Showing posts with label creativity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label creativity. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 18, 2021

Bring Your own Argument






















We have a pandemic problem with dialog.

People state opinions as absolute facts, and they argue facts emotionally as if they were opinions.

We need a new set of rules around dialog, a new paradigm.

Perhaps if both sides of a dialectic conversation where facts are questioned and opinions are conflicting were to step back from their side to critically analyze what is "right" about the other side's facts, and what of their opinions can be agreed upon, a newly articulated and stronger position could be assumed in the debate. It would also undoubtedly be one that would be more readily accepted by the "other side" owing to the fact that much of the newly assumed position would have originated there.

In my experience personally and professionally I have witnessed dialog turn completely toxic so many times owing to unsophisticated thinking regarding the other side. What, in nearly every case should have been a generative and collaborative discussion with a singular and purposeful agenda to "win" the issue as opposed to "win" the argument, turns into a complete deviation from that. The righteous agenda to discuss an issue purposefully with the intent to improve the reality of the issue being discussed is completely lost at that point.

We're living in a world that is advancing faster than our ability to keep up. We're forced to deal with complex problems revolving around evolution and progress a lot these days. Oftentimes when we come up with something brilliant, it appears to create a cascade of unforeseen challenges that we didn't anticipate. The inception of smart phones and how using them correlated with a sharp increase in mental health and social problems among users is a simple and obvious example.

 Look Both Directions Sign - R15-8, SKU: X-R15-8

Saturday, April 11, 2020

A Real Emergency in Education- Crisis As Opportunity...

Let's face it, to some people everything is an emergency.

A Chinese symbol for crisis is made up of two parts:
danger and opportunity…
                                    _
Crisis as Opportunity (wéi ji) 

Danger – originally pictured as a man on the edge of a precipice
Opportunity – a reminder of the seemingly small but important opportunity that can come out of danger

There is controversy surrounding the symbol above and its interpreted meaning, but that's for other people to worry about. For the sake of the point I'm making, I believe as interpreted, the idea behind the meaning of the symbol above is very important. How it's further interpreted in practice is exponentially more important.

A Taoist story tells of an old man who accidentally fell into the river rapids leading to a high and dangerous waterfall. Onlookers feared for his life. Miraculously, he came out alive and unharmed downstream at the bottom of the falls. People asked him how he managed to survive. "I accommodated myself to the water, not the water to me. Without thinking, I allowed myself to be shaped by it. Plunging into the swirl, I came out with the swirl. This is how I survived."
Emergencies are often what we make of them. 

I can't tell you how many times I've had to address the emergent situation that someone dared to park in someone else's regular parking spot in our staff parking lot. 
e·mer·gen·cy
/əˈmərjənsē/
noun
  1. a serious, unexpected, and often dangerous situation requiring immediate action.

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Take class(room) action...

flickr image via jbj

I believe in the power of action research. Initiatives often start in one direction but end up going in a completely different direction and we sometimes view this as a failure, but within the context of action research, this shift in focus is often a good indicator of progress. Some are uncomfortable with the intangibility of this, but I like it. I like to think of the action research process as a cyclical path that puts to use the five R's: reflect, retool, recalibrate, reframe and refocus. These elements are key to keeping a project dynamic and malleable, but at the same time focused and purposeful in the effort to support quality teaching and learning. 

My Alberta teaching colleague, Greg Miller (@millerg6) recently shared this video... 


The author in the video is Dylan Williams. He writes about assessment in schools; the virtues of formative assessment in particular. I agree with his message that the power of reform in schools lies mainly in teachers. There are many camps within education reform, but without getting into the debate about which one is most correct, I just want to draw attention to the fact that the single common denominator in any teaching reform effort is teachers. As individuals, and even more powerfully and effectively in collaborative groups, teachers have a distinct and brilliant education reform platform to work from because together, they are immersed daily within classrooms and schools. 

