Committing to Creativity Part I – Rationale

The five year old proudly brings his drawing to his Kindergarten Teacher. He says “Look, I drew a purple flower!” The teacher looks it over and smiles at him. “Johnny, what a wonderful purple flower! Draw more purple flowers for me!” And he proceeds to shower her with purple flowers for days to come.

10 years later that same Johnny offers up a drawing a purple flower to his teacher. Hmm, would this teacher as likely shower him with praise and encourage him to create more for him?

In the next period, the history teacher drones on about the Civil War. Johnny raises his hand and asks, “What if the South had won the Civil War? Would we have slavery today?” The teacher watches the clock, might even like the question. Maybe she wishes that SHE had asked that question and possibly considered it in her lesson preparation. But since she felt that the question would steer her time into uncharted waters she dropped it. Instead she says to Johnny, “Interesting point but we know that the North won the Civil War don’t we? So let’s stick to the actual content.”

It’s 10 years later, the latest Mid East crisis has resulted in widespread destruction of the Saudi oil fields. The world’s economy, ill prepared for this event, grinds to a halt. Social unrest, violence, and disruption plagues all governments. The President convenes her cabinet and asks “Can we create a solution to this?”

In all of the cases above the critical variable is creativity, more specifically, creative problem solving. That is, the ability to weld right brain creative skills and properties with left brain logic and convergent thinking to synthesize what we are considering, re-work it perhaps, to come up with new, original approaches to our literacies and competencies.

The P21 framework recognizes the need for reorganizing schools’ curricula to include the expectation that students will practice and master creative problem solving.

I’d argue that if there ever were a time when we need our learners to be proficient creative problem solvers it is now. Economic downtimes, social and political upheaval, accelerating  technological change, demographic trends all combine to suggest an uncertain future and perhaps an UNpreferred future for us all unless we collaborate to recreate our now for a positive and preferred futures set for twenty first century citizens world wide.

A counter argument is that creativity can not be taught. Rather, they say, it is a skills set or attribute that is the peculiar property of a sub set of our population. On surface that may seem true. Certainly some people are more creative than others.

I’d posit that those folks well -known or known only to you, may appear more creative than others you know because for one reason or another they either took or were afforded the opportunities to practice creativity.

Would that schools would make those same opportunities for students! They don’t as a system though do they? Sure sometimes there are special teachers, or special subject areas that lend themselves more readily or openly to “permitting” creative thought and production. But do school systems, big and small, routinely and consistently require a creativity “strand” that all students must take?

The next several posts will identify and explain how we can do this.

The Education Gap of Now that Impacts the Education of the Future; Let’s Future Wheel That!

This blog is intended to equip all educators with mindsets and skills to reshape what our educational system is to what it should be against our common vision of the society it will drive. Then you read the February 9th article in the New York Times by Sabrina Tavernise and realize the depth and breadth of the challenges before us. These challenges are within our power to manage, and even transform into positives provided we are clear on our vision and clearer on our determination to get there.

Tavernise describes two studies. One that “found that a gap in standardized test scores between affluent and low-income students had grown between rich and poor children by about 40 per cent since the 1960s….”

Another describes “the imbalance between rich and poor children in college completion – the single most important predictor of success in the work force – had grown by about 50 per cent since the 1980′s.”

There are those who will argue the studies from a statistical design view and perhaps find some anomalies that dilute the message inherent in both studies. I will not because it just seems pretty evident that there is an educational gap.

Where I live, on Long Island New York, is a great example. Long Island students are among the best in the nation. Long Island students dominate the Westinghouse Intel Scholar program. About a third of all recognized high schools for their AP successes from across the nation are Nassau and Suffolk County schools.

But there is a but lying within this plaudits. Remember the young lady from Brentwood Schools (a LONG ISLAND school) who won Westinghouse recognition who wound up on The Ellen De Genares show and on several newscasts who was homeless?! She was rightfully praised for her accomplishment in the face of poverty issues that plague many districts on Long Island. She managed to seize the ring happily. However that very same school district has lost millions of dollars in state aid the past few years that would have gone to additional staff and intervention programs for their schools’ most needy and most academically challenged students.

How many Intel winners were from inner city schools?

In short these trying economic times, and a time also of changing demographics, are coming together in a not so perfect educational storm that portend dark days for educational systems not up to the reinventing challenge and darker days for their students who in fact amount to victims of poor planning and of poorer prioritization by the society who needs these very same students to flourish in so many ways.

How about a Futures Wheel now?

GAP

What do you think? How can we achieve our Preferred Futures?

Through the Looking Glass

I urge you to access this link: http://mashable.com/2012/02/03/day-of-glass.

You will be able to access a video produced by Corning Glass that talks about the Future of Touchscreen Tech.

