Month: January 2015

Join me for #28daysofwriting – developing a writing habit

28 Days of WritingPublished onUpdated on40 Comments on Join me for #28daysofwriting – developing a writing habit

5.11pm

I don’t know about you but I seem to have an endless list of ideas for things I am going to write about, a smattering of drafts ready to go, and not quite the writing habit to get them published. You may also suffer from blog guilt! You may have a publishing space that you want to re-energise and kickstart again – getting back to a time when you were rattling off posts left write and centre.  Inspired by similar  ideas in the past – like 750words and nanowrimo – I thought I would start something up around the simple approach:

Write everyday for 28 minutes for 28 days. #28daysofwriting

Writing Chunks
The time frame seems manageable in our hectic lives and is often the hurdle for me publishing posts, just spending too long on them! Hopefully you will agree that we should be able to find a  28 minute chunk of uninterrupted writing time during any given day – especially if we are committed to developing such a habit.

A Creative Habit
And that is very much what this is about – getting into a strong, sustainable writing habit that lasts. Who knows whether 28 days is enough but I am up for sticking at it and seeing where I am by then.

Building a Writing Community
Blogging has had an immeasurable impact on my professional life and yet I know I can still be a better writer. Writing regularly helps so much, but it is also about the social platform that is blogging. Sharing with others, with a network, a community. I feel that the blogging community has changed, especially within education, and so this idea is also about building strong(er) communities of writers.

Not Posting Perfection
One of the hurdles for me in my recent writing days has been trying to craft that epic post, that idea or piece of writing that keeps burgeoning – it seems to go on forever and needs to be just so before we hit “Publish”. The healthy constraint of time will help us all to publish. To just publish what we have and be content with that. Sharing early thoughts is sometimes more valid than waiting till the idea is just how we want it before we share it – such behaviour can only lead to a closed or fixed mindset. Write for 28 minutes and publish what you have and then enjoy the conversation that occurs. Don’t aim to publish perfection, we are successful if we just publish.

So if some of these problems and challenges resonate with you. If you are also keen to restart your writing habit and be part of a small community of supportive peers who comment on each others work then sign up in the form below to show you are interested in taking part.

 

I will share some more information soon and I think we will get started from the 1st of February as the month meets our requirements pretty well!

Don’t forget to share this post with others who you think it would be relevant for – use the hashtag #28daysofwriting – we will also use this to flag when we have published our work. I hope to see your name pop up on the list of those interested and I look forward to connecting with you all.

And yes this post took me 28 minutes!
#28daysofwriting
5.39pm

“Stop One. Stop Them All” a Powerful Provocation from the World Wildlife Fund

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Stop One. Stop Them All - 3
Stop One. Stop Them All  – WWF

This is a great example of a powerful provocation for World Wildlife Fund’s (WWF) campaign against poaching from last year. The series of print images were created by the agency Leo Burnett of Sydney – who describe their work as follows: “We needed to highlight the depth, complexity and fragility of the illegal animal trade networks, and empower the viewer to feel that a little bit of help from them could bring down entire illegal organisations.”

Provocations are such powerful devices to use in our design of learning, often used to great effect at the beginning of a period of project (or Immersion). They are jarring and force a response, which can come in many different ways – often creating lasting momentum throughout a period of learning. The imagery used here is a fine example of that, shocking and yet bearing a simple message. Something we can act upon.

 

Creative Learning is Relational

Creativity, LearningPublished on11 Comments on Creative Learning is Relational

There is a great deal written about creativity these days, the need for it in our schools, ideas for fostering it in our physical environments and praise for those icons from the past and present who seem to epitomise the creative mindset. The following is a quote from Bruce Nussbaum, a writer and teacher, on the definition of creativity or being creative. The quote has always been something I reference as it so plainly states the key aspect of a creative approach.

Creativity is relational. Its practice is mostly about casting widely and connecting disparate dots of existing knowledge in new, meaningful ways. To be creative, you’ve got to mine your knowledge. You have to know your dots. – Bruce Nussbaum

As disarmingly simple as it is stated by Nussbaum we are still left with the question of how you actually take action – what can we do in the classroom to foster such dispositions and put into place such processes? I thought I would share a few ideas with you all from my experience of working with design thinking in the classroom for inquiry but also as a strategic process for school improvement.

Casting Widely

Design thinking inquiry processes would signpost the practice of “casting widely” as Immersion – an initial period of time where you are learning broadly about a curriculum topic. If we continue the analogy further – we are not casting a single line for a single target but looking to cast a net that gives us the flexibility and breadth of study. Designing and planning for learning experiences that are multi or trans-disciplinary is the order of the day here. We have the ability to engineer these broad learning experiences by thinking about other subject domains, other areas of study that are relevant and probably most importantly sharing our intentions with colleagues and students to help you find those missed opportunities.

Time for Tangents

With strong provocations and engaged learners you will have momentum during Immersion. This magical sense that your class are fuelling the inquiry themselves. However we have to be intentional again about providing time for tangential study. What I mean by this is ensuring there is enough room in your own planning so that groups or individuals, or even the whole class, can explore an unexpected idea to a satisfying degree of depth. All too often we tighten our grip on what has to be covered and dampen enthusiasm for exploring tangential ideas for study due to a lack of time. Nussbaum describes these ideas as “disparate dots” – give learners the time to be able to uncover these untrodden paths, pull back the vines and discover something new and unexpected. Importantly though we have to be intentional about this commitment of time, in my opinion, we can’t just bolt it on – we should be positive, back ourselves and plan for the fact that our engaged learners will discover some unexpected paths.

