Jeff Piontek is an author, keynote speaker and teacher (most importantly). He has worked with many at-risk school districts nationally and is a thought leader in on-line and blended learning.
I found this to be a great interview with one of the people I admire. He pushes the envelope on technology, human behavior and evolution. Click on the title to see interview with Ray Kurzweil.
by Jeff Piontek
Then you have the other side of the idea, where corporations are controlling the afterlife and a transitional state….funny
My favorite Google search (this week) is: “digital citizenship” site:k12.*.us filetype:pdf. What’s yours?
I break down this search a little later. But first, some perspective.
The new survival is not drowning in information
And we all want to survive. In fact, many of the online resources that have been developed in the last decade have been life rafts that help us keep our heads just above the water line of the digital deluge. Ironically, in the process, each one of them adds to the problem by making more credible information more desirable and accessible. The saying “no free lunch” comes to mind, as do McLuhan’s Laws of Media (enhancement, obsolescence, retrieval, reversal) which basically say there’s “no free lunch” when it comes to innovation.
In this case, we are interested in the law of reversal—specifically, the ability of the new ways we now have to package, distribute, and share information to actually make it harder to process the information that is made available to us. We are now overwhelmed with shared, highly recommended, relevant information. And when there is too much good information, we have to wonder if we are better off than when there was too little.
Twitter approached managing info overload by reducing news to headlines. Now I get a gazillion tweets, some of which entice me to look at the broader story beneath the headlines, which requires time I don’t have because I have too many tweets to read. I wouldn’t want to miss something.
Facebook (and social media in general) approached info overwhelment by allowing us to band together and to share what we know, so we could pick and choose among the information in our lives based on recommendations from friends and colleagues. Unfortunately, we all have a gazillion Facebook friends, all of whom have a lot of ideas about how you should spend your time, energy, and money. These Facebook friends also need to realize it is a social network site NOT their diary!!!
Better living through better searching
But then there is better searching. It is a bit of a bright star in the world of overwhelment because being a good Google searcher can do things like reduce the number of hits in a search from millions to hundreds. I have been a passable Google searcher for some time, and it amazes me how many people aren’t. If I ask a group to search, for example, for recent reports being used in K12 on the topic of digital citizenship, many will use a search like, “recent reports about digital citizenship in K12 in the United States.” That just returned 219,000 hits.
I used: site:k12.*.us “digital citizenship” filetype:pdf. In addition, I limited my search to one year. That produced 257 hits. Let’s look at the components of that search command.
If I specifically don’t want information about elementary programs, I might add “-elementary”, so my search becomes: site:k12.*.us “digital citizenship” filetype:pdf -elementary, which yielded 129 hits. I might also look to see what the government has published about this in the past year, and use site:gov. That yielded 90 hits. Or perhaps universities, by using site:edu. That yielded 216 hits.
While Google’s Advanced Search features are helpful, you have to be able to think like Google. And the way it thinks isn’t all that sophisticated. And of course there is always Google Scholar.
This is nothing new to anyone with a heartbeat or a pulse in education, who work in the Pre K-20 or P-12/P-16 continuum. The fact that so many students drop out of high school in 9th grade, take the GED route instead of attending classes (and some pass) and then go on to CC, and of course those who eventually graduate in 5/6 years just shows that the high school system is fatally flawed and needs to be revamped NOW.
If you want to know more about my views on this topic watch the presentation I did in 2007, yes 2007 to the entire STEM, Political and Education committees in Hawaii which showcases our data, it is disturbing.
But, you know what is even more disturbing is the fact that under our current administration, our current superintendent and our current BOE nothing has changed!!!!
This year though during the election or re-election campaigns they will though promise to do it AGAIN, promise to make things better AGAIN and unfortunately we will see in another 2/4/6 years at the end of their term what has actually been done. There are people like Linda Lingle who as Governor did more for education that her prior three Governor’s and unfortunately in a wildly Democratic State like Hawaii did not receive the credit for her attempts to move Hawaii into the national spotlight with Robotics, STEM education and partnerships with organizations like the National Governor’s Association.
Maybe someday Hawaii will have a strong, healthy, diverse economy, but not if the “Good Old Boys” network keeps on doing what they are doing, NOTHING to change it, because it benefits them.
