Make your classroom a “Liquid Network”

Where do good ideas come from?

In a recent TED talk, it’s the question that Steven Johnson is asking. (Johnson is the author of Everything Bad is Good for You, The Ghost Map, Mind Wide Open and Emergence.) And it’s one we should be asking as well.

Schools often claim that they want to create “life long learners” and “problem solvers.” We want kids to develop idea creation skills but we often don’t create an environment where this can happen.

Many of us are pushing for and using the idea of Problem-Based Learning in our classrooms, asking good essential questions and providing authentic problems. But . . . Steven Johnson suggests that perhaps we need to do more. How do we set up the actual physical learning environment where we want kids to learn? Is that environment conducive for creating new ideas? I don’t think we do enough.

During his TED presentation, Johnson says that

good ideas do not happen when you’re alone in the lab or by yourself poring over data. Good ideas happen when people work together.

He asks his audience to think about what that looks like and mentions Google’s 20% rule (the rule that encourages Google employees tospend 20% of their developing new ideas). But Johnson spends a lot of time discussing the coffeehouse environment that sprung in North America and Europe during the 1700s & 1800s. This, he suggests, is where new ideas develop – in a place where people gather and discuss, argue and share information. Johnson calls this the “liquid network.” A book called The Invention of Air suggests the same thing.

Have we altered our physical classroom environments enough so that kids are encouraged to create new ideas? I don’t think so.

So . . . what does it look like? Some suggestions from Johnson and others:

• Get people with hunches to talk to other people with hunches, i.e. have kids work in groups, both formal and informal, as much as possible
• Encourage mistakes
• Arrange the physical environment differently – use tables not desks, arrange your room so that kids can quickly get together for brainstorming sessions, have other forms of comfortable seating available
• Spaces and tools for brainstorming, collecting and storing data – this could be whiteboards, blank bulletin boards, iPods or computers with Google Docs loaded
• Put your desk in a corner out of the way – you won’t be there much during the day anyway
• And in a perfect world (with perfect kids!), the K-12 equivalent of Johnson’s coffeehouse – snacks & drinks to encourage conversation

The last one may be difficult! But the idea remains the same . . . we need to rethink the physical spaces where our kids spend their time if we want to them to be creative.

Seven ways to solve the Creativity Crisis

There’s been a ton of conversation in our office lately about what the future of education looks like in Kansas. With economic issues, core curriculum standards and NCLB concerns on their plate, it seems as if schools are moving backwards towards a 1950s instructional model rather than one focusing on the 21st century.

It’s a concern that I know teachers and administrators have but they seem powerless or unwilling to swim against the current. And that’s what we’ve been talking about. Where do we spend our time and resources? What do we focus on?

ESSDACK has always worked to help school districts find ways to deliver high-quality instruction that prepares kids for a future we can’t predict. But that task becomes more difficult when district leaders feel that they need to focus on short-term concerns rather than long-term.

We are committed to finding ways to do both – meet NCLB requirements while delivering engaging and high-level instruction. Part of that commitment will be developing strategies which support instruction that builds creativity and innovation in students.

A recent Newsweek article, The Creativity Crisis, provides some ammo we can use with educational leaders and classroom teachers. Authors Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman discuss current research on creativity and how it fits into the educational landscape.

The scary thing?

Since 1990,

creativity scores have consistently inched downward. “It’s very clear, and the decrease is very significant,” Kim says. It is the scores of younger children in America—from kindergarten through sixth grade—for whom the decline is “most serious.”

Most serious because

A recent IBM poll of 1,500 CEOs identified creativity as the No. 1 “leadership competency” of the future.

And Bronson and Merryman suggest that creativity goes deeper than just “sustaining our nation’s economic growth.” It seems as if there are problems everywhere we look – oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico, food shortages around the world, global warming, child slavery, immigration, health care, lack of clean water and war just about everywhere. All problems without easy answers, all requiring creative solutions.

In his 2006 TED talk, Ken Robinson defined creativity as

the process of having original ideas that have value, more often than not, (coming) about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things.

and the article does a great job of describing how this process is measured. It’s not easy because as Bronson and Merryman write

There is never one right answer. To be creative requires divergent thinking (generating many unique ideas) and then convergent thinking (combining those ideas into the best result).

The problem is not just measuring creativity but finding ways to teach it. The good news is that creativity can be taught.

Using problem-based learning is one of the best ways to incorporate creative thinking skills into heavy content areas like history, science and math. Part of that is training teachers to provide good questions rather than simply providing the answers.

And personally I think an even bigger part of improving how we teach creativity is convincing teachers that they themselves must model creativity and a “curiousness” for their students. We often don’t ask good questions of ourselves – we don’t read recent books, don’t browse good blogs, don’t travel, don’t develop personal learning networks. We don’t model learning in our own learning environments.

