Creativity and the artist/crafter/mistaker

Ken Robinson asks, in the TED talk embedded at the end of this post, why don't we teach children dancing everyday, the same way we teach them mathematics? I am going to make posters from this, that's how much I love what I see embedded into this question.

You see, I agree with his basic argument, that creativity is a skill, or an orientation, or a collection of attributes, that we need to teach just as much as we need to teach literacy and numeracy. One of the things that makes it hard, though, is the fact that people think that creativity is a kind of a gift that some people have and others do not.

Wrong. You only have to watch young children playing in sandpits to realise that the capacity for imagination and creativity can be found in all of us. I mean, what is there to get excited about in sand? But when you have a truck and can create a city (or a farm or a spaceship) - then sand is fun.

I was thinking about the key things that keep me creative, and that I think helped me when I was growing up. I blame books, a lot, but also having plenty of quiet time away from other people. I might not have internalised all the lessons about cooperation, but I learned how to entertain myself. I got to try things out and make mistakes - and that's there in the title.

Now that I am a teacher, I've worked hard to find ways to encourage creativity. I model it, by bringing in projects that I have been working on or talking about something that I have tried recently. If I finish a sewing project that I am pleased with I will bring it in and show it off - and talk about what went wrong and how I fixed it. I talk about the whole body and start senior physics classes with a few minutes of yoga or stretching. I have a whole unit in junior science about playing round with diy and everyday materials. I encourage students to use interpretative dance to present ideas (ideal for waves).

But I find that I am fighting all the time to incorporate creativity and learning about creativity. I want to make it like metacognition, a thing I slip in all the time. Perhaps I should start thinking about it that way.

And, finally, the TED talk that sparked all this in the first place. Here's Ken Robinson, kicking it old school about creativity and schooling:

Fashion or refashion?

I am usually all about the upcycling, refashioning, and general diy goodness. My current example is a project I am going to try in the spring - growing plants in a converted pallet, as in this post from Life on the Balcony. Doesn't it look awesome?

Just so that there is some educational link (aside from my daughter growing strawberries and cherry tomatoes), the Horticulture teacher is going to try with one class while the Horticulture block is being upgraded and therefore unavailable for her usual beds. This is a clear example of how my google reader provides useful and practical ideas that I actually use.

But the real topic of this post is to talk about fashion, and was prompted by a conversation with my Y13 class. I was introducing the idea that I had made a presentation (embedded below) and that I expected them to watch the presentation themselves and then bring their questions to class for clarification and extension, tutorial style. So far, so good, right?

But I said that there were fashions in education, in the sense that teachers follow trends in education, just like other trends. Someone has a genius idea and then people trial it and riff off it and it spreads. My students snorted, and when I asked them why, they said that all their experience of teaching was that it was pretty much all the same, and the differences came down to the style of the teacher, not the fashion or trend of the moment. These students have been at this school for over six years now, so I was pretty intrigued by this. Do they really have teachers who are still stuck in the educational equivalent of Paris Hilton as a fashion icon? (apparently, 2003 was also the year of cargo pants, monograms and Chinese embroidery)

I don't claim to be at the leading edge of educational trends and ideas, but I know my teaching tools and techniques change over time. One of the things I am playing with now is the idea of presenting lecture material online, to give students more time for talking and tutorials in class. I'm starting out with some presentations on present.me and then perhaps some video of me doing worked mathematical examples on the board. The Horticulture teacher is planning to do videos of practical skills, and the Chemistry and Biology teachers are investigating what's going to be best for their presentations.

It's interesting stuff. Is it fashionable? Probably, but it's interesting and educational. I'm enjoying the experimentation. Anyway, here is the presentation - NCEA level 3, all about Simple Harmonic Motion:



Or you can go and watch it, on present.me

Causing mayhem - cognitive conflict

In senior Physics, at least, I rarely have trouble causing cognitive conflict. My students are in an almost perpetual state of cognitive conflict. They barely have a few moments of blissful security before I start asking questions that get them to look at how their existing understanding is too simple and full of misunderstandings.

In junior Science, however, getting students to that point of cognitive conflict can be difficult to achieve. There is nothing so disheartening as discovering that your students have absorbed all the new learning, but not jettisoned all their old beliefs. Students are capable of holding seven contradictory thoughts before breakfast, let alone their contradictory thoughts about the structure of plastics.

I have been working hard to get students to recognise that they are in cognitive conflict, not just be in cognitive conflict, do a bit of mental gymnastics, and assimilate the contradictions into a dual view of the world.

This isn't new, I know, but I have just come across it again recently. When I am working with students at a high level - getting students to predict, or make generalisations, or evaluate ideas - then students can't help but change ideas. It's something to do with the extended abstract thinking, at that top level of SOLO taxonomy, that makes contradictions untenable.

I use SOLO taxonomy in a relatively limited way in my junior classes. They are definitely embedded in the learning outcomes, and our whole department is working on increasing metacognition in our students. Now that I've thought about this link between cognitive conflict, high level thinking on the SOLO taxonomy and real change in thinking, I am going to have to think more about how to extend this.

Reflection! Fun times.

Google docs and collaboration

Our school changed to GoogleApps for our email last year. Bundled with that are GoogleDocs and a bunch of other apps. We've been using the Calendar, and it's been awesome, but I have learned that many teachers haven't even opened their GoogleDocs, much less used them. I am aghast. Aghast, I say.

I love GoogleDocs. I have been using them for a long time for writing and sharing with friends, and so I think they have a lot of potential to be awesome in the classroom too.