Presentation Link: http://www.slideshare.net/jeff.piontek/an-inconvenient-reality-oct-2007-2780003
Community colleges should tailor remedial curriculum for students who are unprepared for introductory English and math courses, and in some cases, developmental classes “hinder” student progress, according to a report released by the Education Department (ED) during an April 27 virtual symposium.
ED Secretary Arne Duncan and Second Lady Jill Biden spoke to educators and students at a symposium broadcast on the internet from Montgomery College in Silver Spring, Md., a two-year school with more than 60,000 students on three campuses.
ED officials and educators who led sessions at the symposium outlined “bridge programs” for adult learners who want to return to college after many years in the workforce, and customizing those remedial classes that come with high costs to colleges, students, and taxpayers.
ED released the report to coincide with the symposium that said as much as 60 percent of incoming community college students enroll “in at least one developmental education course to bring their reading, writing, and mathematics skills up to college level.”
Developmental classes that help new community college students catch up with their peers can be critical to earning a degree, according to the ED report, but remedial education “may not improve students’ persistence or completion rates and, in some cases, may actually hinder their progress toward educational goals.”
A more flexible slate of remedial class options on two-year campuses would have educators pinpoint precisely where a student needs improvement, said Shanna Smith Jaggars, a senior research associate at the Community College Research Center in New York.
Targeting specific academic vulnerabilities, Smith Jaggars said, would allow a student to move through remedial classes quickly without redundant lessons that lead to high drop-out rates among remedial students.
“We need a system that diagnoses student weaknesses and determines which areas require quick redress [that] gives students less opportunity to get disheartened and a chance to drop out,” she said.
Early intervention was stressed by several speakers who addressed remedial classes in community colleges. College officials and policy analysts said summer bridge programs would help high school students prepare for college without having to enroll in non-credit-bearing remedial courses.
Duncan and Biden, as they have since President Obama entered the White House in 2009, said continued help – including federal funds – for two-year colleges would help unemployed Americans find jobs and prove to be a centerpiece in the country’s economic recovery.
ED introduced the Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training (TAACCCT) Grants Program on Jan. 20, inviting community colleges—and other two-year degree-granting institutions—to apply for up to $5 million per institution, or up to $20 million to applicants who apply for funds in a consortium of schools.
ED will dole out about $500 million in 2011, and $2 billion will be distributed in the next four years overall, according to the announcement.
“These funds will support programs that use proven or innovative strategies to prepare students for high-demand careers,” Biden said.
The Obama administration in October invited more than 100 community college decision makers to the White House’s first-ever Summit on Community Colleges, where top federal officials lauded two-year colleges as a bridge to jobs and four-year universities, and a way to lead the world in college graduates by 2020.
Education analysts said last year that the expansion of online classes at two-year colleges would be key in increasing community college enrollment.
Distance-learning enrollment in American community colleges jumped by 22 percent during the 2008-09 academic year, an increase fueled in part by an influx of nontraditional students who require the flexibility of online courses, according to a survey conducted by the Instructional Technology Council (ITC).
The ITC, which is affiliated with the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC), collected 226 responses from community colleges in its annual survey, “Trends in eLearning: Tracking the Impact of eLearning at Community Colleges,” which revealed the 2008-09 increase in online enrollment. Last year’s ITC survey reported an 11-percent uptick in web-based class enrollment at community colleges.
“We flat lined and stagnated [while] other countries have passed us by and I think we are paying a price for that,” Duncan said. “So [as we] try to educate our way to a better economy, community colleges are absolutely going to help lead us where we need to go. … Community colleges have been the unrecognized, unpolished gem on the education continuum. I believe we have come a long way to ending that.”
Biden, a longtime educator and adjunct English professor at Northern Virginia Community College, lauded the Obama administration’s $2 billion community college funding add-on to the health care reform bill passed last year.
Will this actually change anything? What are your comments I would love to know……
There’s an interesting and worthwhile debate over whether we should be expanding alternative, public-funded charter schools; some, like the Kipp Academiies, are clearly successful, although we can argue about the extent of that success. Others have been flat-out scams. Then we have the case of cyber charter schools, which receive public tax dollars to educate children over the Internet, and which seem to be especially popular in Pennsylvania.
What could possibly go wrong with poorly supervised, taxpayer-funded online learning, right? Especially in such an on-the-ball state as this one.
