Creativity Archives - Page 6 of 7

Hold Your Ideas Lightly

Tom28 Days of Writing, Creativity, Design ThinkingFebruary 10, 2015October 1, 20156 Comments

This is a simple metaphor to understand. When you are exploring the validity of an idea, hold your idea lightly – do not clutch it tightly to your chest. We often explore if an idea is valid in the company of others and so we need to present our thinking with this mindset as lots of good things flow from it. It is an important mindset we adjust to in our design thinking workshops we run with teachers.

Instead of having to pry open our fingers to get to the idea to offer advice, when it is held lightly and openly in our open hands others can access it.

Offer an invitation to your ideas not a barrier to hurdle.

When we hold on to our ideas lightly we are being more careful in terms of what we have committed to that idea. There is no tension in our grasp of the idea because we have invested lots of time and energy into developing it. It is probably early on in terms of our thinking and we are open to what others say.

If our grasp is light it might be swept along by a strong breeze from others. Who knows if we are open to other people contributing and building on our idea it might be taken in a direction that we might not have seen.

It is all about communicating your idea as early as you can, but matching that action with a relatively low commitment in energy, time and resources.

In the workshops I have led over the last four years I have asked hundreds of people to communicate an idea they have only just created to someone else. The constraint comes from the time they have to communicate the idea or concept and the resource they have to do it with. A single Post it note. What else!

They are thrust into a situation where they are already non-committal about an idea and are encouraged to “Hold their ideas lightly”, pitching the idea to someone else quickly. All of these things create a scenario that is often alien within education – sharing something so early. I always like to follow this sort of task up by asking “What does it feel like to have to share an idea so early on in the process?”

Invariably there is a mixed reaction. From the “nerve wracking” and “scary”, to “liberating” and “exciting”. The anxious responses normally speak of a habitual culture of getting it “just so”, or working on something heavily before sharing widely. The more positive responses, which is the majority, recognise how this mindset, named up front, and the process that activates it, creates a refreshing sense of openness about our creative work.

Hold your ideas lightly – don’t clutch them tightly to your chest.

In A World of Their Own – the features of immersive play

Tom28 Days of Writing, CreativityFebruary 3, 20153 Comments

If you ever have the opportunity just to observe some of the youngest learners in school playing together, make sure you take it. It remains a constant source of fascination and wonder for me to see children immersed in play.

I was lucky enough to work with Reception or Foundation classes in my second year of teaching, when I was planning and teaching ICT lessons across the full primary range – and when some of these youngsters used to think I lived in the computer suite. (Ha! “computer suite” – showing my age!) I was also providing cover for staff and so might be in Year 6 in the morning and then doing phonics sessions with Foundation in the afternoon.

A good few years later I took up a new role as Deputy Principal in a school and taught for a while in the Foundation 2 class. I still recall the experiences and smiles I had during those times with great fondness. And I got to witness that immersive play that is so wonderful.

Nowadays I see George, my 8 year old son, immersed in his play, either with his friends or simply on his own. It is a wonder to behold and something that we slowly see less of. The reason I think that I find it so interesting is that it flies in the face of what adult life is so typically about, immersive play doesn’t happen within those rules and challenges the typical constraints adults might see or hold.

The Edges

Yesterday I wrote about the importance of constraint, and healthy constraint at that, in our design of learning. I described how some resources create an artificial line that children don’t go over or how time might restrict what we do. When children are truly immersed in play the edges of their play seem invisible.

It is not simply the timeless nature of immersive play but also the way that physical barriers, and even the rules of physics, become non-existent. They are changed, thwarted and ignored. Superpowers ON! Groups of toys suddenly are thrust together and the props of the play become varied and limitless – the play things even become augmented themselves changing in the mind of the young authors of this new reality.

Presenteeism

When you observe this powerful type of play, a total immersion takes hold. Children get caught up in their play, they lose track of time. They don’t worry about what has gone before or what is next – they don’t think about the to-do list or their worries. When children are safe and immersed in their play, they are wholly present. (There is lots to read about this type of Flow state and the positive impact it can have on learning or the creative process.)

Social

One other curious feature of immersive play is when play overlaps with others. A complete imaginary state bumps into another, children play together seamlessly co-constructing something that is completely imaginary. They negotiate and choose and build together under what seem to be a silent set of rules encoded deep inside them. The social aspect of immersive physical play just feeds the imaginations at work and you see worlds evolve and collapse, characters develop and disappear in quick succession.

All of these beautiful, natural instinctive behaviours might be summed up in this lovely quote:

Children have neither past nor future, they enjoy the present, which very few of us do.

– Jean de la Bruyere

Now of course immersive play is not simply the bastion of the young learner, but perhaps we have to try just that little bit harder to build and collapse those worlds as easily.

What do you see as the signals of immersive play? When do older students and adults get the opportunity for such wholly present experiences?

A Prototyping Disposition

Tom28 Days of Writing, Creativity, Design ThinkingFebruary 1, 2015February 2, 20178 Comments

I bump into different views of what “prototyping” is, should be or could be quite regularly. It is interesting to try and help people, especially educators, change the way they perceive a word and begin to use it, even understand it, in new ways. After all language is such a decisive factor in our willingness to understand and so to change.

Although not a designer by trade I know that prototyping is about making versions of something, creating various attempts and that these attempts have a trajectory. A direction they are heading towards. An outcome their production is seeking. I get that this is an iterative approach, resting on the knowledge that we will gradually get better through advice and comment from others.

Ultimately though a prototype’s success lies in the mindset or disposition that they are created with. Or to say it more clearly, when we make stuff if we are iterative in our approach we are more likely to succeed. But there is a lot going on if we begin to consider prototyping as not just about making something, but a disposition too.

It is not just about junk modelling or computer aided design or 3D printing or physical building – a disposition towards prototyping means we:

Are committed to the expertise and ideas we might gain from others and don’t just simply rely on our own perspective.
Believe in the value of feedback and how critique can move our ideas forward.
Engineer as many opportunities for feedback as we can, as early as we can.
Are willing to share what we create when it is extremely, painfully incomplete.

Learning, and often learning within a school, can be such a creative process, I know that teaching is one of the most creative of professions I know. The prototyping disposition is a stance we need to consider for our learners and for ourselves.

All too often our design of the creative tasks we ask our students to embark upon do not signpost these perspectives. Constraint is rare and we open the doors for our students to emotionally commit to a project, a creation, whether prose or painting it is much the same.

Simply stating the traits of an iterative or prototyping approach is far from enough – we need to consider how we can design them into scaffolded or modelled tasks. For example increasing the constraint of resourcing and time when we get started.

“You have 5 minutes to write the first 2 sentences and yes you can only use a post-it note. Ready go!”

What comes next is easy to understand – feedback and feedforward. Next steps and critique. So much has been written about the high impact on student outcomes of high quality feedback that I do not have to restate it. What perhaps does need pointing out is how woven it is into the fabric of an iterative creative process. So let us look again at how we might model this approach in all of our work and consider ways to engineer multiple versions followed up with as many feedback opportunities.

Prototyping is not just about physical modelling, it is an iterative mindset towards anything that we, or our students, create.

Creative Learning is Relational

TomCreativity, LearningJanuary 9, 201511 Comments

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.

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.

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

TomCreativity, Design Thinking, LearningJanuary 4, 2015October 16, 20196 Comments

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

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Category: Creativity