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!

 

 

Last week I enjoyed the final #IMMOOC conversation online with Brad Gustafson, Katie Martin and George Couros.  I was mid-way through Brad’s book, and have now finished reading it.

The strongest “take-away” for me was Brad’s discussion of our frequent focus on the innovators in our schools, often at the expense of those who are continuing to do great work.  My school has a strong tradition, and is proud of that fact.  Some of my teachers are offended by our efforts to innovate, seeing this as a challenge to their experience and expertise.

As a leader, my job is to celebrate our excellence, and then coach our teachers to work for incremental improvement based upon this strong foundation.  One strength in our school is the work we do with our students in preparation for the annual Literacy Test.

This fall our literacy team made use of a Google Classroom with our 425 students preparing for the online Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test, to be written this past week.  Though the test was an “epic fail” (in the words of our students), we now have an environment in which our students can continue to develop their literacy skills, and be even better prepared when they write in March.

(In case you missed it, the Ontario Education Quality and Accountability Office provided an opportunity to write the annual OSSLT this fall, to test out the new online version ahead of the scheduled test next March.  It resulted in 100,000 plus students sitting looking at white screens for more than two hours before the test was cancelled.)

The use of Google Classroom has leveraged the excellent work done by our teachers over the past years with individual students, and provided students and parents with the resources and support to improve their skills and be successful on this graduation requirement.

We need to continue to look for ways to connect excellent teacher practice with the tools to reach beyond their individual classrooms.  As I see it, why not start with those already near the top?

 

It’s Week #2 of the Innovator’s Mindset MOOC, and the end of Week #3 of school here in Ontario, Canada.  In my school board, we are now in the middle of “reorg”, a process whereby we meet the class size limits as set by the Ministry of Education and negotiated with our teachers’ unions.  In my school we have had to restructure, and on Thursday I informed three of our teachers that they’ll be moving to a new school in a week’s time.

This is not a new process, and I am reflecting back on my first experience of the process, 30 years ago.  I believe that “reorg” is likely the  experience that set me on the path of my own personal “Innovator’s Mindset”, developing the characteristics of Empathy, Problem Finding, Risk-Taking, Networking, Observance, Creating, Resilience, and Reflection in my own teaching practice.  I’m hoping that my three “excess” teachers will find their experiences to be equally positive.

In October 1986 I was 4-months pregnant with my first child, and I was excited to have my first team-teaching class on my timetable:  a grade 9 instrumental music class where I would instruct the brass, and my colleague would have the woodwinds and percussion.  We had an amazing first month.  Then, the administration looked at our numbers and decided that our grade 9 English classes were over capacity, and that our music class of 39 could be taught by one teacher alone.

Despite my colleague having qualifications in English (which I did not), seniority prevailed, and I was assigned to teach Grade 9 Advanced English, to a new class of 34 students made up of 3 or 4 students from each of the other classes.

Resilient – In 1986, both I and my students had our first test of our resilience, as each of them adjusted to my teaching style, and as I worked to build community within our class.  In the 2016 era of “lawnmower parents”, I hope my current teachers will welcome their opportunity for a genuine test of resilience as we reorganize, and will be optimistic and supportive when this year’s 200+ grade 9 students receive their new timetables on Monday.

Reflective – I wasn’t very reflective in 1986 – I could barely keep up with each day’s demands as I taught my new English class, my guitar class, and my introduction to computers (programming) course.  In 2016, my teachers make good use of social media, are supportive in collaborative practice at school, and most likely utilize reflection with their students on a daily basis.

Empathetic – As a 26-year-old, about-t0-be-mother, novice teacher, this was definitely an area of growth.  It’s difficult to look beyond oneself when one is barely keeping up.  My current young teachers have had the benefit of our work over the past decade in school climate, character education, and differentiation, and we hire with empathy as one of our “look-fors”.  Today’s students and teachers are much better prepared for this week’s “reorg”, and have access via the Internet to many more resources, than did we 1986.

Observant – While I might have been trying to be observant in 1986, I didn’t have the view beyond my classroom that is now afforded educators via the Internet and social media.  My documentation tools were paper and pen in my computer/math/English classes, and a cassette tape recorder in my music classes.  Today’s teachers in 2016 can easily document, annotate, and feed back their observations, with a wide range of digital tools.  These observations can easily be communicated, and will assist our students when their timetable change requires a change of teacher and class.

Problem Finding – The question to start with, both in 1986 and now, is:  “How can this experience help my students and me grow?”  And the answers will be different for each teacher and each student, but I believe they will all be positive.

Networked – There is no question that this is easier now than thirty years ago.  When my English department head handed me the stack of reading for Grade 9 English, and told me that we assessed in four categories:  Reading, Writing, Speaking and Listening, I knew that I’d be back in the department office throughout the semester.  I had a support team of experienced teachers, who were all willing to share their best practices with me.  Now, in 2016, my teachers have access not only to their school’s team, but virtually any English teacher in the world as potential colleagues.  My three “excess” teachers know that they will always be able to connect with and be supported by their current colleagues, as they move on to their next school.

Risk-Taker & Creator – “Reorg” in 1986 taught me that I could take risks, and that the result would be infinitely better!  My grade 9 students finished “Summer of my German Soldier”, and made strong connections to “Diary of Anne Frank”, and  then linked both when we attended a performance of the play at Young People’s Theatre in Toronto.  When we moved on to the Mythology Unit (the one unit I hated when I was in grade 9), we considered the role of mythology in culture and religion, and each student developed their own world in which myths explained all of the huge mysteries of life.  Their 3-D cardboard models, and written descriptions, finally taught me the mythology I had missed!  And when I chose to focus on popular ballads from the top 40 in our poetry unit, I learned more about my students (and about their parents’ concerns about song lyrics) than would have been possible with the traditional poetry textbook.

Our three teachers will be missed by their students and by their colleagues.  My wish is that they embrace these Characteristics of the Innovator’s Mindset, take this as an opportunity to take risks, and return to our school in the future to share what they have learned.