Creativity

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If Robots Will Run the World, What Should Students Learn?

April 12, 2013 | 10:39 AM | By
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Education reformers have been calling for a different type of education, one that nurtures creative and innovative thinkers. But for many, that future is hard to see and even harder to influence.

Science fiction writers and blockbuster movies have been predicting a world run by robots for decades, and for most of us, the fantasy has stayed in the realm of fiction. But artificial intelligence has made rapid progress and robots are becoming more a part of everyday life than many people realize. Those who study robots and their impact on life foresee a day not too far off when many jobs now held by people will be automated.

“If you can detect a pattern, you can automate it,” said Charles Fadel, founder of the Center for Curriculum Redesign and a visiting practitioner at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, who spoke at the recent Learning and the Brain Conference. Fadel sees signs that robots are already becoming a part of everyday life. Google has a self-driving car. Japan recently put on a concert, attended by thousands of people, featuring a hologram popstar with a synthesized voice. Virtual models are gradually being put to work displaying the newest styles, and Watson the supercomputer whooped-on the best Jeopardy players. Signs of robotic intelligence are everywhere and educators need to be preparing students to enter a dramatically different world, Fadel said.

“The role of the educator is to channel and guide what is fundamentally an improvisational process.”

As artificial intelligence improves and slowly takes over aspects of daily life, the only way for people to continue to be useful is to “up-skill” — and that takes creativity. “Incremental creativity is just improving on something, but radical creativity is thinking something up,” Fadel said. He believes that, in time, computers will be capable of incremental creativity, slowly improving a process and building on its success. What they will never be able to do is generate a radically new idea.

“We’re being pushed upwards in abstraction, in some senses,” Fadel said. Recognizing how sophisticated computers already are, and how much better the algorithms are getting will be important as the education system evolves. Implicit in Fadel’s stark view of how artificial Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Learning Methods, Research, artificial intelligence, collaborative learning, creativity, project-based-learning

How Emotional Connections Can Trigger Creativity and Learning

March 15, 2013 | 11:15 AM | By
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Scientists are always uncovering new ways into how people learn best, and some of the most recent neuroscience research has shown connections between basic survival functions, social and emotional reactions to the world, and creative impulses.

Students’ social and emotional reactions to learning are imperative to feeling motivated to learn and to their ability to creatively solve problems, according to Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, who wrote Musings on the Neurobiological and Evolutionary Origins of Creativity via a Developmental Analysis of One Child’s Poetry [PDF]. Her research tries to understand why emotions are so important to learning by examining what happens to brain functions.

“Neuroimaging experiments show us that we use the very same neural systems to feel our bodies as to feel our relationships, our moral judgments, and our creative inspiration,” said Immordino-Yang, a professor at USC’s Rossier School of Education and an expert on the neuroscience of learning and creativity. Her whose work focuses on how neuroscience can help teachers understand the ways students learn best, and to that end, she’s created a free online curriculum for teachers.

“Help kids know how to make meaning and sense of what they are learning so they can see who they are.”

The neuromechanisms responsible for feeling and managing the body’s physical survival and consciousness have been co-opted to also manage social survival. “Survival in the savanna depends on a brain that is wired to make sense of the environment, and to play out the things it notices through patterns of bodily and mental reactions,” Immordino-Yang writes. “This same brain, the same logic, helps us make sense of and survive in the social world of today.” To make something relevant to a learner, it should inspire an emotional reaction in the person, triggering these survivalist parts of the brain that indicate something is important.

[RELATED: Teaching Social and Emotional Skills in School]

“The way that we make meaning out of situations, and the way that we feel and evaluate things, is plated on the same neural platforms as do the basic job of managing our viscera,” Immordino Yang said. When a topic strikes a chord with a student it feels meaningful because the part of his brain firing is the same part that keeps him conscious and alive. It’s also the part of the brain responsible for novel, creative or new ideas.

“Creativity is representing some kind of relevant problem in a new way and making people Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, Research, creativity, inquiry learning, Neuroscience, science, social emotional learning

Nurturing the Next Van Gogh? Start With Small Steps

March 1, 2013 | 11:12 AM | By
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If it’s true that fostering creativity in learning is not just a nice notion, but an imperative, then educators must find a way to integrate it into a system that has not made this intangible, un-testable attribute a priority. More and more, teachers are becoming alerted to the idea that nurturing creative minds is necessary to raise a generation of innovators.

Knowing that it’s important is one thing, but integrating creativity into curriculum is harder than it sounds.

“In order for something to be creative, it has to be task appropriate,” said Dr. James Kaufman, director of the Learning Research Institute at California State University San Bernardino. Along with Dr. Ronald Beghetto, associate professor of Education Studies at University of Oregon, Kaufman has been studying how to make creativity more approachable for educators.

The first step is to help both students and educators understand productive creativity. A wildly creative solution might not solve the problem. Conversely, it’s easy to come up with answers that aren’t unique. Creativity is the ability to produce work that is unique and unexpected as well as appropriate, useful, and adaptive.

What seems like a tangent could actually help other students think about the problem in a different way.