Useful feedback loops don't occur in isolation. The collective intelligence of a group will always provide a depth of feedback from different perspectives and bases of knowledge that help steer the research ship purposefully from informed and diverse perspectives. Action research is an exciting process with the power to inform, but also an under-utilized tool when teachers don't talk to each other. To leverage the power to do things better, teachers should embrace the action research process and initiate their own local, classroom-based projects designed to improve what they do. Sharing the results of this research with other teachers allows them to learn from our experiences also which essentially streamlines their reflective process in the event they choose to conduct similar research; it's the edu-conomy of scale in action.

Collaborative education reform is powerful. Action research is a collaborative process. Much can be accomplished in better, faster and cheaper ways when we put our heads together in education. Teachers have skills, knowledge, and experience, but don't utilize them often enough to challenge each other; to step outside the box and do things differently in search of doing things better. Why should they? Because taking a different perspective or direction typically leads to greater insight, learning from mistakes and improved practice if we keep an open mind. Action research provides a conduit for stepping outside the box; making ourselves vulnerable together in the name of learning how to teach better and support kids better. 

When we fail to plan, we plan to fail. Of course, this is true for research as it is for anything, however, I would also say that when we fail to adjust a plan, the plan is doomed to fail. The nature of action research is to adjust. The action in action research includes adjusting plans according to real time data and feedback that the research is providing. It's a participatory and collaborative process that works well when those involved understand the value of the five R's of good action research. 

Reflection is looking back to empower learning forward. In research, it's learning from mistakes by being honest about our process and willing to take a critical perspective. Re-tooling is the natural selection process in research; the ability after reflection to recognize that something isn't working, and then make re-calibrating changes to the research design or process. Re-framing is the process of creating an adjusted context for the research that reflects the new responsive process that reflecting and re-tooling has resulted in. Re-focusing is the product of distributed leadership within the group; a willingness from all sides to embrace and value the new or adjusted research direction. The five R's of action research are responsive strategies that allow us to function as classroom-based researchers understanding that all is not lost if the organic nature of teaching and learning causes (as it nearly always does) a deviation from the original classroom-based research plan.

Of course it's very important for teachers to stay abreast of current pure research, but in reality, teachers in the classroom are often distanced somewhat from the basic research that occurs at universities to increase understanding of fundamental pedagogical principles. They are consumed with the application of these principles as presented through various forms of professional development as new ideas and ways of thinking about education come online. Perhaps participating in collaborative action (applied) research projects while doing the great work teachers do in the classroom every day is a way to bridge ideas, theories and principles with real-time action to test their validity. Participatory action research is how this can be done, and it often, if not always can be done for little or no cost in dollars and cents, but it does require the will of people to get together and spend some human capital.

What will your next action research project entail?


Monday, July 11, 2011

Unfolding- Classrooms emerging from a platform of creativity

Sunday, February 27, 2011

Fundamental EduKare... balance and adaptabilty

flickr photo by Tom Hilton

Earlier this month I attended the annual Alberta Initiative for School Improvement (AISI) Conference. The purpose of the AISI Conference is to showcase a wide variety of Education Department-funded action research projects from all over the province. It was evident that a large number of teachers in Alberta take being involved in embedded action research within their schools very seriously... a good thing. A colleague pointed out to me today as we reflected on our experiences at the conference that although he was undoubtedly impressed by the broad range of research and results teachers were experiencing, each project was contextualized locally according to the needs, goals and environment surrounding it. We agreed that some of the projects were so specific and specialized that they simply wouldn't be adaptable in different situations. This is a problem that EduKare seeks to solve.

Large scale system transformation efforts must be grounded in foundational philosophical elements so the integrity of the process is transferable from school to school. They have to possess universal qualities allowing them to find balance by adapting to unique school contexts. Two fundamental systems quality attributes of an EduKare environment are flexibility and adaptability. If EduKare is to scale effectively in different school environments, it has to be able to fit different environmental school contexts. EduKare schools must demonstrate that they routinely balance their priorities toward providing services to address locally identified social, emotional, physical and educational needs, and they also must display adaptability with respect to addressing these needs in their unique social, physical and political environments.

