He makes an argument for individualizing learning, but also for valuing teachers and thinking of their professional development as an investment in children and the future.

By Elizabeth Blair, NPR

Let’s start with a question from a standardized test: “How would the world be different if we all had a third eye in the back of our heads?”

It’s not a typical standardized question, but as part of the Next Generation Creativity Survey, it’s used to help measure creativity a bit like an IQ test measures intelligence. And it’s not the only creativity test out there.

So why bother measuring creativity? James Catterall, a psychologist and director of the Centers for Research on Creativity in Los Angeles, says the simple answer is that if society, business and education demands it, then we need to know when it’s happening; otherwise, we’re just guessing when it’s there.

He says, “Measuring is an important aspect of knowing where our investments pay off.”

Troublemaker Or Misunderstood Creative Genius?

In the late 1950s, a man named E. Paul Torrance was similarly interested in children’s creativity. Torrance was a Georgia farm boy-turned-psychologist, and one of his first jobs was working with boys at a military academy. It was there that he began to see creativity as something that was misunderstood. Bonnie Cramond, director of the Torrance Center for Creativity and Talent Development at the University of Georgia, says a lot of the boys Torrance worked with were thought to be troublemakers.

“They were high-energy kids with ideas,” she says, “and those don’t always fit into a very structured school situation. And so [Torrance] did a lot of research in how, for example, teachers much prefer highly intelligent kids and often don’t like highly creative kids because they are harder to control and they’re misunderstood.”

Torrance set out to change that, or at least to prove that creativity was as important as intelligence, not just in the arts, but in every field. As part of that mission, he devised a number of ways to test for creativity. Today, the system he created is called the Torrance Test.

Rewarding The ‘More Elaborate Route’

Janet Stanford is the artistic director of Imagination Stage, a professional children’s theater company and arts center in Bethesda, Md. She says when she first heard about the Torrance Test, she was skeptical. “Initially I thought, as many people do, ‘Well, creativity is not something you can measure. It’s this sort of wonderful gift and let’s not question it too carefully.’ ”

But Stanford was curious, so she ordered the test packet anyway, and she also got to see some of the results. In the “figural” section of the test, there’s a page with a large, black egg shape in the middle. Test-takers are asked to make a picture out of it that “no one else will think of.”

“One little boy created a cave out of it,” Stanford remembers. “He put a cliff around it, and so there was a ladder going up to this hole as if it was a great cave. And then there was a Martian or some kind of alien spaceship in the air, and this little boy who was hiding from the aliens. I mean, the world that he created was complete.”

Stanford was intrigued enough that she asked her entire staff to take the test. There was some resistance at first, but then a few members like Lauren Williams learned to grade the test. Williams says that for a test about creativity, it has a lot of unexpected details. Take, for example, the test’s “resistance to premature closure” section, where test-takers are asked to turn lines on the page into a picture somehow. “They look for people who choose not to take the quickest way and to choose a longer, more elaborate route instead,” she says. “And you get points for that.”

Shining Light On A Hidden Problem

The Torrance Test has been translated into several languages and is mostly used for admission to gifted and talented programs. But other creativity tests are also in the works — James Catterall and his team at the Centers for Research on Creativity are still tweaking theirs.

Catterall says they made an interesting discovery while they were testing out their survey: Elementary school kids scored better on it than high school kids did. “I think the expression that many people use is that the schools have a tendency to suck the creativity out of kids over time,” he says.

And that’s a problem — a problem that will require enormous creativity to solve.

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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.

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 intelligence fits into human kind’s future is a question about the value of education. Why teach content when everything is searchable? Why teach specific skills when computers will one day be able to do that work, he asks.

[RELATED READING: How Can Teachers Prepare Kids for a Connected World?]

Education has to focus on learning how to learn – metacognition. School will still be important, but not to impart what happened during the Revolutionary War or to teach the quadratic formula. School, he said, should focus on teaching young people the intangibles, the things that make humans unique: relationships, flexibility, humanity, how to make discriminating decisions, resilience, innovation, adaptability, wisdom, ethics, curiosity, how to ask good questions, synthesizing and integrating information, and of course, creating.

In the future, computers and humans will be working together to create the next big invention and when that happens, people can distinguish themselves by controlling the process and the strategy. Humans will define the goals and will think creatively about solutions.

