!

Purposeful action in action

4-5's took their show on the road last week.  Their Bee Show that is.  They had prepared a thoughtful and beautiful presentation about honey bees, bee keeping, threats to honey bees, and more.  After a presentation here at school, they perfected their slides and talk and came up with a game, too.

The 4th and 5th graders at Doane Stuart were very receptive.  The waggle dance, part of the game wherein correctly answering bee questions earned each hive-team some pollen, was a big hit.  9th grader and Parker grad, Jack RP was on hand.  He originated the bee project at Parker. 

He loved seeing himself in the slide show - and gave the advice, "No matter if you are young or old, if you work hard, you can do anything!"

It was fantastic to see the kids take their learning beyond the classroom - purposeful action in action!

Creative Entrepreneurialism

Examining a bee under a microscope is part of the Bee Project,
understanding their complexity and importance in ecosystems

I just returned from two very thought provoking conferences for Heads of School.  One of the speakers was Dr. Yong Zhao of U. Oregon talking about the ideas in his latest book World Class Learners: Educating Creative and Entrepreneurial Students.  His remarks resonated because at Parker we are educating children in all the ways he espouses, through project-based experiences (he calls it product-based) that have a purpose beyond the classroom.  This kind of learning is inherently interesting to children and promotes a passion for learning more.  It involves flexing that creativity muscle in a myriad of ways that are left out of learning as it is expressed by teaching to the Common Core.

Great examples are the honey bee curriculum in 4-5, the goat wool weaving project in K-1, and STEM week and the archeological dig in middle school.  Each of these projects requires students to think independently, make connections across several disciplines and express their learning in multiple forms of media - so far beyond filling in a bubble for multiple choice responses that it's mind boggling!

Students work with our bee-keeping mentor, Tony as they learn to calm the bees with smoke and gather some honey.

Citizen science at work

This was our fifth year collecting data on the Hudson River for Snapshot Day.  All the information goes to Lamont Dougherty Earth Observatory at Columbia for analysis in this DEC project involving over 70 schools from the Troy Dam to Manhattan.  The 2-3's and 6-7's take their responsibilities seriously as they measure turbidity, pH, salinity, water and tide flow, and collect sediment samples, micro-invertebrates, and other measurements of river health. 

They get the thrill of being in the field and tracking this majestic river's health over time, monitoring the effects of human and weather activity.  Citizen scientist experiences like this lend purpose and passion to the learning for Parker kids - highly motivating!

How do we teach creativity?

Teams in K-1 designed and built bridges to support a cup of sand.

It worked!!!

The best creative works happen when we are trying to explore our world and make sense out of life. It is that sense of purpose that propels the creative process. 

So says John Spencer in Ten Things I've Learned About Creativity, a blog post in Education Re-Think.  He also says that creativity takes a lot of courage - the courage to overcome the insecurity of being wrong.

The kind of school atmosphere that Parker has, the kind that allows for re-do's, re-thinks, and do-overs as a regular part of learning is crucial for creativity to blossom.  Doing multiple drafts of a piece of writing, perseverance in LEGO Robotics, teams charged with real challenges, all these experiences accumulate to form a creative mindset. 

Spencer also says the joyful exuberance of play is often involved in creative endeavors.  You can see it in the children's faces in the photos - shared purpose, experimentation, the give and take of a small group:  it's pretty apparent how we teach creativity!

Advocacy on Earth Day

For Earth Day, Parker kids learned that Monarch butterfly habitat is disappearing all across the migration path.  Buddies got together to write letters to Congressman Tonko, Senator Gillibrand, President Obama, and Grandpa Herating (a farmer in Mexico) to advocate for habitat protection. They are planting a butterfly garden with milkweed and other Monarch favorites that will become a certified butterfly way station.  You can learn more at Monarch Watch.

My favorite letter started: "Dear Butterflies, We are making you a lovely garden.  We hope you like it!"

More about innovative learning

4th grade math students explore together how to draw 2D representations of 3D objects. Students can then make drawings from their own designs for others to try recreating.