The collective understanding puts creativity into two categories — legendary status, like Van Gogh — and everyday creativity, like cooking, scrapbooking, or drawing. Kaufman and Beghetto have dubbed these kinds of creativity “Big C” and “little C.” The problem with this dichotomy, however, is that it privileges the legendary Big C above all else, making it seem that only few have the potential to be creative.

Instead Kaufman and Beghetto favor what they call the 4 Cs. They’d like to include “mini C” Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Learning Methods, Research, creativity

Can Repetitive Exercises Actually Feed the Creative Process?

February 22, 2013 | 10:19 AM | By
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By Holly Korbey

In Sherri Scott’s first grade class, the daily “main lesson” pages students work on — essentially their handmade textbooks made up of words, numbers, and artwork — are copied straight from the old-fashioned blackboard, not created. And that’s the point.

“It’s what we do in Waldorf schools,” Scott says. “In the lower grades, those initial main lesson pages are copied as closely as possible, to allow practice and more practice with shading, perspective, accuracy, spatial awareness. All that practice copying turns into a keen eye and skilled hand when given free rein in the upper grades.”

For many dedicated to re-making our schools as hubs of dynamic innovation and creativity, getting good at math or science or literacy might be better found in techniques like inquiry-based learning, less emphasis on standardized testing, and avoiding the soul-numbing “drill and kill” exercises and worksheets used to instill basic skills.

But what if the right drill -- without the kill — actually encourages creativity?

Teach Like a Champion author Doug Lemov proposes this very idea in his new book, Practice Perfect: 42 Rules for Getting Better at Getting Better. His Rule Number 4, “Unlock Creativity… With Repetition,” falls in line with virtuoso musicians, elite athletes, and Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000 hours rule” — that creativity actually comes after lots and lots of rote learning (also called practice)

“Creativity is play within a system of rules, and you can only play with the rules once you understand the systems.”

has built a solid foundation of skills. Focused practice, Lemov has found in his research training teachers, actually automates a process in one’s body, which then becomes fertile ground for creative breakthroughs and individual variations.

To explain why his teachers have had so much creative success with repetitive practice, Lemov told the story of a particularly good literature teacher who would get stumped when students Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, Research, creativity, drill and kill, practice, rote learning

How Free Play Can Define Kids’ Success

February 15, 2013 | 10:44 AM | By
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Free, unstructured playtime gives kids a chance to discover their interests and tap into their creativity. It’s a crucial element for building resilience in children, an attribute they’ll need in order to become happy, productive adults. That’s Kenneth Ginsburg’s thesis and the core of his book Building Resilience in Children and Teens.

Ginsburg, a pediatrician at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia who also works with homeless children, has spent a lot of time trying to help young people build tools they’ll need to succeed — even when trauma has marred early lives.

But the word “success” can be loaded, often carrying different connotations. To Ginsburg, a successful child is one who finds something he loves to do, is generous, empathetic and compassionate, committed to repairing the world, shows grit and the ability to collaborate, creativity and can take constructive criticism. These are what will serve young people as they move into the world on their own.

“Play is integral to being able to build resilience.”

“So many of the things that we care about are completely learned through the creative process,” Ginsberg said at an event hosted by the Bay Area Discovery Museum. When kids are allowed free time to play, they learn how to work in groups, negotiate, share, self-advocate, and make decisions.

Ginsburg cautions parents that putting too much pressure on children’s academics might have negative effects in the long term. The way he frames parents’ ultimate goals: Raise healthy, wise Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Learning Methods, Research, creativity, grit

How to Fuel the Innovation Engine in Learning

September 7, 2012 | 11:13 AM | By

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By Jennie Rose

Can creativity be taught? If innovation is truly the key to this country’s success, then it’s time to think strategically about engendering creativity into our education system.

That’s part of Tina Seelig’s thesis in her new book Ingenius: A Crash Course on Creativity. Case in point: In schools, when we give students math problems to solve, we ask simply, “What’s the sum of 10+10?” to which there is only one right answer. But Seelig says we should turn the question on its head, and ask, “How many ways can you add 10+10?” The question you ask is the frame in which the answers will fall, Seelig says.

This approach is fundamental to Seelig’s work as a professor at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford. The Institute (or “d.school”), renowned for incubating inventive new businesses, is committed to teaching students about design thinking. And it’s in her course on creativity where Seelig introduces students to her celebrated Innovation Engine, which she says represents all the values we need to unlock creativity.

The Engine has six parallel lines in a Möbius strip design. Three internal human factors comprise our knowledge, imagination, and attitude.

As Seelig describes it:

  • Your knowledge provides the fuel for your imagination.
  • Your imagination is the catalyst for transforming knowledge into ideas.
  • Your attitude is the spark that sets the Innovation Engine in motion.

The other three lines include external influences of resources, habitat and culture.

  • Resources are all the assets available to you.
  • Habitat includes the space, rules, constraints, and people around you.
  • Culture is the collective beliefs, values, & behaviors of your community.

These inside and outside strips are woven together because nothing can be looked at in isolation. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Learning Methods, creativity, Failure, Innovation, Tina Seelig