But to get to that place, the education system needs to nurture creative young people. That isn’t happening right now, he says.

EDUCATORS CAN HELP

Most political leaders and education experts agree that the education system needs to adapt to the technological realities of the age and work to produce more creative thinkers. “The whole culture is coming out with support for more and greater creativity in students,” said R. Keith Sawyer, professor of education and psychology studying creativity and learning at Washington University in St. Louis, at the same conference.

Sawyer says fostering creativity starts by recognizing that it’s a collaborative process, not one big idea from a genius. Rather, it’s more like improvisational theater. “Each person contributes a small idea or contribution and the next person picks it up and takes it somewhere,” Sawyer said. “It’s unpredictable and unplanned but something wonderful emerges.”

Recognizing that much of the creative work generated comes out of collaborative group work, teachers can think about their classrooms as places for improvisational flow, where teachers and students are building knowledge together. Structure is needed, but some flexibility as well.

“The role of the educator is to channel and guide what is fundamentally an improvisational process,” Sawyer said. “Students learn what they need to learn but in a way that allows them to be creative.”

To arrive at an improvisational classroom, educators can move away from an instructional model for the classroom. The traditional model clings to the notion that children need to learn particular facts and it’s the teacher’s job to impart that information to students. Facts and information build incrementally and turn into more complex ideas, and learning is measured by testing knowledge of facts.

But many argue that this model results in superficial knowledge and low retention, weak transfer to new situations, inability to integrate facts and apply to other situations, Sawyer said.

Sawyer proposes that schooling should be constructionist, focusing on a deeper, conceptual understanding of topics with the ability to build new knowledge in new situations. To do this, students need to take facts, skills, and concepts and apply them to real-word problems. Learning should start with a driving question. This way, students can explore the topic through inquiry and discussion, working in teams, just as they would in the workplace or other life situations. Students create a tangible product that addresses the issue at hand, and along the way an instructor guides the process.

Sawyer is not naïve about the challenges to this model. It’s hard to develop a good design question. “The really good problems are not too hard, not too easy and they result in the acquisition of required content,” Sawyer said. But even after coming up with a perfect problem, it’s difficult to get students to actively engage and to collaborate effectively. It’s hard to assess learning this way and to effectively critique in a way that doesn’t stunt ideas, but helps guide the process.

It may seem daunting to change the current system into something that resembles the constructionist model Sawyer and others champion. But Sawyer said it’s happening in schools across the country, and educators are passing along these ideas to each other.

[RELATED READING: Fostering Creativity Is Not An Option]

“Every teacher is a creative professional,” Sawyer said. “And in the ideal world, every teacher is contributing these small ideas, engaging in mutual tinkering. But we have to share with others, we can’t keep it in the classroom.” The creative act of teaching needs to be a collaborative one, like a startup team working on the next innovative product. If each teacher continues to tinker and offer ideas to the larger group, a creative breakthrough will emerge.

“It’s going to be every one of us that contributes ideas along the way,” Sawyer said. And in doing so, teachers everywhere can create the institutional change that stands between them and implementing the ideas that to many are obvious and instinctual.

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By Thom Markham

One overriding challenge is now coming to the fore in public consciousness: We need to reinvent just about everything. Whether scientific advances, technology breakthroughs, new political and economic structures, environmental solutions, or an updated code of ethics for 21st century life, everything is in flux—and everything demands innovative, out of the box thinking.

The burden of reinvention, of course, falls on today’s generation of students. So it follows that education should focus on fostering innovation by putting curiosity, critical thinking, deep understanding, the rules and tools of inquiry, and creative brainstorming at the center of the curriculum.

This is hardly the case, as we know. In fact, innovation and the current classroom model most often operate as antagonists. The system is evolving, but not quickly enough to get young people ready for the new world. But I do believe there are a number of ways that teachers can bypass the system and offer students the tools and experiences that spur an innovative mindset. Here are ten ideas:

Move from projects to Project Based Learning. Most teachers have done projects, but the majority do not use the defined set of methods associated with high-quality PBL. These methods include developing a focused question, using solid, well crafted performance assessments, allowing for multiple solutions, enlisting community resources, and choosing engaging, meaningful themes for projects. PBL offers the best method we have presently for combining inquiry with accountability, and should be part of every teacher’s repertoire. See my website or the Buck Institute for methods.