Well, just like with some bricks-and-mortar charter schools, some cyber charters are deeply flawed. My Daily News colleague, David Gambacorta, has reported extensively this year on problems at a Philadelphia based cyber-school called the Frontier Virtual Charter High School. It was just forced to surrender its charter, actually. Why?
Frontier didn’t supply students with promised laptops, printers and Internet reimbursements, the state said. The school’s administrators didn’t properly monitor attendance, truancy and grades, according to investigators. A “significant” amount of money was spent on nonschool expenses, the state said, including trips to restaurants and cash purchases that weren’t backed with the receipts. The school failed to provide many of the classes it had offered students.
An extreme case? For sure. But what if I told you that, generally, a wide swatch of students at these cyber charters are underperforming their peers at other traditional public or charter schools? That seems to be exactly what has been happening here in the Keystone State (PDF):
“In an April 2011 study (PDF), the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University reviewed the academic performance in Pennsylvania’s charter schools. Virtual-school operators have been aggressively expanding in the state for more than a decade, making it a good place for a study; around 18,700 of the state’s 61,770 charter school students were enrolled in online schools. The results weren’t promising.
The virtual-school students started out with higher test scores than their counterparts in regular charters. But according to the study, they ended up with learning gains that were “significantly worse” than kids in traditional charters and public schools. Says CREDO research manager Devora Davis, “What we can say right now is that whatever they’re doing in Pennsylvania is definitely not working and should not be replicated.”
So, given this body of research from one of America’s top universities, guess what the state of Pennsylvania is doing?
It’s replicating them!
Specifically, the state has greenlighted four new cyber-charter schools — all of them run out of Philadelphia. Education guru Diane Ravitch wrote yesterday: “This is unbelievable,” and it’s hard not to agree. At a very cursory glance, the folks running these new ventures seem to be qualified and well-meaning. But that’s not the issue. The issue is the growing evidence that cyber charters are not helping — and possibly harming — the kids who are educated there. Until these issues are resolved, Pennsylvania should not be approving new cyber charters.
New online learning models are bursting from startups and top universities, bridging the educational divide.
We are in the midst of a revolution that will bring high-quality education to hundreds of millions of people who have never had access to this level of learning before.
These tools will reach those in developing cities and countries but also foment a revolution in the U.S. classroom as they change our perception of what learning can be.
Here are the leading new platfoms disupting the education world:
1.Udacity
Sebastian Thurn and his colleagues hit on wild success with their Stanford computer science courses when they opened them up to the online public.The team has left Stanford to start Udacity with venture backing and a new slate of courses. They have hit 150,000+ students in each course, signaling the demand for great online education. Thurn admits that there is no firm business model as yet, but will use the next year to experiment with different approaches.
CNN highlights Udacity’s new model.
2. Coursera
Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng founded Coursera to bring high-quality university courses to the masses. They are working with Princeton, Michigan, Penn, Stanford and others to fashion online courses which include video, online testing and peer support. In a recent Forbes article, Koller expressed the hope that “maybe the next Albert Einstein or Steve Jobs is living in a remote village in Africa” Bringing top professors to a global audience can certainly change the game in the education divide.
3. EdX — MIT and Harvard
MIT has been a pioneer in online education with its Open Courseware (OCW) program. Now it teams up with Harvard to launch EdX (by the way — have you noticed how many brands use x these days? SpaceX, UberX, X Prize, TEDx — it gives that hint of mystery to a brand.) OCW boasts more than 2,000 online courses, but these are all archived. EdX will specialize in courses that students can take together with supervision and interaction.
4. iTunes U
I still meet people who own iPads, iPhones and every other Apple device and yet do not know about iTunes U. How can this be?!
Want to understand what in the world a Higgs boson is? Download a physics course from U.
5. Khan
Sal Khan hit on education gold when he started making videos for his young cousins on science and math. Now the site offers more than 3,000 videos — all in short form so they are easy to digest. Great for kids to watch at home and do more interactive work at school. Let’s phase out boring class lectures and get kids moving and excited at school.
Many would benefit from watching the video on the Greek crisis:
<iframe width=”640″ height=”360″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/xc-TSAQkqJ0?feature=player_embedded” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe>
6. 2Tor
John Katzman founded Princeton Review and now launched 2Tor. His new company teams up with top universities such as USC to offer fully accredited degrees online.
