Category: Commentary

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Defining Creativity – Higher Order Thinking for All Students

Sir Ken Robinson was recently interviewed for  the “Teaching for the 21st Century” issue of Educational Leadership. more

The article “Why Creativity Now? A Conversation with Sir Ken Robinson” notes three misconception that people have about creativity.

One is that it’s about special people—that only a few people are really creative. Everybody has tremendous creative capacities. A policy for creativity in education needs to be about everybody, not just a few.

… It’s about special activities. People associate creativity with the arts only. … education for creativity is about the whole curriculum, not just part of it.

… It’s just about letting yourself go… Really, creativity is a disciplined process that requires skill, knowledge, and control. Obviously, it also requires imagination and inspiration…. It’s a disciplined path of daily education.

I agree with Robinson but he defines creativity in a way that I find a bit narrow  ”a process of having original ideas that have value.” I define creating more broadly as “a new combination of old elements.” The distinction between the two definitions is important. As educators we want to move all our students along a full spectrum of Blooms’ Taxonomy. If we want our students to reach the highest level of critical thinking, then we need to be clear on our goals.

Creating requires both a strong foundation in content knowledge and the ability to apply that knowledge in new ways – usually across a variety of disciplines. And it requires using all of Bloom’s skills from remembering through creating. It begins with a firm grasp of the basics and includes analyzing patterns and needs, evaluating alternatives and finally creating something new. When seen as as “a new combination of old elements,” creating is not  limited to the “creative.” It’s something that all students can do, and one of the goals of the new Common Core standrards.

Toy-bath To illustrate the point that all students can create, here’s a photo of my granddaughter, Zoe taken when she was a toddler. I had walked into her room and saw her sitting in a mesh basket used to store her stuffed animals. When I asked her what she was doing, she quickly replied “I have a toy bath.”

Was their “value” in her “creation?”  Probably not.

But don’t try to tell me that this little cutie isn’t creative!

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Harness Twitter and Your Audience Backchannel with Wiffiti

Recently I posted about trying out Wiffiti in my professional development sessions. "Use Wiffiti to Engage Your Audience." Since then I've used it a few more times with great success. I thought I'd share a live Wiffiti screen with my readers. This is from my most recent training session at Pomperaug High School in Southbury CT.

Wiffiti accounts are free and it's very easy to use. I created a new Wiffti screen using the school logo and set it to gather the tag #R88. The evening before the presentation (and again that morning), I posted a Tweet asking for greetings – “Say hi to Monday's teacher workshop at Pomperaug HS. (Southbury CT) Go Panthers! Tell us where you're from & why you Tweet. Add tag #R88”  As participants arrived in the workshop, they were greeted on the big screen with encouraging words from all over the world. 

During breakouts I switched back to projecting the Wiffiti screen and invited workshop participant to text message into the screen. They had fun with shoutouts to their friends and comments about the workshop.  Pretty impressive when you're talking about the impact of technology on teaching and learning!

Many thanks to my Twitter PLN who took the time to send us a greeting. You made this possible!

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Learn Mathematical Thinking From the Wrong Answer

I recently saw this video clip from an old Abbott and Costello film (thanks to my Twitter network). It reminds us that math isn’t simply about learning a computational process, or getting the right answer. It’s pretty clear that Lou Costello has learned the wrong algorithm, and he defends his approach it with great determination.  See the same mathematical thinking by Ma and Pa Kettle. 

We learn math skills so that we can apply mathematical thinking to the problem solving we will need in our lives. Thus, much can be learned from the procedures we use to generate both the “correct” and the “incorrect” answer. Sharing our thinking with others allows us to negotiate a deeper understanding of algorithms and their application in the real world.

The video clip neatly “illustrates” a teaching strategy from Teach Like Your Hair’s On Fire by Rafe Esquith. The book details Esquith’s fifth grade teaching methods in a rough LA neighborhood. Esquith shows us what students can learn from the wrong answer and his process can be easily applied across the curriculum. While it makes for an excellent test taking strategy, its real power is that gives students an engaging perspective to think more deeply about teaching and learning.

Esquith writes,  “Let’s say I’m teaching addition. Just before I give the kids their own problems, I put one more problem on the board:

63 + 28 = 

Rafe: All right, everybody. Let’s pretend this is a question on your Stanford 9 test, which as we all know will determine your future happiness, success, and the amount of money you will have in the bank. (Giggling from the kids) Who can tell me the answer?