But the authors list seven simple strategies we can use with kids (and ourselves) to encourage creativity:

• Don’t tell someone to be “creative”
  Instead ask them to “do something that only you would come up with – that no one you know would think of.”
• Reduce screen time
  Watching television for an hour reduces creative activities by 11 percent.
• Get moving
  Exercise boosts blood flow and creative thinking.
• Follow a passion
  Allow yourself and your students to pursue interests “wholeheartedly.”
• Take a break
  While working on multiple projects, feel free to set one of them aside for a time and come back to it.
• Explore other cultures
  Cross-cultural experiences seem to increase creativity. This could be actual travel or even simply studying another culture.
• Don’t brainstorm
  Contrary to popular belief, brainstorming in a whole group environment actually stifles creativity. Think / Pair / Share type activities generate better results.

In a follow-up to his 2006 talk, Sir Ken Robinson makes the case for a radical shift from standardized schools to personalized learning — creating conditions where kids’ natural talents can flourish. It provides more suggestions and inspiration for embedding creativity into our instruction.

Part One

Part Two

Open Content – Why are we here?

During a Skype presentation back in January, Marco Torres asked some interesting questions.

He had K-12 teachers describe their curriculum and then asked:

If I can Google everything you just said, what value are you adding to the learning that takes place in your classroom?

He continued on that theme:

Never ask a question a kid can look up – simply knowing the answer is just not enough anymore.

I just finished listening to an interesting presentation at BbWorld 2010 by author and speaker Anya Kamenetz. (She also has an interesting blog.) She talked about the research and ideas from her recent book, DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education.

Anya spent her time this morning talking about how higher education needs a “radical revolution” because of cost, access and quality issues. She suggests that higher ed, while not becoming an “iPod app,” needs to be much more open source in terms of content, socialization and accreditation.

Most of what she says makes some sense. Fewer and fewer students are actually graduating from college, it’s taking people longer to graduate and those who do are piling up amazing amounts of debt. And while the traditional college track is probably not going away, (and in my opinion, probably shouldn’t) we need additional paths for preparing people for the 21st century.

Anya went on to mention a variety of examples of how this new model of open source higher ed, DIY U, might look. I especially liked her examples of open content sources:

• iTunes U
• TED
• Khan Academy
• Einztien Knowledge Network
• Saylor.org
• FlatWorld Knowledge
• Open Learning Initiative

I would add sites like Shmoop to the list.

And while Anya focuses on higher ed, her observations mesh with the K-12 track that Marco Torres talks about.

Marco would agree that there is tons of content available online. Kids can access that content. But I think Marco adds a bit that Anya ignored.

Content without some sort of quality instruction and direction isn’t worth much. Marco’s point is that many K-12 (and I would add, higher ed) teachers focus just on content and not quality instruction. Colleges of ed across the country have created a huge group of K-12 teachers who believe that quality instruction is the same as delivering content.

But in today’s world, content delivery is not enough – whether kids get it face-to-face in the classroom or online. We as teachers, K-20, need to be more concerned about what our students do with that content.

So while Anya is correct in saying that how content is accessed is changing, I like how Marco is pushing us to be aware of the importance of what good teachers should be doing with that content, no matter the source.

That’s why we’re here.

Bribes for learning

I admit it.

I bribed my kid.

When nothing else seemed to work, we used a variety of stickers (mostly Thomas the Tank Engine) to encourage our two year old during potty training. And while we didn’t do a lot of scientifically-based research, it seemed to have a positive effect.

Giving kids stuff to modify their behavior is a time-honored parenting tool that’s been around forever. Schools have used similar techniques in the past but as the educational stakes have gotten higher, the “stuff” used to modify behavior has changed to include actual cash. A recent Time magazine article documents the trend:

In recent years, hundreds of schools have made these transactions more businesslike, experimenting with paying kids with cold, hard cash for showing up or getting good grades or, in at least one case, going another day without getting pregnant.

The question is does it really work? And, more specifically, can similar strategies be used to encourage long-term learning?

The Time article highlights the work of Harvard economist Roland Fryer Jr. who distributed 6.3 million dollars of private funds to thousands of students in Washington, D.C., Dallas, New York and Chicago.

The results?

Like any large educational research project, the results are mixed. You can read for yourself but in one city,

the experiment had no effect at all — “as zero as zero gets.”

In another,

something remarkable happened . . . Statistically speaking, it was as if those kids had spent three extra months in school, compared with their peers who did not get paid.

Robert Marzano’s research on what works in schools discusses the concept of rewards.  At Building Better Instruction:

It is equally important to reward students for achieving specific goals. Though there are many ways to tell a student he or she has done well, recognition is most effective when it is abstract (e.g., praise) or symbolic (e.g., tokens such as coupons or stickers) and contingent on students’ attaining specific performance goals. (see Classroom Instruction That Works, pp. 73−74, for a list). 