One day, I will write a really thorough blog post about a way that my students used GoogleDocs to collaborate in a constructive and constructionist way. I sometimes need to remember that it's not a huge mission to set up simple collaboration - and if I need reminding, I am certain my colleagues need reminding too.

It gets different

Here's the thing, I've never been bullied for being queer. I've been bullied for other things, but not for that. Oh, and there was the time someone wrote "Mrs Cooper is a dyke" in pencil on my classroom door (ridiculous, since all the students know I'm not married), but as a kid? Nope. I guess there were enough other things about which to bully and ridicule me without having to guess about that.

But I recognise that queerness is an important facet of bullying and victimisation in schools in Aotearoa New Zealand. Hearing 'gay' and 'fag' used as put-downs, the subtle heterosexism that prevails in books and classrooms, it all can add up to making queer - gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual, genderqueer, asexual, questioning and so on - young people feel invisible. Feel worthless and marginalised. Feel unsafe.

The It Gets Better project is designed to combat this with the thought that things change. You grow up, other people grow up, and you can change your life. Which is great, and I am certainly a different, more confident person now.

I was reading Karen Healey's livejournal post on the matter this morning, and so much of what she said resonated with me.

Every day, I worry that a student in my classes or at my school is being bullied or victimised and I am not seeing it or doing anything about it. I'm missing the signs, or the student is too scared to tell anyone, or, worse, I am seeing it and not realising how serious it is. Every day, I worry that I won't be able to do something positive for a student who is being bullied. I worry that I am not enough of a positive role model, that being out and living my life is not enough. I worry that the systems I work in will fail students, and that will feel like I have failed them. I worry that I'm not hard enough on students who are casually homophobic, cruel or abusive. I worry, I worry, I worry.

So, I do some small things. I am out, to start with. I am openly bisexual. I have zero tolerance to 'gay', 'homo' and other homophobic language. I use examples with queer people in them - it's hard, given that I teach science, but not impossible. I try. I try to get the Guidance Counsellor to get me posters that highlight sexuality acceptance, and I put them up with my Quit Smoking posters. If I know there are students who are having a hard time, or who are high risk, I put more effort into having a positive and encouraging relationship with them. Sometimes, these students come to talk to me about whatever is worrying them, and I take the time to listen.

But I still worry.

Does it get better?

Well, yeah. For me, it did. For my students, I hope it will get better too.

Slime and fear factor

Slime is one of my favourite things, and I am delighted that I have a unit which requires me to make it this year. Fear Factor is going to be an awesome unit, I can tell already. The cleaners are going to kill me, though, for the amount of paint and glue and gloop we managed to get on the floor yesterday.

Anyway, it turns out that the high grade PVA we get here in NZ is not the same thing as Elmer's glue. Who knew? I am disappointed, because it means that our slime is not quite the same thing as I expected, based on the instructional video I found.

One of the things I like best about teaching science is that, if first we don't succeed, we can just try again. The lab technician and I spent a happy hour making various concoctions - sometimes, I am sure I didn't grow out of making mud pies, I am just more purposeful about it now. Anyway, we came up with two possible recipes:

40mL PVA glue
10 - 15 mL acrylic paint
approx 5g borax

Sprinkle the borax onto the glue and paint mix and mix thoroughly. If it is too sticky, try moving it to another person who has clean hands, or add more borax if that doesn't work

This gives a beautiful, shiny putty that is charmingly elastic and doesn't stick to your hands too much.

We also made a slime that is quite lightweight and frothy.

1/2 cup PVA glue
few drops of food colouring
1/2 cup water
2 heaped Tbs borax

Mix all ingredients in a tip top container. The PVA will curdle and the borax will feel grainy, but just keep mixing until it starts to coalesce. This will make a firm, frothy slime that sticks to your hands rather more than classic slime.

We plan to mix grated polystyrene into the second slime and make sculptures. We expect that they will set nicely if left on a windowsill for a couple of days.

Anyway, the science that we are teaching along with this is all about states of matter and things like that. I hope the students are learning something in addition to the enjoyment of slime. Next week, cornflour slime. I love me some non-newtonian fluids too.

Cyclical thinking, the midnight sun, and connecting with others

Blame my vaguely witchy version of being an athiest (which is a post for another day), but I have always loved cycles and repeating patterns. It's just gone winter solstice here and, like every year, I'm finding it hard to haul myself out of bed every morning - but at least, having celebrated the solstice, I know that better times are on the way (at least with regard to it being light when my alarm goes off).

The next unit in Year 10 Science is Amazing Adventure, where the students 'travel' around the world learning about scientific issues in different places. One of the places they visit is Oslo, in Norway. I wanted to visit Iceland, but no one would be able to reliably speak or say Reykjavik. Also, fiords are cool. It's a shame, though, because Oslo does not actually experience the midnight sun, you have to travel North for that. Right now, I am collecting first hand experiences from people who have seen the midnight sun, and also from people who live in northerly places where they experience the long winters and blinding summers. What is it like to live in a place where the cycles are so strong, compared to the fairly gentle ones we have here? I hope to set up a skype interview with a friend so that students (some, at least) can ask questions about that experience.

Anyhow, aside from the connected learning aspect, I am quite excited about this, because cycles make me happy. I love to look at the moon each night (or early morning) and track the phases. I like to celebrate the solstices and equinoxes (and I often celebrate the other Sabbats, just because). And I like to have quite a cyclical approach to my own creative process too. I think that the most interesting part, for me, will be to hear how the really strong sun cycles affect people in the northernmost portions of the world.