It’s about 10 minutes long. Obviously it is a commercial about Corning Glass. And of the 10 minutes, perhaps half to two thirds are about educational applications of their research and development.

But oh, what a half or two – thirds.

I took at least two themes from viewing it this morning. One is directly linked to future schools and how they might look and related to that how teachers will need to be able to change their repertoire to accommodate and to maximize these technologies’ potential.

The other theme I took was the capacity of her students’ to engage the technology effortlessly and to incorporate it into how they were learning. For you see, the teacher was certainly not playing sage on the stage. Instead she was orchestrating or better yet, leading an educational jam session by leveraging the capacities of the technology to highly involve her students so that they could use true inquiry-process skills to construct their own learning.

The students for their part, were totally comfortable in interacting among each other and in using multi sensory  approaches to learn.

And going back to the previous two posts where we first used the Futures’ Wheel and then next, the Cross Impact Matrix futures forecasting strategies, it is fairly easy to discern the Preferable Futures that may lay ahead for schooling.

Oh but the implications for teachers and for educational leaders! Work forwards – backwards in your thinking and by the way, this is a left handed way to plant the acorn for another futures forecasting technique to be explored another day, Backwards Forecasting, and consider what Higher Education teacher training programs will need to do to re-tool how they prepare future teachers. And related to this would be how schools offer meaningful and effective Professional Development to their staff.

I don’t remember the exact numbers but someone once told me that typically corporations (perhaps in more flush times) allot 15% of their budget to research and development. In contrast school districts typically budget less than 1% of theirs to professional development.

Throw in two other factors, where school districts are scrambling to hang onto jobs let alone allocate monies for professional support, and, where what’s left of professional development is allocated to answering to the high stakes testing hysteria across the country. It is totally understandable although also lamentable that training teachers to use the kinds of technologies this video depicts and to translate these to constructivist learning that must characterize twenty first century learning is not in the front of the priority wagon train.

And Schools of Education in colleges across the nation? Are their professors trained to engage future teacher candidates in practicing and mastering the skills of using such technologies? Do they collectively recognize their moral obligation to prepare future teacher candidates to be able to skillfully embrace and practice the competencies necessary to make these practices the rule rather than the exception?

Creating Your Educational Future Means Calculating the Impacts: The Case of Goldilocks and the Three Bears

… the impacts of how the future you want may play out.

The last post was of the Futures Wheel futuring strategem. A related technique is the Cross Impact Matrix.

It is what it sounds like; call it a spreadsheet if you will. It is a device to help futurists project the probable outcomes and impacts on people, systems, or groups that could be affected by the future you are aiming for.

Let’s take up the case of Goldilocks. She has had an argument with her parents and has run away. She wanders into the forest and comes upon the the Three Bears’ house. She is curious, hungry, and tired and wants badly to go into the house. The possible futures she is considering are to enter their house or not to enter their house.

Now look at the graphic:

Goldilocks

I apologize for the quality of the graphic but I’ve no doubt you see how this works:

1. You put the probable futures under consideration along the vertical axis.

2. You put the people, groups, systems, sub-systems, premises likely to be affected by the  probable futures you are considering along the horizontal axis.

3. You, hopefully in groups, begin to fill in the boxes to show how you project how the future will impact or effect the the people, groups, systems, sub-systems, premises you have identified.

4. Doing so helps the futures-based educator to begin to plan for the consequences of the future they prefer.

Here is another model: Last week Apple announced that it was going into education by making it easy to download e-texts to their IPads. As a futures-based educator how do you project the possibility / probability of moving towards giving every student an IPad?

Before you do this, and this is fodder for future posts. What would be the your preferable future? For example, do you project this probability as an opportunity to re-tool your educational system to promote an instructional program grounded in the P21 framework and / or do you consider the preferability of saving textbook expenditure monies? The sample cross impact matrix below is limited of course by space considerations. Go ahead, give it a try,

IPad Cross Impact

The Devil’s in the Details or It’s the Implementation that Scares me.

Those of you familiar with the futures forecasting technique below will need to bear with me as I begin to introduce futures forecasting techniques as they may be appropriate.

In the previous post I said I was fine with the P21 model. It recognizes the need to retain that which is good about our present education system; welds it with a universal mindset of higher expectations and then most laudably, identifies its most important paradigm by coalescing competencies and literacies cores that are grounded in its best estimation of what the future will require of 21st century citizens, American -based or global – based, your call.

And the yes-but was my wondering aloud of how or whether the translation from the theoretical to the real will be successful. We all know that the latest “innovations du jour” often flop in our society because of our near universal attention deficit order syndrome that demands that a change be quick and easy.

So, if thoughtful educational planners mean to make this or any other worthy futures oriented model take root we have have to consider those 3 P’s I wrote to in a much earlier post: What’s Possible?. What’s Probable? What’s Preferable?

