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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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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. The best part? You can start anywhere.

USING FAILURE TO LEARN

If this strip is the engine, then the chassis is a modest idea that failure gives us useful data.
“I crafted the Innovation Engine dozens of ways before finding one that clicked,” Seelig writes. Failure is not a waste of time, rather it is constantly testing new ideas. “The big idea is by looking at ‘failures’ as ‘data’ we enhance everyone’s willingness to experiment.”

A willingness to experiment in order to unlock creativity drives Seelig’s outlandish d.school lessons. In sync with some of the au courant ideas about students and failure, Seelig created a workshop called “The Failure Faire” for her students to experiment with failure, and to challenge their assumptions about its definition. In traditional educational settings, students are encouraged to perfect their material before they share it with others. Seelig takes an altogether different tack, suggesting that the sharing of all kinds of unedited ideas, even the bad ones, is a practice that cultivates collaboration and innovation in earnest.

Seelig’s classroom exercises and experiments carry the same message over and over: Everything you see is ripe for innovation. In one example she cites in the book, Seeling asked students in Osaka to squeeze out as much value as they could from the contents of a single trash can in two hours. As a challenge, it’s actually not that far removed from the realities of what most cities around the world — especially high-population areas in Asia — are tackling.

Another popular approach Seelig mentions is the “Marshmallow Challenge,” which all types of people can use: everyone from cross-functional corporate teams, to kids in Destination Imagination programs. Teams are given 18 minutes to build the tallest freestanding structure possible out of 20 sticks of spaghetti, one yard of string, one yard of masking tape and one marshmallow. The marshmallow goes on the top of the structure. Of all the different teams who’ve tried this, it might come as no surprise to teachers to learn that children are the most creative and had the most fun with the challenge.

Teachers and students of all ages may want to consider starting toward the back of the book with the chapter “Move Fast, Break Things.” This chapter is particularly useful for educators who want to reframe how they envision brainstorming, or turn their classrooms into fruitful idea labs.

Quoting Henry Ford, Seelig reiterates: “Failure is only the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.”

For many schools across the country, today marks the first day of a new year. In addition to thinking about tools that help boost educators’ teaching practice, this moment might be a good time to pull back and think about some big-picture ideals, too. Here are a few to consider.

1.   INFUSE PASSION INTO LEARNING.

Nine Tenets of Passion-Based Learning. Educators who focus on integrating kids’ own interests and passions into the curriculum will see them flourish as learners. Educators can think about integrating such practices as showing relevance of what students are studying to life outside school, connecting with parents, and using digital media as a way to spark interests and spreading ideas.

2.   TRY SOMETHING NEW.

Jumping Into the 21st Century. For both veteran educators and newbies, the temptation to stick to what’s acceptable and what’s been done is hard to overcome. Educator Shelley Wright talks about how she took the plunge and redesigned the entire structure of her teaching practice. Her goal? “Changing to a student-centered, skill-based, technology embedded classroom,” she says.

3.   CONSIDER THE FLIPPED CLASSROOM MODEL. 

The Flip: Why I love It, How I Use It. Educator Shelley Wright shares why she’s decided to flip her classroom. “I don’t believe in assigning videos every night as a substitute for my own lecturing. To me, that’s simply the traditional classroom rearranged, not flipped. I use the flip when my students need to absorb a few chunks of new information to continue learning. I don’t use it to front-load information at the beginning of a unit. I think that can rob students of the experience of authentically building knowledge and skills as they encounter new concepts. I use flip time to create curiosity in my students.”

4.   TAP INTO STUDENTS’ IDEAS.

How to Turn Your Classroom Into an Idea Factory. Design thinking isn’t just for engineers and designers. It can be applied to every aspect of learning — from generating ideas to the iteration and execution phase. Here’s how educators can foster innovation in the classroom.

5.   CONSIDER THE FUTURE SCHOOL DAY.

The School Day of the Future is Designed. “It’s not too big of a leap to want the school day designed around notions of how we naturally, and individually, learn,” writes Sandy Speicher of IDEO. “Designing the day around discovery of information, connections to real world challenges, discussions digging into our experiences with the world. Here are some examples of how futuristic scenarios are actually happening now.”

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By Aran Levasseur

Innovation is the currency of progress. In our world of seismic changes, innovation has become a holy grail that promises to shepherd us through these uncertain and challenging times. And there isn’t a more visible symbol of innovation than the iPad. It’s captured the hearts and minds of disparate subcultures and organizations.

In education it’s been widely hailed as a revolutionary device, promising to transform education as we know it. Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as bulk purchasing iPads and deploying them into the wilds of education. Innovation can’t be installed. It has to be grown — and generally from the margins.

The profusion of digital technology at work, home and everywhere in between is evident to even the most causal observer. In this climate, it’s understandable why many schools are interested in technological integration and innovation. While it seems clear that students will increasingly be expected to be adept at using digital tools in their professional and personal lives, there isn’t great clarity on how exactly these tools should be used. Often visions and goals are nebulous — if they exist at all. We can’t just buy iPads (or any device), add water, and hope that strategy will usher schools to the leading edge of 21st century education. Technology, by itself, isn’t curative. Human agency shapes the path.

In light of this dynamic, two critical questions need to be asked and provisionally answered when integrating technology into education. The first question, while obvious at first glance, isn’t always fully articulated: “What are the educational goals of technology integration?”

The second question is equally important and often more elusive: “Do the current systems and processes support the integrative and innovative goals?”

Adapting Teaching To Technology

The answer to the first question — about the goals of technology integration — often orbits around 21st century skills. The problem is that most of the curriculum within schools today is distinctly tied to the 20th century. The first phase of technology integration usually focuses on the transition from an analog to a digital environment, but after that happens, the use of technology raises deeper pedagogical questions.