All: 91.

Rafe: Very good Let’s place that 91 by the letter C Would someone like to tell me what will go by the letter A?

Isel: 35.

Rafe: Fantastic! Why 35, Isel?

Isel: That’s for the kid who subtracts instead of adds.

Rafe: Exactly. Who has a wrong answer for B?

Kevin: 81. That’s for the kid who forgets to carry the 1.

Rafe: Right again. Do 1 have a very sharp detective who can come up with an answer for D?

Paul: How about 811? That’s for the kid who adds everything but doesn’t carry anything.

In Room 56, the kids come to learn that multiple-choice questions are carefully designed. It is rarely a matter of one correct answer and three randomly chosen incorrect ones. The people who create the questions are experts at anticipating where students will go wrong. When a kid makes a mistake somewhere in the course of doing a problem and then sees his (incorrect) answer listed as a potential solution, he assumes he must be correct. My kids love to play detective. They enjoy spotting-and sidestepping-potential traps.

When students in Room 56 take a multiple-choice math test with twenty problems, they see it as an eighty-problem test. Their job is to discover twenty correct answers and sixty incorrect ones. It is hysterical to listen to the sounds of the class when the students take a standardized math test. The most common sound is a quiet giggle of recognition. The kids love to outsmart the test and can’t help laughing as they discover one trap after another.”

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Use Wiffiti to Engage Your Audience – Big Screen Live Presentation of Feeds from Twitter, Flickr and Text Messages

I’m always looking for ways to make my presentations more engaging and interactive. (A must if you’re advocating more student-centered instruction.) I’ve been using a TurningPoint ARS for years with great results and have tried live blogs at my larger workshops. As a convert to Twitter, I thought it was the logical next step. 

I’ve experimented with Twitter visualizers on my blog- StreamGraph,  TwitterCloudExplorer, and most recently, Wiffiti. When I saw how good Wiffiti looked on my blog, and I realized it would be a great way to capture the backchannel at workshops. Users can interact with Wiffiti from their mobile phones or the web. It looks great on the big screen – plus it can feed from Twitter, Flickr and text messages.  

I opened a free account and gave it a trial run at my recent workshop in Moriarty-Edgewood SD, New Mexico. It was easy to create a new Wiffiti screen with custom background. (I selected a local landmark neon sign from old Rt 66 in Moriarty.)  I set up the Wiffiti screen to capture Tweets tagged with my Twitter user name @edteck.

The evening before the presentation, I posted a Tweet asking for greetings – “Say good morning to my teachers’ workshop on old Rt 66 in NM. Where are you from? Why do you Twitter?”  As participants arrived in the workshop,  they were greeted on the big screen with encouraging words from all over the world. Pretty impressive when you’re talking about the impact of technology on teaching and learning!  Special thanks to all that sent greetings – it was an powerful demonstration of the new landscape of information and a display of the power of Twitter / social media!

I shot a bit of video to give you and idea what it looked like.  
 (Remember, the live version of this screen no longer has Tweets relevant to the workshop.)

New Wiffiti messages are instantly displayed center screen and are easily viewable from a distance. Older messages then fade back and move as an animated cloud. Updates from both mobile and web are displayed synchronously across all screens subscribing to the same tags, encouraging the creation of a wide, cross-channel audience.

 Using Wiffiti in Breakout Sessions

I also created a second Wiffiti screen to use during break outs. This one was designed to capture text messages from participants. For those that did not have cells, we set up computer stations where they could make comments directly from the Wiffiti website.

Here’s some sample comments – a nice mix of thoughtful observations, fun comments and a few critiques. (Note: I kept it real and I ran my system unmoderated, but it is possible to have someone monitor comments.) 

“School is where kids go to watch old people work really hard”

“My Brain Hurts!”

“Let’s get going!”

“disequilibrium, change, and freedom”

“same old stuff, different day!”

“the table in the back rocks!!”

“English teachers and librarians rule -all others drool!”

“having a blast!”

“science is over here.”

“This is a great workshop!”

“Enjoying the presentation Peter. Especially the film clips!”

“Rigor and Relevance for the English Department: Rigor: Apply knowledge and skills in complex ways to analyze and solve real problems…”

My bottom line? Wiffiti is a great way to harness back channel workshop comments. The free version works well and paid versions offer more opportunities to customize and monitor comments.