Teach concepts, not facts. Concept-based instruction overcomes the fact-based, rote-oriented nature of standardized curriculum. If your curriculum is not organized conceptually, use you own knowledge and resources to teach ideas and deep understanding, not test items.

Distinguish concepts from critical information. Preparing students for tests is part of the job. But they need information for a more important reason: To innovate, they need to know something. The craft precedes the art. Find the right blend between open-ended inquiry and direct instruction.

Make skills as important as knowledge. Innovation and 21st century skills are closely related. Choose several 21st century skills, such as collaboration or critical thinking, to focus on throughout the year. Incorporate them into lessons. Use detailed rubrics to assess and grade the skills.

Form teams, not groups. Innovation now emerges from teams and networks—and we can teach students to work collectively and become better collective thinkers. Group work is common, but team work is rare. Some tips: Use specific methods to form teams; assess teamwork and work ethic; facilitate high quality interaction through protocols and critique; teach the cycle of revision; and expect students to reflect critically on both ongoing work and final products. For peer collaboration rubrics, see these free PBL Tools.

Use thinking tools. Hundreds of interesting, thought provoking tools exist for thinking through problems, sharing insights, finding solutions, and encouraging divergent solutions. Use Big Think tools or the Visible Thinking Routines developed at Harvard’s Project Zero.

Use creativity tools. Industry uses a set of cutting edge tools to stimulate creativity and innovation. As described in books such as Gamestorming or Beyond Words, the tools include playful games and visual exercises that can easily be used in the classroom.

Reward discovery. Innovation is mightily discouraged by our system of assessment, which rewards the mastery of known information. Step up the reward system by using rubrics with a blank column to acknowledge and reward innovation and creativity. I call it the Breakthrough column. All of the rubrics on the PBL Tools section of my website have a breakthrough column.

Make reflection part of the lesson. Because of the coverage imperative, the tendency is to move on quickly from the last chapter and begin the next chapter. But reflection is necessary to anchor learning and stimulate deeper thinking and understanding. There is no innovation without rumination.

Be innovative yourself. This is the kicker, because innovation requires the willingness to fail, a focus on fuzzy outcomes rather than standardized measures, and the bravery to resist the system’s emphasis on strict accountability. But the reward is a kind of liberating creativity that makes teaching exciting and fun, engages students, and—most critical—helps students find the passion and resources necessary to design a better life for themselves and others.

This post originally appeared on ThomMarkham’s blog.Thom Markham, Ph.D., is a psychologist and school redesign consultant who assists teachers in designing high quality, rigorous projects that incorporate 21^st century skills and the principles of youth development. He is also the author of the Project Based Learning Design and Coaching Guide: Expert tools for innovation and inquiry for k-12 teachers.

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Bestselling author and educational expert Alan November’s new book Who Owns the Learning?: Preparing Students for Success in the Digital Age compiles lessons learned over 30 years of educational experience. Beginning with his first teaching job, November began to realize that the most powerful education happens when students take ownership of their learning and when they feel that what they produce contributes meaningfully to a community.

Using those two principles as his guide, November’s book profiles innovative teachers’ efforts to make learning meaningful to their students, sharing concrete ways to transform schools. The book uses the family farm as a metaphor to explain the importance of making students central contributors to the modern education system. The excerpt below helps explain the type of work students could do in this model and how technology can help along the way.

Owning Their Learning: Student Jobs on the Digital Learning Farm

Perhaps the greatest role shift in the Digital Learning Farm model is that of the student. As we help to transform students from passive receptors of information into active drivers of their educational experiences and designers of their educational goals, we need to provide them with the incentives of meaningful work and authentic audiences. Here are the four types of jobs for students that we will discuss in this book:

1. Tutorial designers
2. Student scribes
3. Student researchers
4. Global communicators and collaborators

Tutorial Designers

Students often learn better from other students; they listen more intently, understand more completely, and participate more readily. Using webcams, video software, and other freely available recording and broadcasting tools, students can create tutorials that other students, parents, and viewers can access and use from any location. As you will learn in chapter 2 (page 25), teacher Eric Marcos and his students from Lincoln Middle School in Santa Monica, California, have energized their school through the use of screencasted tutorials they produce. Creating tutorials increases student engagement and provides struggling students with more opportunities for reviewing troubling concepts. As one of Eric’s students reminds us, “In order to teach it you really have to learn it” (personal communication, December 2011).