The best schools throughout history prepared their students for the social and economic realities of their time. Our system of universal education was designed to meet the social and economic needs of the industrial revolution, which was defined by a world of standardization. While the industrial revolution has been added to the annals of history, our system of education has not.

The social and economic world of today and tomorrow require people who can critically and creatively work in teams to solve problems. Technology widens the spectrum of how individuals and teams can access, construct and communicate knowledge. Education, for the most part, isn’t creating learners along these lines. Meanwhile, computers are challenging the legitimacy of expert-driven knowledge, i.e., of the teacher at the front of the classroom being the authority. All computing devices — from laptops to tablets to smartphones — are dismantling knowledge silos and are therefore transforming the role of a teacher into something that is more of a facilitator and coach.

This isn’t to say that teachers are becoming obsolete. Great teachers are needed now more than ever. But what it means to be a teacher and student is changing — as it has throughout history. The main point is that technology is helping to drive a pedagogical change, and schools need to be mindful of this influence and thoughtful of how they’d like to facilitate this transition. This is why linking technology to learning objectives is so important. Otherwise, schools could find themselves in a position where the cart (technology) is before the horse (pedagogy).

Does Our Current System Support Innovation?

Answers to the second question (Do the current systems and processes support the integrative and innovative goals?) are rarely offered because the question is seldom asked.

The organization of schools — their systems, processes and values — were deliberately designed to accomplish specific objectives. Departments, 50-minute classes, bells, rows of desks, lectures, textbooks, standardized tests, and grades are all aspects of schools’ organizational structure that were conceived to train students in the image of industrial society. Within this model, standardization and mass production rule supreme.

The systems and values of industrial education were not designed with innovation and digital tools in mind. Innovation, whether it’s with technology, assessment or instruction, requires time and space for experimentation and a high tolerance for uncertainty. Disruption of established patterns is the modus operandi of innovation. We like the fruits of innovation, but few of us have the mettle to run the gauntlet of innovation.

Innovation from the Margins

Because integration and innovation with technology can be so disruptive to established systems, innovation is more likely to take root if it is grown on the margins. The margin can be a small percentage of class time that’s carved out each week for experimentation, or it can be a technology incubator designed to function beyond the conventional boundaries of school systems.

Wherever the appropriate margin is identified for technological innovation, the climate within the margin needs to be such that teachers and students are supported in exploring the edges of uncertainty. This is critical because uncertainty and experimentation are perceived as a waste of time within the current model because there is curriculum that needs to be covered and tests that need to be taken within a prescribed schedule. One can’t begin to have more time and space for innovating in class unless one loosens the reigns on traditional objectives and creates more flexibility and leverage within classrooms and schools.

This is easier said than done. To varying degrees we’ve all come through the traditional model of education that has trained us to seek certainty. Combine that with the fact that we are wired to look for negative information — and uncertainty would definitely fit into the negative category for most of us — and we have a compound society that is increasingly risk averse. Yet without taking risks, we can’t have breakthroughs.

Learning environments of the future are in incubation. And therein lies the challenge: Learning environments that don’t exist can’t be analyzed. Moving into the unknown requires a pioneering spirit. Helen Keller reminds us that is the truth of not only our age, but of all ages: “Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.”

Aran Levasseur taught middle school history and science for five years, where he integrated technology into his classes to enhance his teaching and student learning and is currently the Academic Technology Coordinator at San Francisco University High School. You can follow him @fusionjones on Twitter.

This post originally appeared on MediaShift, which covers the intersection of media and technology. Follow @PBSMediaShift for Twitter updates, or join us on Facebook.

In groups called Action Collabs, they’ll tackle big-picture questions like how to help teachers influence and have impact on learners, how to create opportunities to learn for students who are pushed out of formal education space, and how to create alternatives for certification as a way to expand education and career opportunities.

Some of the scheduled speakers include Sugata Mitra, professor of education technology at Newcastle University, who installed an Internet-connected PC in a New Delhi slum and watched how kids learned how to use it on their own and to teach each other; Stephen Breslin of Futurelab, a U.K.-based nonprofit that finds innovative uses of technology to support systemic change in education; and Christopher Rush, of New York’s School of One, which has revolutionized the traditional classroom model.

Participants will also have access to hands-on workshops that demonstrate how to use technologies in the classroom, organized by KQED’s Education Network.

Big Ideas Fest, held Dec.5-8 at the Ritz Carlton in Half Moon Bay, is organized by ISKME, the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education, a research institute that develops research-based innovations, and facilitates field building to improve knowledge sharing.

MindShift will be there to cover the event and is honored to co-sponsor the Media Lounge, where participants attendees can share their ideas through multimedia platforms. Look forward to seeing you there!

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Notebook funds charity

Design thinking is not just for professional designers. Anyone, including high school students, can find a way to apply creative problem-solving skills to important social problems.

And that’s the point of School: By Design, as reported by Good’s Allison Arieff.  The youth-mentoring program, initatied by Design Ignites Change challenges high-schoolers in underserved communities to redesign their schools with the help of college or professional design mentors.

Their objective is to design a sustainable school — but with an expanded definition of the word “sustainable.”  “In this program, ‘sustainability’ will extend beyond customary notions of green design and eco-friendliness, to the more meaningful aspects of cultural, social and economic sustainability,” the site explains.

The winning high school wins $10,000 to be implemented toward their dream school. Deadline for registration is Dec. 31, 2010.

Those who want to help fund the prize can invest in this notebook, created by Mohawk Loop, which will donate 100% of the proceeds to the program.