USC and 2tor offer a full masters in education. This is great for anyone who wants to change careers and still work while they are obtaining the degree necessary to become a teacher. 2tors’s newest degree is from Wash U. and offers foreign lawyers a masters in U.S. Law
7. Altius Ed
Spark Capital, Maveron and others have invested in Altius Ed. Altius partners with universities to offer a two-year bridge program for those students who wish to attend a four-year college but may not have the requisite coursework.
8. Latimer Education
Latimer works with historically black colleges to extend their reach online. Investors include Maveron.
Rather than partner with other universities, Capella itself is an accredited university offering its courses online. Capella counts Maveron and others as investors and offers bachelors, masters and doctoral programs. The jury is still out on how these pure play degrees will be accepted in the marketplace.
10. Minverva Project
This is an ambitious attempt to start a new university from whole cloth. Students will live in dorm buildings placed around the world and the professors will pipe in via video conferencing to each of the buildings. Ben Nelson, the former CEO of Snapfish, raised $25 million from Benchmark Capital for this new venture. We will have to wait to see on this one as it has yet to be launched.
11. (yes, we could not fit all the new platforms into a list of 10) Straighterline.com
This site offers online courses which earn real credits that can be transferred to many college degree programs. Straighterline aims to make college courses more affordable with both a la carte and subscription plans.
Bonus Disruptor:
Add to the pot the new University Venture Fund.
This new venture capital fund will invest in the kind of revolutionary startups that we described here. Bertelsmann and the University of Texas are two of the largest investors.
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All in all, these disrupters will bring high-quality learning to millions of people in the U.S. and around the world who never had access to this material. Now the questions are:
a. Will it scale?
b. Will these models turn out to be sustainable?
c. How do we measure the intangibles of in-person learning and how can we replicate those online?
d. Who will disrupt these disupters?
Stay tuned.
http://www.crl3c.org/fr_
investedin – a platform built to help anyone raise money for anything, utilizing their existing social network presence
Kickstarter – a new way to fund creative ideas and ambitious endeavors and is powered by a unique all-or-nothing funding method where projects must be fully-funded or no money changes hands.
Teacher Planet – complete online resource for information related to K-12 grants.
DonorsChoose.org – an online charity that makes it easy for anyone to help students in need — public school teachers from every corner of America post classroom project requests.
crowdrise – is about volunteering, raising money for Charity and having the most fun in the world while doing it.
GiveForward – provides free, personalized fundraising pages to raise money quickly and easily online.
givezooks! – offers social fundraising for nonprofits, connecting individuals and organizations online to increase charitable giving.
Social Wish – makes it easy for individuals and not-for-profits to raise funds through social media, email marketing, and websites.
IndieGoGo – any project or idea (creative, cause or entrepreneurial) can raise money, offer perks, and keep 100% ownership of their project.
Image: Maurits Knook/Flickr
Long considered home to the worst commenters on the internet — racist, cruel, idiotic, nonsensical, and barely literate — YouTube is in theprocess of upgrading its comment system in order to better tame its most loathsome members.
Word of the overhaul slipped out during the Q&A portion of a YouTube developer session at Google I/O, the annual developers conferencefrom the video-upload hub’s owner, Google.
A member of the audience, which was stocked heavily with online video publishers, asked for advice on handling negative commentswithin his YouTube channel. Dror Shimshowitz, a YouTube “head of product,” replied that “comments are kind of the Wild West of video” and can be turned off. But Google doesn’t like it when people do that, he said, because it cuts off the community. So the companyis working on fixing the system.
“We’re working on some improvements to the comment system, so hopefully we’ll have an update on that in the next few months,” Shimshowitz said. Shimshowitz declined to elaborate further in a follow-up interview, in which he was asked about the scope and nature of the planned changes. “We’re working to improve comments as much as we’re working to improve all parts of the site and YouTube experience,” a Google spokesman said,adding that the company would not comment further.
There’s no question YouTube has its work cut out for it; its comment sections are widely regarded as cesspools. Meme harvester BuzzFeed called YouTube “a comment disaster on an unprecedented scale” with “the worst commenters on the internet; ”online entrepreneur (and Wired contributor) Andy Baio called them “historically pretty bad;” and the online comic XKCD in 2006 imagined the moon landing being broadcast — and moronically heckled — on YouTube. “The internet has always had loud dumb people,” XKCD illustrator Randall Munroe wrote in an accompanying caption, ”but I’ve never seen anything quite as bad as the people who comment on YouTube videos.”