Student Scribes

Not all students take excellent notes every day, but free online collaboration tools can give any class the opportunity to collaboratively build one set of perfect notes. Using a shared blog, wiki, Google Docs, or another collaborative writing tool, students work together to create a detailed set of notes that can be used by the entire class. (Visit go.solution-tree.com/instruction for live links to the websites mentioned in this book.) Darren Kuropatwa, a high school calculus teacher, uses this student scribe technique to transform his classroom into a collaborative learning community. In chapter 3 (page 39), you will learn more about Darren’s student scribe program in which each day a new student is responsible for taking notes and collecting diagrams that become part of his class’s online calculus textbook. Using a student scribe program encourages students who don’t take notes to do so, and it helps students who struggle to take good notes improve their technique through positive feedback and advice from their teachers and peers.

Student Researchers

Many classrooms have one computer sitting in the back of the room or on the teacher’s desk that gets very little use while instruction is taking place. What if that computer became the official research station where one student each day was responsible for finding answers to all the questions in class—including the teacher’s questions? Assigning students the research job can be a very effective learning tool, and it’s an incredibly simple process: each day, assign a different student to sit by that computer. When questions come up during class, it is that student’s responsibility to search out the correct answer. In chapter 4 (page 49), you will learn details about using this student job to build a class search engine that meets course standards for curriculum content and reliability of resources. Training students in the role of researcher offers guided opportunities and teachable moments that allow them to hone their research skills.

Global Communicators and Collaborators

It wasn’t that long ago when it was cost prohibitive to have your class connect with other classes and subject experts around the world. That time is gone! In an ever-shrinking world, we now have free access to make these very connections. In chapter 5 (page 65), you learn how educators are using Skype and other online tools to establish and maintain working relationships via the Internet with classrooms and topic experts from around the world. (Visit go.solution-tree.com/instruction for live links to the websites mentioned in this book.) Students can develop questions, conduct interviews, and build their skills in online learning and collaboration with people from different countries and cultures. This Digital Learning Farm job offers hundreds of opportunities for any adventurous group of students to bring the world into its classroom.

These jobs offer just four examples of work that gives students valuable opportunities to make real contributions to their learning community. While educators can implement these and other student jobs individually, we can create a more balanced approach to teaching and learning by bringing multiple jobs together to work in harmony. I have talked with educators who assign different jobs to their students. If the work results in meaningful activities that advance student contributions and ownership in the learning process, it probably deserves a place in the classroom.

Flickr: fhwrdh

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.

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 understand it, and feel about it, and have some insight into something that matters,” Immordino-Yang said. She argues that creative moments are motivated by caring deeply about a subject. Furthermore, humans make meaning by relating new information to feelings, memories and other personal information to give it context.

To undertake that complicated process of internalizing information Immordino-Yang has found that it’s necessary to shut out external inputs and focus intensely on what’s going on internally. Asking students to constantly pay attention or allowing them to be distracted by games, phones, and other stimuli may deprive them of the important inward-looking time crucial to deeper learning.

“The way in which people learn information, the way in which they make it their own, assimilate it, are dependent heavily on a neural system that is fundamentally incompatible with external information and distraction,” Immordino-Yang said. Long term learning happens when the brain calls up old memories and incorporates the new knowledge into a personalized understanding of the world. And that’s often a creative process. It takes creativity to synthesize new information within the context of old experiences and to reshape difficult concepts into something understandable. Immordino-Yang argues that the essence of that process requires the thinker to disengage from the world around them.

[RELATED: How to Fuel Students' Learning Through Their Interests]

That doesn’t necessarily mean that daydreaming is the key to developing innovative ideas. There are times when insight strikes while the mind wanders, but Immordino-Yang says that in those cases the information is already present. When it comes to learning something new, the inward focus is often real work.

“Help kids know how to make meaning and sense of what they are learning so they can see who they are,” Immordino-Yang said. “Creativity is just an extension of that.” She gave the example of her young daughter who wrote a song about loving her young brother, but the imagery in the song incorporated space, planets, and the galaxy. She had just learned about those concepts, but in order to really understand their significance, she needed to express them within the totally understood and emotional space of family love. Allowing kids the space for the interplay between the emotional and cognitive spaces will benefit the long-term learner.