A rainy Sunday and a good book; what could be better? And even better when it can be read in a few hours, and generates the thought “yes” at every page!
This Sunday it’s “Wired to Create: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind” by Scott Barry Kaufman (@sbkaufman) and Carolyn Gregoire (@carolyn_greg). Inspired by Gregoire’s 2014 article for the Huffington Post, “18 Things Highly Creative People do Differently“, and building upon Kaufman’s research, this book provides a wonderful framework to compare with my most recent reading, (See #IMMOOC – Tradition vs Innovation, Laying the Foundation for Innovation – #IMMOOC Weeks 3 & 4, Prensky’s #21stC Model – #IMMOOC), and with my current view of education and schooling.
As a start, I’ve pulled out some of the ideas for consideration:
| Quote | Response | ||
| Introduction: Messy Minds | “To build these skills, we must encourage risk taking and orginality, and give people the autonomy to decide how they learn and create” (p xxxii) | Our educational structures are designed NOT to allow learners the autonomy to decide how they learn and create. The introduction of “choice” is a step in the right direction, but we need to get out of the learners way, and remove the roadblocks. | |
| 1 | Imaginative Play | “The science shows that hybrid forms of work and play may actually provide the most optimal context for learning and creativity, both for children and for adults” (p 11) | And “direct instruction” is “work” but rarely is it “play”. |
| 2 | Passion | “..we must not only fall in love with a dream of our future self… but also love the process of becoming that person” (p 27) | As teachers, we need to facilitate the process, but not prescribe. Opportunity and feedback will nurture the love of the process. |
| 3 | Daydreaming | “We should allow ourselves to balance the focused mind with the wandering mind, and skilled daydreamers do this naturally”. (p 43) | I don’t recall anyone talking to me about my daydreaming as a child, though I do believe it lead to an ability to focus, as I developed thinking skills to organize what I was thinking. |
| 4 | Solitude | “the act of creating requires us to find time to ourselves and slow down enough to hear our own ideas – both the good and the bad ones”. (p 48) | I’m not certain that our students have any solitude: they are accompanied by their devices, music, and continual input. |
| 5 | Intuition | “Intuition arises from unconscious, or spontaneous, information-processing systems, and it plays an important role in how we think, reason, create, and behave socially”. (p 64) | Allowing students to express their thoughts, and to explore those that arise spontaneously, seems absent from our classrooms. |
| 6 | Openness to Experience | “We need new and unusual experiences to think differently”. (p 82) | We need to facilitate these experiences through field trips, clubs, and events, and to bring them into our classroom with a deliberate plan for novelty. |
| 7 | Mindfulness | “The capacity to deeply observe is not only a key attentional skills, it’s also a distinct creative advantage”. (p 105) | Our teachers often take the more efficient action of “telling” or “showing” rather than allowing students to see at their own pace. |
| 8 | Sensitive | “If we think of creativity as ‘connecting the dots’ in some way, then sensitive people experience a world in which there are both more dots and more opportunities for connection”. (p 126) | For sensitive learners, filtering out the irrelevant “dots” can be a challenge in our classrooms. And at the same time, we need to bring some of the “dots” to the attention of others, who aren’t even aware that they are there. |
| 9 | Turning Adversity into Advantage | “Experiences of extreme adversity show us our own strength”. (p 146 | We’ve done a lot of talking about resilience and how we can nurture it in our students. Our “lawnmower” parents ensure that their children never face adversity, and our educational accountability structures cause teachers to do the same with their students. Those of us who grew up in the 60’s and 70’s have often spoken of the value of not really knowing what the teacher wanted, nor how she was coming up with a mark. |
| 10 | Thinking Differently | “The suppression of free thinking and imagination often starts in the educational system”. (p 174) | There are so many “don’t”s in the world of our children, both at home and at school. My students believe that there is a “formula” to life, and that if they merely find the first step on the path, they will succeed. We know that isn’t how life works, but we persist with the fantasy in the school system. |
I’ll certainly be returning back to this book, and revisiting these concepts, over the next little while!
Terry Whitmell, PhD 