So we have some newer Fryer research partly supporting older Marzano research. The problem some are having is that cash is not “abstract” or “symbolic.” Larry Ferlazzo of Websites for the Day is concerned about using cash rewards for certain types of learning:

As Daniel Pink and others have described and demonstrated much more ably than I can do here (see A Few Reflections On Daniel Pink’s New Book, “Drive”; On Rewards & Classroom Management; and New Study Shows That Paying Students For Higher Test Scores Doesn’t Work) extrinsic rewards do work — for mechanical work that doesn’t require much higher-order thinking. But it doesn’t work for anything that requires higher-order thinking skills and creativity. And, in fact, these incentives reduce intrinsic motivation over the long-term.

Claus von Zastrow who writes for Public School Insights agrees, remarked that Fryer’s team noted that students getting cash for scores naturally grasped at test-taking strategies rather than, say, better study skills or deeper engagement in class materials:

Students [who were asked what they could do to earn more money on the next test] started thinking about test-taking strategies rather than salient inputs into the education production function or improving their general understanding of a subject area…. Not a single student mentioned reading the textbook, studying harder, completing their homework, or asking teachers or other adults about confusing topics.

For me, it comes down to this. When all we worry about is test scores, about the short term, about meeting AYP, about meeting NVLB reqs, it seems as if paying kids for performance might be part of the answer. And I know that every school and situation is different and short term solutions may be what’s needed in some areas.

But if we want to kids to think critically, to apply content in creative ways and to be true 21st century learners, I’m still not convinced.

Finished a day of teaching, “a day wasted”

It’s a story many of you already know. But perhaps on a Monday late in the school year with state assessments all around us, it bears repeating. I was reminded of the story while browsing through an old teaching strategy article from the Organization of American Historians.

Charles Francis Adams, grandson of John Adams and son of John Quincy Adams, served as a Massachusetts state senator, a US Congressman and ambassador to Great Britain under Abraham Lincoln. He was also very conscientious about keeping a daily journal and encouraged his children to do the same.

Henry Brooks, fourth of seven children, followed his advice and began journaling at a young age. A particular entry written when Brooks was eight has continued to catch our attention. Following a day spent with his father, he wrote

Went fishing with my father today, the most glorious day of my life.

The day was so glorious, in fact, that Brooks continued to talk and write about that particular day for the next thirty years. It was then that Brooks thought to compare journal entries with his father.

For that day’s entry, Charles had written:

Went fishing with my son, a day wasted.

Now it’s possible that Charles was upset that they came home empty-handed, having caught no fish. But even so, he seems to have forgotten that the process is sometimes more important than the product. That the time spent with kids is usually more important than what we do with them.

It’s easy to forget the powerful impact we can have with our students just with the time we spend with them. So a gentle reminder during the assessment season . . . focus on the kid, not just her test scores.

Teach Like a Champion

I mentioned Doug Lemov of Uncommon Schools several weeks ago in a post about tenure, teacher layoffs, budgets cuts and how to make teachers better.

Uncommon Schools

is a nonprofit organization that starts and manages outstanding urban charter public schools that close the achievement gap and prepare low-income students to graduate from college. Playing on Horace Mann’s notion of the “common school,” and born of the fact that too many of today’s educational institutions steer toward mediocrity, Uncommon was founded to create more uncommon schools – uncommonly good, extraordinary, autonomous, and distinctive.

As the managing director, Lemov has done a lot of work trying to figure out what makes a teacher a champion and then finding ways to share that with others. His latest project is Teach Like a Champion: 49 Techniques That Put Students on the Path to College.

It’s an interesting concept. Watch great teachers teach, gather together their best ideas and train others to use those ideas in ways specific to each teacher.

I just started going through Teach Like a Champion and am impressed with both the simplicity and power of Lemov’s suggestions. Much of what Lemov shares seems pretty basic.

SLANT shows how to teach “behavior and skills that help students concentrate, focus and learn.”

• Sit up
• Listen
• Ask and answer questions
• Nod your head
• Track the speaker

Or Exit Ticket

• a single question or short sequence of problems to solve at the end of a class
• they’re quick – one to three questions
• designed to yield data
• share the data the next day with kids

This is not rocket science. But what makes Lemov’s ideas so effective is that they are intentional. I think many teachers use powerful and effective strategies but I also believe that many of us fail to use them purposefully. We don’t plan for these things to happen.

The beauty of Lemov’s book is that these are things we should practice and plan to use. Lemov has also included a variety of video clips that highlight specific techniques being used by classroom teachers.

If you’ve got some left over PD funds or classroom budget money anywhere in your building, buy one copy and pass around. You’ll walk away a better teacher!