This week there were many interesting ideas offered up by the various speakers that we listened to and articles that we read. John Seely started off talking about the world of constant flux that we live in, and how technology has changed the half life of learning a skill from 10 years to about 5. According to Seely learning is about "creating the new, not teaching the old." He suggests that we need to rethink how we learn, and that learning is more tacit. He shows us that when people play together on online games it is like learning online in a study group. He talks about the Wow mantra - "if I'm not learning, then it ain't fun." He tells us that when users play online games (he uses the World of Warcraft as an example) players are constantly tinkering and that it is too complicated to play it without complex analysis tools and dashboards. These dashboards are nearly always handcrafted by each player and are key to masterful play. This blends tacit with cognitive learning. Wow's knowledge of the economy helps players gain and create knowledge faster. He then moves on to talk about the bigger picture - man as a knower vs man as a maker. He makes reference to Homo ludens - a highly nuanced concept of play which gives people freedom to fail and fail again without fear, where people can use their imagination and can have an epiphany where things suddenly fall into place. Learning as 'riddles' leads to reframing or re-registering of the world.
Gardner talks about 5 minds for the future - the disciplined mind the synthesizing mind, the creating mind, the respectful mind, the ethical mind and how it is imperative that we educate them. Some of the things discussed really resonated with me, especially with regard to creativity. He points out how kids "cannot think outside the box, unless there is a box to think outside." It is important that students deal with things that don't work out and keep working. This means a lot with regard to classroom learning. Students need to keep trying and working through things until they have that 'aha moment' where they feel they have grasped the concept - but how do we motivate them to do that and not give up because they are not succeeding at first? He suggests that young students (15-20 yrs old) have a very different ethical sense to teachers and some may not realize/believe that it is wrong to cheat. We need to educate them and show/model examples of good work. We need to call attention to negative examples and they should have consequences. He also goes on to talk about the fact that there is tension between respect and ethics. If someone you respect does something wrong, how do you deal with that? We need to create a school and local community atmosphere which is characterized by ethics, and then need to spread this nationally. He shows how everything is different in the digital world and so many things need to be retaught. You can be a different person online, can plagiarize easily - we as teachers need to get down to the kids level and start where they are. Out of all of the speakers I found Ken Robinson to be the most engaging. He discusses creativity and how in today's world we are not fostering that in our schools. All students have talents, but depending on what they are, they can be squandered. Our education system prioritizes subjects according to what we believe students will need to be educated in to get a job. Some subjects such as dance or theater are really on the periphery and are not seen as that important. We tend to judge students on whether they are good at those key important subjects, and if they are not then they are brushed aside or ignored. We need to educate the whole child and the idea that we should judge kids by whether they are good at the key subjects we believe are important needs to change. We need to see kids how they are. He suggests that creativity is as important as literacy and like Seely, he believes for kids to be creative they shouldn't be frightened of being wrong. The final speaker Dan Pink talks about the puzzles of motivation. This was very interesting. He talked about studies of groups being incentivized by money to complete a task more quickly but they actually took longer if the task required the use of rudimentary cognitive skills. He says there is a mismatch between what science knows and what business knows. According to these studies financial incentives can actually lead to a negative impact on overall performance. He suggests we need a new approach - intrinsic motivation. People should be paid well but given autonomy. Some companies who gave workers 24hours to work on things they were interested in came up with many creative ideas. Students should be given more freedom to work on what interests them so that they feel empowered. By doing this they may well take more risks and strive to achieve something that normally is beyond their limits. The final article I read "Can creativity be taught" was written by Louis Mobley, Director of IBM's Executive school. His insights were most interesting - he talked about how we are taught to think in a linear way but to be creative we need to think in a 'non- linear' way. Students need to get out of their comfort zone and be provided with humbling experiences to learn to be creative. When educating IBM's executives he never used books/classes/lectures, their learning involved riddles, simulations and games. In his opinion, the fastest way to become creative "is to hang out with creative people." Students need to be given permission to be wrong as every great idea grows from hundreds of bad ones. People should not be afraid to make mistakes. "Creativity requires treating the impossible as possible." We should refuse to quit and have faith. There are many takeaways from these videos and articles. The biggest thing for me was that students really to need to reach for the stars when trying to be creative and not give up. We need to encourage students when working and even if they are wrong, motivate them to keep going so that they eventually get to where they need to be & hopefully be able to think outside the box. Traditional methods of teaching are really not working - we need to recognize what students are good at, and even if it is not something traditional we need to get them to focus on that so that they can have success. We have core subjects that students need to study - is that really necessary? The world is changing so much and by the time these students graduate it will have changed significantly. Giving students freedom in my classroom to focus on the assignments that they are truly interested in seems key. Giving students choice so that what they are studying is relevant to them and resonates with them may help improve motivation and levels of creativity. In my classroom 'getting people out of their comfort zone' would involve them speaking much more in the foreign language as this is what most people struggle with. Getting students to focus on speaking and practice in a non-threatening environment could I believe improve their confidence. I often get students to do presentations in the foreign language - getting them to do more of these and giving them choices as to what they want to talk about and are interested in may help their level of engagement. Doing less book work and formalized lessons but more group activities, language games and active participation are certainly methodologies I could use to help my students be more creative. There is much food for though, and the goal posts seem to be continually moving - how do we educate today's child for tomorrow's world?
1 Comment
Caitlin Mitchell
10/22/2018 08:46:06 pm
I like how you mentioned that quote about how creativity requires us to consider the impossible as possible. It makes me think of the brain stuff that we were talking about and how when they looked at Einstein's brain that they found that his brain showed that it had certain areas that we very under- developed that actually allowed to see beyond the limits of normally mathematical concepts. We need to encourage students to consider beyond what is easily seen and unseen in a problem, like the candle problem that was spoken about.
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AuthorI am a French & Spanish teacher at Justin-Siena High School wanting to get new ideas to motivate my students. Archives
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