The site’s commenters have inspired a mocking blog and even specialized filtering software.
YouTube improved the situation two years ago, when it introduced a “highlights view,” the predecessor to today’s “top comments” section, which features the comments most highly rated by other YouTube commenters. (It, too was eventually parodied online.)
But YouTube needs to go much further, to kick the worst vulgarians out from under its videos. The site is trying to build a glossier future for itself, one with smarter videos produced by businesses, Hollywood studios and independent creatives. Better production values, in turn, make the site more attractive to advertisers. Vicious commenters break that virtuous cycle.
“YouTube comments are a potentially fantastic engagement point that is unfortunately the most common go-to example for trolls,” says Huffington Post community manager Justin Isaf. “These are real people who are opening themselves to what is often ridicule and overt abuse. How many people would put themselves out there again after reading comments that belittle, insult, malign or otherwise hurt them? It’s a loss of an amazing opportunity.
“I would love to see Google put their search and algorithm know-how to use to create a more safe space where people can engage in a meaningful conversation and be themselves on video without worry of needing therapy afterward.”
One obvious direction for YouTube is to ask users for more information about themselves. Many members use anonymous handles since YouTube, unlike other Google sites, allows people to create distinct accounts. At other Google sites, users must use their Google+ identity, linked to a real name. As a general rule, people are far less likely to troll under their real name.
Requiring Google+ identities could also help YouTube’s advertisers target ads more narrowly, since Google+ collects information about people’s location, gender, occupation, likes and interests.
If YouTube isn’t interested in integrating more deeply with Google+, BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti offers a Plan B: “YouTube should use Facebook comments,” Peretti tells us, referring to Google’s archrival. “YouTube would benefit from extra distribution in [Facebook’s] News Feed so their videos would spread even faster. And people use their true identity on Facebook so it would help make YouTube comments more civil.”
That’s a long shot, given Google’s competitive position with Facebook, but still, it’s better than being subjected to “U SUCK, SERIOUSLY GO BACK TO DORK SCHOOL, ANONYOUTUBE 4-EVA. LOL,” and whatever else the YouTube chorus usually has to say.
This was written by Marion Brady, veteran teacher, administrator, curriculum designer and author.
By Marion Brady
Fairtest, Parents Across America, Save Our Schools, United Opt-Out National, and regional groups such as Fund Education Now, are fighting to stop the corporate takeover of public education. It’s a David-Goliath match.
They’re up against the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, the American Legislative Exchange Council, the biggest philanthropic foundations in the world, most of the mainstream media, and the highest-ranking officials in both political parties.
Goliath has money and power, and has been using it for years in a campaign to privatize public schools. Those who oppose Goliath are labeled “defenders of the status quo.” David, coming late to the fight, has neither money nor power, just a warning message and social media for getting that message out.
Believing that public schools are essential to democracy and our way of life, and concerned about how poorly the young are being equipped to deal with a complex, dangerous, unknowable future, I couldn’t be happier about David’s growing clout.
But I want to do more than just stop the destruction. “You never change things by fighting existing reality,” said Buckminster Fuller. “To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
I want to help build that new model.
Decades of teaching adolescents tell me that the single biggest problem kids face with traditional schooling is information overload. So much random, disorganized, disconnected information is dumped on them they can’t come even close to coping with it.
That some seem to do so — collect “A”s and ace standardized tests — can be misleading. They’ve learned to play the simple “Remember” game. But if the game is made more challenging, if, for example, it’s changed to “Infer” or “Hypothesize” or “Synthesize” or “Value,” scores and grades shift, sometimes even reversing the “A”s and the “F”s, the “B”s and the “D”s.
Back in the 1960s, while teaching at Florida State University, I concluded that mental organization is the key to productive, creative thought. The more I studied the matter, the more convinced I became that although the so-called “core curriculum” is an adequate organizer of school subjects, it’s a lousy organizer of general knowledge, and general knowledge is what holds daily life together.
I needed a general organizer for work I was doing with kids attending Florida State University’s on-campus K-12 school. I found it in General Systems Theory as it had developed during World War II. Adding to my confidence in the potential of systems theory for radically improving learner performance is the fact that the very young, long before words like “chemistry,” “economics,” and “geometry” mean anything to them, know how to make sense, and use systems thinking to do it.