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

There are no borders in the mind of a child...

flickr photo via satguru

"What if" ... I love to say these words. Saying these words takes me back to the days of carefree childhood where everything was possible, limited only by the bounds of my creativity. These two words, and whatever they are followed with, make up every bit of future we create; good and bad. This is the most creativity inspiring phrase I know.

A child's mind is a world without borders where all is shared... kids are so mindful, so attuned to their limitless imagination... sharing their thoughts with each other seems an automatic response. Kids just blurt out whatever is on their mind when they play their 'make believe' games. Just watch a group of kids playing sometime so they don't notice you... every bit of good, and every bit of bad is ultimately shared with the group; it's brilliant. They all benefit from each other's wonderment, but also by sharing their pain, frustration, confusion or any other negative element of their thoughts. The bad stuff ultimately gets distributed to the point of dilution... each member of the group takes on a bit of the pain so nobody has to endure it all, and then, with their minds in overdrive, they begin to construct the next bit of fun.

Imagine this... what if there were no borders in the real world? Perceive a world where we all benefit from good, and where bad is diluted through shared distribution so nobody has to tackle it alone... a world without borders. Some may dismiss this as pie-in-the-sky ideology, but at the risk of altruism, just think about it for a bit.

I have thought about this so many times. We could share all the good, all the richness of each other's newly exposed wonders. At the same time we could dilute those debilitating elements of the real world like poverty, conflict, hunger etc, understanding that sharing the bad allows us to take collective responsibility for all of it... to spread it so thin that its effect is neutralized.... increase good, dilute bad. 

If the adult citizens of the world could tap into their childhood mentality (something we seem so sadly to lose as we get older and begin to believe we can control things by creating limits and borders) the entire human race would benefit from a consciousness that produces a mindful distribution of all that is good, and a willful watering down of all that is bad. It seems to me that when we draw lines in our mind, we are immediately stifled; possibilities are lost. When we draw lines on a map, the same thing happens... we become geographically stifled, less willing to learn from others; to experience their culture and everything good within it, and less confronted by the ills that plague others until we become comfortably ignorant inside our own teflon-wrapped section of our world.

The world is growing and shrinking at the same time. Through technology advances and our growing ability to access every corner of the divided-up world, we are presented with glorious opportunities to harvest consciousness and be more attuned to each other's purpose, which ultimately reduces the perceived distance between us. The cyber-world is much more child-like than I think we even realize... open-source technology is very much like the open-source thinking of children- it's natural; it's an automatic response to the world's desire to know and share information, challenges and ideas... and it's limited only by the bounds of our imagination.

The only thing holding us back from an open-source world are the borders we've created to close it... arguably an act of human nature that has precipitated a lion's share of our world's conflict and pain since the beginning of time. Like so many other lessons we become blind to with age, if we could reacquire the unfettered and border-less nature of children's thought, perhaps the borders of our adult world would become more open, and far less damaging.

Friday, April 9, 2010

If You Believe It, You'll See It

flickr CC image via Cessna 206

Perspective is everything. The lens we look through is the difference between success and failure, courage and fear, positive and negative... the difference between everything as we see it with our own eyes, minds and feelings.

"I'll believe it when I see it" is such a common statement we make. What if we adjusted the statement to say "I'll see it because I believe it?" I'm not so naive to think that we can will things into being simply by believing in them, but can it hurt? Dewitt Jones (...watch the video preview), the acclaimed National Geographic photographer and world-renowned speaker is on to something with this concept. Just like I'll believe it when I see it,  perhaps believe it and then you'll see it will become cliche, but if so, it will be because the wisdom of this point of view is so timeless and true that we'll become desensitized to the message. How can something so simple be meaningful, right? Wrong... we need to heed simple maxims like this one because they help us boil things down to their purest form- the place where clear perspective comes from.

The odds that something we desire will happen increase exponentially when we can picture that desire in our minds; envision it happening... how it will look, sound and feel once realized. We should all take a serious look at how we perceive what we want before it happens.

I think what we want will then begin to happen more often.