K-1's all contributed to this story about an unlikely friendship between a bobcat and a cat at Parker.  They are going to turn their story into a book.

This article in MindShift, 7 Essential Principles of Innovative Learning expresses how we teach at Parker.  Author Katarina Schwartz pares it down to 7 elements that correspond exactly to what we call project based education or signature experiences.

1. Learners have to be at the center of what happens in the classroom.

2. Learning is a social practice and can’t happen alone.

3. Emotions are an integral part of learning.

4. Learners are different.

5. Students need to be stretched, but not too much.

6. Assessment should be for learning, not of learning.

      7. Learning needs to be connected across disciplines.

I would take it one step further than she does, adding "8. Learning should result in purposeful action."  This concept includes projects that have a purpose beyond the school's  walls - learning that expands into the world beyond the classroom.  That is what gives the depth and meaning to activities that will excite students' imaginations and passions.

Entrepreneurial learning

The Global One-Room Schoolhouse: John Seely Brown (Highlights from his "Entrepreneurial Learner" Keynote at DML2012) from DML Research Hub on Vimeo.

What does it take to cultivate entrepreneurial learners?  Visiting scholar at USC and independent co-chairman of the Deloitte Center for the Edge, learning innovator, John Seely Brown ruminates on play and how to develop a questioning disposition.  This is a very cool animated video of his ideas.

At Parker we practice critique and purposeful action among other ways to get kids to "play" with ideas and explore the results - here is another way to think about it!

Real work for a real purpose

2-3's presented essays, three-dimensional models and murals showing the changing landscape in Rensselaer County from Native American times to today at the Rensselaer County Historical Society.  Their exhibit opening was held on Thursday night for assembled families, teachers and docents.  At the end of the evening, students presented items for a time capsule that will be kept in the museum archives.  This article about the event appeared in the Times Union.

Walt Disney

Joan of Ark

Amelia Earhart

Samuel Morse

4-5's presented a Living Museum of History Makers today.  Their displays included posters, PowerPoints, timelines, masks, artifacts, and oral presentations.

Having an audience raises the stakes for students - it enhances the quality and importance of the research and presentation and gives incredible meaning to the whole project!

Can altruism be taught?

Parker middle schoolers sort items at the Regional Food Bank of Northeastern New York.

Making bowl selections at the Empty Bowls hunger awareness evening last week.  8th graders organized the event and raised over $1,150 for Joseph's House, a homeless shelter in Troy.

Developing empathy, sympathy, compassion, kindness and charity is a process that takes lots of practice.  Offering opportunities for children to do good, to "see themselves and frame their own behavior as generous, kind, and helpful" is critical.

For the last four weeks, the whole middle school has gone to the Regional Food Bank on Friday afternoons to do what ever needs doing there: sorting rotten from good cucumbers or organizing boxes of toiletries.  It is truly "hands-on" and it helps them understand the massive logistics of  ameliorating local hunger.  It gives them practice in what we hope will be a life-long habit of helping others. 

What is their reward? As I used to tell my own children, "Your reward is the satisfaction of a job well done."  Research shows that material reinforcement is not the most effective way to stimulate generosity - it's the "warm glow" that works.  In the New York Times article, Understanding How Children Develop Empathy, Perry Klaus, MD, tells about the brain chemistry that makes this so.

What you do with what you know

The world no longer cares about what you know; the world only cares about what you can do with what you know.

Thomas Friedman quoted Tony Wagner of Harvard, the author of “Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World" in his NY Times Op Ed piece yesterday.  Everywhere I look at Parker I see this idea in action.  "Purposeful Action" is what we call it.  Students using math and engineering skills to build and program robots; eighth graders preparing and serving a spaghetti lunch to raise funds for a curricular trip to Philadelphia; K-1's writing about their observations of the radishes they planted; 2-3's preparing a display for the Historical Society; and on...

Our curriculum is based on building things, doing for others, trying out perspectives, exploring fascinating topics - what you know is vitally important because what you do with it can change the world.