That has to mean that they’re using a systemic mental organizer. How quickly they learn to use that organizer to navigate an incredibly complicated world says that the organizer is first rate, and should be put to use. It shouldn’t replace school subjects, but integrate and enhance them. The core subjects sometimes run parallel, overlap, or support each other (e.g. science and math, language arts and social studies) but they can’t be patched together in any coherent way to create an intellectually manageable, sense-making tool. Systems theory solves that problem. It makes all subjects part of a single, coherent, easily understood, mutually supportive sense making tool.
To me, the core’s inherent problems explain why most schooling doesn’t “take,” why kids are usually bored and disengaged, why adults remember and use so little of what they once “learned” in school at great expense, why K-12 fads and reforms come and go, eventually fading away in a sort of embarrassed silence.
The current multi-billion dollar push to put the Common Core State Standards in place, and write tests for every school subject under the sun, will follow the same path and suffer the same fate. It’s as futile as pounding sand down a rat hole. The whole Common Core circus is designed to improve the specialized studies that make up the core curriculum (and it may or rmay not do that), but what K-12 kids really need is a system for organizing GENERAL knowledge.
They HAVE such a system. But they don’t know they have it, so for educational purposes, it isn’t doing them any good. It has to be lifted into consciousness, elaborated, and put to intentional use to help them make better sense of themselves, each other, and the world. (And, of course, school subjects.)
Let me try to explain the basics of that system. It’s simple, so if it doesn’t seem so, it will be because it’s taken for granted, and we’re not used to looking closely at things we take for granted.
Making sense of something, we do the following:
(a) Locate it in space (in the next block; South Africa; on the top shelf; about six miles north of Hastings).
(b) Locate it in time (after lunch; next week; every ten minutes; October 14, 1066).
(c) Identify the actors (Tom and Huck; union members; Holocaust survivors; Norman and Saxon armies).
(d) Describe the action (took blood samples; built a raft; walked all the way home; fought a battle).
(e) Attribute cause (the road was icy; she lost her temper; too much sugar; to gain control of England).
That done, we relate the five (On October 14, 1066, Norman and Saxon armies met about six miles north of Hastings and fought a battle for control of England).
That’s it. Those five kinds of information, (a) through (e), take in and organize all knowledge—school, street, everything. Kids helped to lift them into consciousness, elaborate them in ever-greater detail, relate and make intentional use of them, get smarter quick. They have a powerful tool that helps them cope far more easily with information overload and unlock their creative potential. Once lifted into consciousness, they’ll use it for the rest of their lives.
You’re skeptical? Of course. That’s to be expected. The only people who aren’t are those who’ve helped kids understand the system, and in so doing come to understand it for themselves.
I give away a course of study designed to help teachers of adolescents and older students do that. It’s called Connections: Investigating Reality. And you can see comments from a user here.
Connections isn’t a finished product, and never should be. It needs continuous input from teachers who work with kids every day and talk to each other about what worked, what didn’t work, and how it could be improved. It needs to be piloted.
But right now, Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, Arne Duncan, Bill Gates, Mike Bloomberg, Eli Broad, Andrew Cuomo, Michelle Rhee, Jeb Bush, and others block the way. They’ve bought the corporate line, and any innovation that doesn’t fit with the Common Core Standards in some obvious way, or doesn’t lend itself to mass testing, is off limits.
So go, Fairtest, Parents Across America, Save Our Schools, United Opt-Out National, Fund Education Now. If classroom teachers, school principals, and local school boards know you’ve got their backs, if the National Resolution on High Stakes Testing gets enough signers, I might be able to get a few pilot programs in place.
I’d love to see Connections or some other free, open source, general education teaching tool — a tool owned and operated by working classroom teachers — go head to head with Harcourt Educational Measurement, CTB McGraw-Hill, Riverside Publishing, and NCS Pearson.
Last week, I asked:
How can we help students develop their creativity?
In addition to ideas from readers, two well-known writers and researchers have contributed responses today:
Jonah Lehrer, author of “Imagine: How Creativity Works,” which has been at the top or near the top of The New York Times bestseller list the past few weeks (A portion of his response is adapted from the book).