.

Monday, March 8, 2010

Calling All Experts- What is Authentic Learning?

flickr CC image via mzagor

Learning should be an organic, concentric process, not a linear one. The world surrounds us; it's not a point to point path. However, our education system is set up as a from here to there journey- not a great reflection of the broader world we are a part of. Enter authentic learning.

There is a debate brewing over what authentic learning looks, sounds and feels like, I just know it. I'm hearing people make reference to the term, but I'm not sure if people know what it means. I'm not even sure if I know what it means. I have my point of view on the concept, but I haven't actually heard a definitive explanation. Sad it would be if the potential value of what authentic learning has to offer kids were to be diminished as a result of teachers bantering the term about without actually creating authentic learning in their classrooms. (Reminds me of what's happened with PLC's. Alarmingly, many teachers claim to be involved within a professional learning community, but they have no idea what Richard DuFour intended that to actually mean... I know because I've asked them.)

So what is an authentic learning environment? Here's some examples of what I think an authentic learning environment might look, sound or feel like:
  • Kids who go home at the end of the day and do homework that I didn't assign, but that is totally related to what we did in class that day
  • Unit and lesson plans that adjust for the unforeseen possibilities that crop up in an organic learning environment (a.k.a. teachers who aren't slaves to their well-thought out plans for instruction; those that think on their feet)
  • Evaluation and assessment practices that reflect student's progress against his/her personal goals and aspirations, and that are relative to where the student jumped off at the beginning of the learning journey
  • Learning activities that provide multiple formats and opportunities to display learning
  • Learning that stimulates all modalities; that draws the whole person into the process... there's more to learning than just what we see with our eyes and hear with our ears
  • Learning in three dimensions (can you say paperless teaching?)
  • Kids suggesting what we should do next in whatever class to extend the learning objective we just met
  • Parents knowing what their kids are doing at school because the kids are so darned excited that they can't wait to tell them every day
  • Teaching and learning that understands we are emotional beings; that we need to reach people on personal levels before we can reach them on cognitive levels (and that by doing so, we can go so much further in the cognitive domain)
  • Teaching that exploits all degrees and variations of student strengths without apology with the understanding that there is no limit to what can be learned
  • Teaching from a perspective that doesn't recognize or validate failure, only relative degrees of success
  • Teaching that utilizes various forms of technology as critical tools toward creating authentic learning when the lived experience isn't possible (field trip to the moon)
  • Teaching and learning that incorporates the fine arts and physical movement into all learning activities as opposed to the traditional practise of conducting classes for these as separate 'subjects'
  • Teaching and learning that incorporates the issues, challenges, contexts and mysteries that the broader world provides
  • Teaching and learning that perceives mistakes as critical and valuable elements within the process of searching for understanding
  • Teaching and learning that accepts the connectivity we enjoy in our global environment not as a novelty, but a necessity
  • Teaching and learning that exudes creativity and takes risks understanding that the two mixed together equal opportunity 
OK you experts, how am I doing? I swear I have not looked up authentic learning on Wikipedia, nor have I done research anywhere else on the topic whatsoever. I'm just throwing this out there hoping I'm close to the mark because I sure like the thought of teaching in a class that looks, sounds and feels like what I describe.

Sunday, March 7, 2010

Beliefs- Creativity, Curiosity, Innovation and Imagination

I believe that creativity, curiosity, innovation, and imagination are the benchmarks of vision and problem solving.
flickr CC image via fotologic

In an era of building discontent regarding the state of education in North America, questions about how best to solve our educational problems abound. The vast majority of responsible, hard-working and talented teachers would agree that creativity, curiosity, innovation and imagination are words that describe the sort of positive elements they strive to nurture in their classroom environments working with kids, so it strikes me as ironic that we are so quiet whe it comes to nurturing these elements within the broader professional contexts we work within (curriculum, discipline, assessment, professional development, etc.)