Developmental Learning Space

When we are working with a burgeoning amount of information we have to be able to make use of a space to keep those elements of interest and study within our eyeline. A developmental learning space grows with the learning experiences of the group or individual. Preferably this is a physical space or board that is populated with all of the “dots” of new and existing knowledge and learning experiences. Where there are physical limitations you might create a shared digital space, but for the youngest of learners the tangible output of our collective inquiry is most useful. I have often called this a project nest – a space that we can stand in front of and scan the “disparate dots” of our study so far.

Teachers from Melbourne Catholic Schools working on hexagonal thinking task.
Teachers from Melbourne Catholic Schools working on hexagonal thinking task.

Making Connections

There are lots of ways to act upon Nussbaum’s intentions of connecting up the dots. When working with teachers we talk about the second step of design thinking inquiry being Synthesis – connecting our learning. A simple way to do this would be to use the physical artefacts collected in the classroom (see above) and move them around, sorting, ordering and rubbing them up against each to see what ideas emerge. Another activity to help would be the use of a hexagonal thinking task which helps learners filter for some of the most interesting pieces of information and then encourages them to tesselate the hexagons and justify the connections that emerge. Those of you who are familiar with the SOLO Taxonomy would of course have recognised Nussbaum’s phrase when he describes creativity as being “relational” – we could broadly state that learning is the same. We know that when learners begin to offer explanations of how ideas or knowledge relate to each other they are demonstrating much higher order thinking.

Use images for learners in the early years to support their thinking.
Use images for learners in the early years to support their thinking.

Mining Knowledge

I have been saving to the online bookmarking tool Delicious for a long time now and many years ago I soon realised that I was not really using the links that I saved with any regularity. But what I was doing was building a resource with which I could later dig, or mine for ideas. When returning to the thousands of links saved there I want to be able find and resurface ideas I have gathered. Nowadays I use Evernote (and still have any Tweeted links saved into Delicious and funnelled into Evernote) for the mining and it is a great way to find existing content for curriculum planning and for unearthing old links or resources. Another way to do this is by using the Evernote Web Clipper – an extension for Chrome – which provides search results from your Evernote account alongside a normal set of Google search results. You can switch this option on in the extension settings.

There are many more ways to put into action what Bruce Nussbaum states as the practice of creativity and it would be great to hear your thoughts in the comments on how else we can act on such intentions. Hopefully these practical ideas give you some simple steps to engineer the best conditions for creative learning.

Uncertainties, mysteries and how to nurture your negative capability

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The quote from John Keats that inspires this post is from a letter he wrote to his brothers George and Tom in December 1817. He was commenting about the ideal literary state of mind, one in which someone exhibits “negative capability”.

A sense of calm assurance and innovatory endeavour in the inevitable “uncertainties, mysteries and doubt” that defines the ups and downs of striving for something original.

I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason

Keats, John (1899). The Complete Poetical Works and Letters of John Keats, Cambridge Edition. Houghton, Mifflin and Company. p. 277

Most of the time it is what we don’t do in any given creative inquiry that helps us the most. This is especially true for when we are working on an issue with our teams that requires us to generate some new thinking or ideas.

It is also true when we are exploring a new line of inquiry with learners. In both of these situations, we are consciously choosing to step into a state of flux, a situation that can often be defined by what is not known rather than what knowledge we share.

Human nature does, in some way, dictate that we prefer the habits, rituals and the agreeable comforts of processes we know. We draw a degree of situational steadiness from the fact and reason we can rely on. We see this type of reaction in others as we work with them to move on to new practices or technologies.

The comfort in the known is often too tempting to make the leap and embrace something new. The physical reality of technology is even more challenging as it is harder to ignore and move off of your desk than an ideological concept. 

Letting these go and embracing the state of change and the unknown that surrounds us is counter-intuitive and it takes practice to fully accept. Here are some ideas to help.

Accept the mess

The learning process seems to be defined by these moments of flux we experience, sometimes they are fleeting, but often they are protracted. Uncertainty, doubt and mystery is part of our process of learning.

Accepting that we will experience the uncertainty of such times is a great first step for us personally and within our teams, whether learners or leaders. After all, “If we knew what we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?” as Einstein once suggested.

Reflect on how uncertainty makes you feel

Secondly, we must be emotionally aware of this uncertainty. What I mean by this is to use our emotional state to help prepare for future experiences that will be similar.

When you are navigating an organisational inquiry it not only puts you in a state of cognitive flux but one of mild emotional turmoil as your intuition presses you to seek steady ground and the reassurance of decisions. We are torn between seeking originality and the comfort of tried and tested ideas. 

We should be mindful of how this uncertainty feels, how we react to it and how our emotions change. When we have the energy to record our own emotional experience of such moments we are far more likely to recall them in future times and use these emotional schemata to respond more appropriately.

As an aside I think that meta-emotion is an area we must help learners understand much better. On a simple level to be able to help them manage their own learning more effectively by having a better understanding of their own emotional topography.

Trust the process

A third area that contributes to a better creative approach to inquiry is the understanding that we have a process. When you take this knowledge away or it is not shared amongst a group, we are introducing another mystery: where is this all heading?

We have all experienced those meetings or projects which never went anywhere, great energy and contribution but no follow up or shared understanding of the direction it was heading.

All too often inquiry can feel like we are researching forever, as much as we want to embrace not knowing, and Einstein’s suggestion from earlier, our process needs to signpost the way through this.

I believe that when we are able to recognise “uncertainties, mysteries and doubt” as a natural part of learning; when we share a process and if we have awareness of our emotional reaction, we are engineering the best possible conditions for creative inquiry and hopefully new ideas to flourish.

Photo by Tomas Sobek