Ashley Merryman is co-author (with Po Bronson) of the New York Times bestseller, NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children
Additional resources on this topic can be found at The Best Sources Of Advice On Helping Students Strengthen & Develop Their Creativity and at The Best Resources For Learning About The Importance Of “Grit.”
Response From Jonah Lehrer
Jonah Lehrer is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of three books: Imagine, How We Decide, and Proust Was a Neuroscientist. He is also a frequent contributor to WNYC’s Radiolab. He blogs at Frontal Cortex:
I think we need to begin by admitting that the typical classroom is not set up to encourage creativity. Consider a 1995 survey of several dozen elementary school teachers, conducted by psychologists at Union and Skidmofe College. When asked whether they wanted creative kids in their classroom, every teacher said yes. But when the same teachers were asked to rate their students on a variety of personality measures, the traits most closely aligned with creative thinking (such as being “freely expressive”) were also closely associated with their “least favorite” students. The researchers summarize their sad data: “Judgments for the favorite student were negatively correlated with creativity; judgments for the least favorite student were positively correlated with creativity.”
Of course, there’s a very good reason for this: nobody wants a classroom full of little Pablo Picassos. That’s a recipe for chaos, which is why we also need to teach our kids how to focus and exert self-control. But we shouldn’t be so determined to enhance these mental skills that we discourage the mental strategies that make creativity possible.
So how can we improve the situation? The first thing we should do is broaden our definition of effective classroom thinking. Although we often discourage daydreaming in students – we see the wandering mind as a wasted mind – studies show that people who daydream more score higher on tests of creativity. The same lesson also applies to students who are easily distracted. According to the latest research, these kids are significantly more likely to be eminent creative achievers in the real world. (So are students with attention deficit disorders, provided they’ve got moderately high IQ scores.) The point is that our current pedagogy is mostly designed to encourage focused cognition, teaching pupils to stare straight ahead at the blackboard and absorb information. Creativity, however, often requires a very different kind of thought process. Students need to learn how to pay attention, of course. But they also need to learn how to productively daydream.
And this is why arts education is so important. Like most skills, creativity is best learned by doing. Kids don’t learn how to be creative by sitting in lectures about the creative process, or getting history lessons on American innovation. Rather, they learn how to be creative by creating things, by flexing their own imagination.
However, I think arts education also comes with an additional benefit, which is that it gives students a rare opportunity to discover a classroom pursuit they enjoy. This might sound like a trivial objective, but I think it comes with tangible benefits. Angela Duckworth, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, has done a lot of important work documenting the connection between a character trait called grit and classroom success. (People with higher levels of grit are more willing to persevere in pursuit of a goal.) Although Duckworth is only beginning to uncover ways to enhance grit in students, she often employs a pithy maxim: “Choose easy, work hard.” When kids are young, Duckworth says, it’s important to expose them to a variety of different activities, from sculpture to dance to computer programming, if only so they might find something that seems easy. However, once students find a pursuit that feels like fun – this is a sign they’ve got a natural talent for it – then they need to constantly be reminded to work hard. They will learn how to be gritty as they develop their talent.
The importance of choosing easy shouldn’t just apply to the arts. We should endeavor to make every subject, from high school biology to pre-algebra, full of engaging activities that kids might enjoy. Instead of another chemistry lecture, try a cooking lesson; rather than explain statistics with a textbook, why not experiment with sabermetrics and a baseball draft? The problem, of course, is that such enriching exercises are constantly being threatened by budget cuts and the need to improve standardized test scores.
However, if we are serious about enhancing creativity, then we can’t just treat the classroom as a place for disseminating facts that can be regurgitated. (As Kyle Wedberg, the CEO of NOCCA, an arts academy in New Orleans once told me, “We can’t just be in the business of teaching kids the kind of stuff that they can look up on their phone.”) School has to also become a safe space for creating, a daily opportunity for kids to take what they know and apply it in new and meaningful ways. We should encourage students at all grade levels to constantly try out different forms of creativity, so that they might find one that gives them pleasure and meaning. That feeling of pleasure – the thrill of a choosing easy – is a classroom lesson they won’t soon forget.