Education reform should not be a linear process. On the contrary, reforming education will work best as an organic, concentric process that does not ever reach a state of quiescence. The common center relative to this concentric model of perpetual improvement is the goal to develop people who will be smarter, healthier and more creative than we are. The children we work with are our gifts for the future, and it is so important that we package them carefully. In order to do this effectively, teachers need to mirror the way they contribute to the education reform process with the creative, curious, innovative and imaginative approaches they exemplify in their classrooms.

Teachers are undoubtedly naturally poised to lead the charge at the front of education change. The exempliary skills they display in their classrooms that have become somewhat latent in the broader context of the profession, (a result of years of transactional departmental control over what they do as professionals,) will need to emerge. To solve the problems we're confronted with in our profession, teachers will need to establish collective vision toward the foreseeable preferred future, but they will also need to grasp the concept that we can only see so far into the future; that the target is a moving one that requires a re-tooling process, a constant re-focusing of our perspective regarding how we will package our gifts. A new culture of change invites us.
"To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating."         Henri Bergson
Creativity, curiosity, innovation, and imagination will be the benchmarks that ground our evolving vision and solution focused perspective toward the problems (challenges) that confront us.

Stay tuned.

Saturday, February 13, 2010

Education Reform- How then shall we be led?

flickr CC image via bpende

**With the utmost respect, and in response to Aaron Eyler's "Some Things Educators Need to Stop Saying" post (Synthesizing Education Blog) 

With all due respect, (and I don't necessarily disagree with you,) there are many professionals among us who aren't as attuned to the realities of education reform that you allude to. The terminology, (rhetoric as you refer to it,) educators are using to attempt to make sense of the change going on around them is just that; terminology.

I personally appreciate your honesty, and I get the "good fun" element of your post, but in all seriousness, I think you illuminate a much larger and complicated issue in education. You refer to the transparency and lack of substance of statements such as "who wants to leave a child behind?" I agree; this is a feeble statement, however I also believe that our agreement on the feebleness of this statement would not be shared wholely by the rest of the audience who heard it. Here's the rub: teachers NEED to be led. Many, many teachers buy into this sort of 'rhetoric' because our North American education system has left them feeling powerless to think for themselves, be creative and serve their students instinctually. The focus on externally placed standards of practice and curriculum in North America has become so pervasive that teachers have literally lost the ability to think for themselves, and even worse, lost the priveledge of sharing their professional insight with the continental institution of educational planning and policy-making that assigns these controls.

So, although I agree with your tongue-in-cheek commentary on the educational version of stating the obvious, (the 'child-centered classroom' is another favorite of mine,) I really believe that teachers latch onto these statements hanging on for dear life because they have been left feeling under-valued, controlled and manipulated to the point where any statement about education perceived to be well-meaning and designed to influence thought and perspective becomes popular.

I also wholeheartedly agree that it's time to just get on with things in education. However, to do this, a revised form of leadership would suit the task. I share your fondness for integrative thinking, and honestly (perhaps simplistically) this concept is where we need to begin. There have been many reforms, statements, programs, catch-phrases and movements in education... not all of these were, or are unsound. What we need to do is combine what has been good for education in the past with the best of what forward-thinking educators can come up with today, and design our own destiny.

This is possible.

Friday, January 22, 2010

Control...

flickr CC image via ms. Tea

Uncontrolled Thoughts on Control:

Students don't often fit very well into the assessment categories we have established. They develop at their own pace, reach milestones on their terms and hold a perspective that is theirs alone and impossible for us to decipher, yet when we are pressed to evaluate their progress, we do so in comparison to benchmark standards that we as educators have subjectively designated.

When educators prescribe standards of achievement that target a classic Gaussian Probability Distribution, or bell curve outcome, we are essentially rejecting the quantum possibilities that originate within the standard deviations that fall outside the curve.

Virtually any black swan event in history that I'm aware of originated outside the curve, so to speak. Genuinely earth shattering ideas don't often originate somewhere in the mean.

Perhaps in our quest for ultimate control over student outcomes, we have actually lost control... that is, any amount that may have been within our grasp in the realm of learning and its infinite possibilities.
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