For sure, most things save making pigs fly, are possible. But that won’t probably happen. The probable part requires some analytical thinking; data analysis, etc. I

It’s what’s preferable that counts. And so working backwards, which by the way is another likely futures forecasting strategy I will speak to in later post (see Cornish), if we know what we want (vision?), what we prefer, then we need to chart all the 3 P’s to recognize what might happen along the way and more specifically, what path we prefer to follow.

The futures wheel below begins to in the most rudimentary terms, lay out the 3 P’s of implementing P21.

For those of you unfamiliar with this process the first point to remember that the graphic below is NOT a brainstorm activity! For sure, there are more nearly right and more nearly wrong “forecasts” in all these little circles. That is when thoughtful dialogue and assessment of points of view must be filtered lest you write any old thing down.

But aside from that proviso there are relatively few procedures to remember:

1. Put the “future” or the development you are considering in the center of the wheel.

2. Begin to project the possibilities, probabilities that you foresee in the circles next to the center.

3. Begin to project the possibilities / probabilities OF the possibilities / probabilities.

4. When you think that you have a good sample, put a check in what you think that are likely probable futures.

5. Then put a star in those forecasts that you think are most preferable!

Here is an example.

1. Mary wants to go out with John. Put that in the center of a futures wheel.

2. There are at least three futures to write into circles around the center

- ask him out

- ask a friend to ask him out for her

- never ask him out

3. Now project probabilities from those:

- ask him out – he says yes, he says no

- ask a friend to ask him out for her – he says yes, he says no, he goes out with Mary’s friend

- never ask him out – he asks her out, Mary pines away.

Take a look at the Futures Wheel below. It is very rudimentary for sure but now it gives you a chance to “fill in the blanks” yourself.

So what might an implementation of P21 look like for us? What do you think? What do you think about your own futures-based thinking?

FUTURE IS US

 

“The Best Way to Predict the Future is to Invent it.” Return to the P21 Model

That quote belongs to Alan Kay, a Xerox Corporation visionary whom Steve Jobs admired very much (Kindle, 12476).

And it brings me back to the P21 model I am using as a baseline for exploration of a futures based school system.

We will get back to the other process / thinking skills systems more specifically as the foundation for the P21 model and for interdisciplinary curriculum design. However I thought it was a wise time to pause for a blogging moment to remind myself and the reader  that the vision behind these cyber – conversations is to create a tipping point (see Malcom Caldwell!) or a critical mass that makes the conversion from inadequate schooling and backwards facing curricula (see Toffler) to schools and school systems, however constituted, that prepare children for the future we choose to design instead of a future that happens TO them.

The link below contains a brief audio of Tim Magner, Executive Director of P21 who was interviewed by the American Way Magazine.

In it he argues that their model, a combination of as he puts it “the 3 Rs,” plus specific new core competencies is well suited to invent that future we all should want.

I think that some would argue that Magner’s rationale may be too economically based. That is, the model he advocates has its justification in the needs of our economy’s restructuring to the benefit of our students and to their eventual employers.

Perhaps some would say that in the United States, education’s rationale may be partially economic but that it is also grounded in citizenship values and in producing well rounded individuals.

I can embrace both points of view since I do not think they are mutually exclusive. But as a person I once worked with often said, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” When he used it , he was basically saying that if one wants X or Y to happen then one will have to work very hard and very wisely to make it thus.

That is my fear of the P21 model. It’s fine. I support it.

It’s the implementation that scares me.

American Way Magazine interview

Listen to Tim Magner’s interview on American Way Magazine’s Executive Report, which was featured by American Airlines in their November-December issue. Tim explains why 21st Century Skills are cruicial for all employers to consider.

http://www.p21.org/storage/flash/American_Way_Magner_Interview.mp3

“Ms. President, Should We Launch the Missiles?”

And the value for Edufuturing I think it pretty obvious. Tomorrow’s students will need to make reasoned, futures-oriented, consequence-calculated, choices that must be grounded in clear, moral, and healthy values not only for their good but also for that of the societies they will be leading.

 The decision-making model I offered in the last post was taken from the National Council for Social Studies. It is a great model to “teach” but it is I think really a poor model in practicality.

Think about the decisions we each face every day, from ” Which color socks should I wear?”, to “Should I marry him ?” to ” Should I launch the missiles?”.These sorts of decision-occasions don’t lend themselves to a linear approach as I offered in the previous post.

But if you accept the proposition that we are morally obligated as educators, to have our students practice and master decision making skills then we are equally obligated to use experiential – decision-occasion teaching strategies to ensure that they will be intellectually equipped towards making futures based sound decisions.

I have another blog, http://seriousgamesdotme.wordpress.com/, that elaborates on this. But the purpose here is to dramatize the rationale for teaching PAST the content TOWARDS the process of among other systems of thinking skills, decision making.