Response From Ashley Merryman
With Po Bronson, Ashley Merryman is the author of the New York Times bestseller, NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children, which is being translated into 16 languages. Having written for Time, Newsweek, New York, and many others, Merryman and Bronson have won nine national awards for their reporting on the science of human development. She has appeared on countless television and radio shows (including Charlie Rose and Anderson Cooper 360), and has lectured around the nation, from Yale University to Pop Tech:
As Po Bronson and I first reported in Newsweek’s “The Creativity Crisis,” there is evidence of a decline in creativity in the United States – particularly for children. According to professor Kyung Hee Kim, kids have fewer creative responses than they had 20 years ago. Their ideas are less original and have less detail. Young children’s ability to elaborate has plummeted 37% since 1998. (I think of that whenever I ask a child what he did that day. All too often, the response is: “Stuff.”)
The good news is that creativity can be developed: it is a skill that can be taught.
And not just in arts programs. The arts do help kids develop creative self-efficacy – they learn they can turn an idea into something tangible. But the arts don’t own creativity.
Because at its core, creativity is about having a new idea put into action. Another way to think of creativity is that it means solving problems in a unique way. Thus teaching creativity can be thought of as teaching children to problem-solve. Not according to a set formula, but by applying knowledge they have in a new way.
At Akron, Ohio’s National Inventors Hall of Fame (NIHF) School, sixth graders received a letter from a college professor: she asked if the children would help with data collection for a wetlands project. The children figured out what they’d need to know to help her: that lead to studying wetlands and factors affecting the environment. They learned to take measurements and then studied cell development. They worked on how best to display data in oral and written presentations. In other words, they mastered all the required material . . . and never once asked, “Why do I have to learn this?”
There are commercial curricula to help implement programs like these (such as Problem Based Learning and Creative Problem Solving. In the summer, there’s the NIHF “Camp Invention”). However, developing kids’ creativity doesn’t require such large efforts.
Try a simple instruction such as: “Think of something only you would think of. Not your friends, or your family. Just you.” In experimental settings, that doubled the number of creative responses.
Rather than giving kids an explanation for an event or fact (e.g. why is Sacramento the capitol of California?), Dr. Mark Runco suggests students come up with a list of possible answers, and then figure out which is the best/makes the most sense. In this way, kids stretch their imaginations, then learn to evaluate their own ideas.
Learning about foreign cultures and languages increases creativity: in one experiment, just one 45-minute slideshow on China increased creativity scores for two-weeks. Exposing children to a new culture helps them realize there is more than one way to approach a given situation, and to search for new solutions.
And simplest of all – we can develop children’s creativity simply by encouraging it in the classroom. Respond to a child’s off-beat comment rather than ignore it. If they’ve arrived at an answer in an usual way, ask them to explain how they got there.
Kids who say their teachers listen to their ideas have higher creative self-efficacy; they have higher grades and higher aspirations for college.
Studies have found that teachers who are supportive of students’ creativity in their classes have students who are higher in creativity.
Responses From Readers
Margaret Haviland in an instructional leader and U.S. and World History teacher at at Westtown School in Pennsylvania. She wrote about creativity and teacher professional development recently at the Voices from the Learning Revolution blog:
Teachers need to model creative thinking and the creative process. I have an instructional leadership role in my school and I think it’s part of the work of folks with jobs like mine to encourage and nurture creativity within our faculties. Not every art or music teacher needs to exhibit in a show or perform in an orchestra. Not every science teacher needs to pursue scientific research nor does every English teacher need to be a published author. But all teachers should be transparently sharing with their students their own creative efforts, whether it’s rethinking an approach to teaching, solving a problem with the class, talking about their engagement with an issue beyond school, or sharing their own craft or hobby.
For instance, I have a colleague who has a number of our students working with her to crochet roses (the symbol associated with Cystic Fibrosis) as an ongoing fund raiser. Much about the creative process and imaginative thinking emerges as they share this experience.
David Zulkoskey:
Know your students and by this I mean really know your students. What is in and what is not. Celebrate the accomplishments of others. Create a positive environment that is fun, polite, energetic, safe, nonthreatening, supportive and respectful. Take an interest in your students as a professional teacher – you are not their buddy but rather a compassionate caring person…. Make mistakes, laugh at yourself, and use humour in your teaching. Drama is about life so live it – be healthy, invite kids into knowing about you. You want kids to take risks, well take risks yourself. Find the stories that make life interesting.
Paddy McCabe suggests we help students develop their creativity…
…when pupils are active in planning,when their strengths and interests are central, and when we reflectively use technology
Thanks to Jonah and Ashley for sharing their responses and to readers who left comments!
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