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.
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.
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.
