Seeking Creativity: From Mindless Clicks to Purposeful Choices

I have always believed that the scientific process–-generating questions, making observations, proposing solutions, and drawing conclusions–-is a creative process. To me, these scientific processes and creativity require the same skills–-the ability to use new information to generate ideas and alternatives and make connections in order to solve problems and answer questions.  Over time (I have been a science teacher for many years), I became increasingly frustrated that students seemed to lack these skills, unable to come up with more than one or two observations about a science topic that had the potential to generate dozens of scientific research questions. So I decided to ask them a question:  If creativity is the ability to generate new ideas, on a scale of 1-5, where 1 is low creativity and 5 is high creativity, how creative are you? Less than 20 percent of my students responded with a 3 or better.  It was eye-opening, and I wasn’t sure why so many students seemed to lack what I believed was a fundamental scientific skill. I finally surmised that the issue for my students wasn’t a lack of creativity, but in their inability to access and practice the creative response. I wondered if there was a way to use the diverse nature of educational technology applications to help students (and teachers) reach their potential as creative thinkers.

And so it begins. How can my wonder become something useful for educators? The challenge lies in analyzing the characteristics of digital tools to determine their usefulness in terms of generating creative processes and positive learning outcomes. Analyzing their usefulness requires thought about how to leverage the nature of the digital application itself.  Online digital tools and resources  are inherently multimodal; that is, they use a variety of methods for sharing information with students–-visual information, written and spoken words, maps, animations, interactive processes, sounds and even music. When choosing the right tool or resource to use in the classroom, teachers need to be thinking in terms of integrating these specific attributes of the chosen technology in a way that makes it possible for students to generate new ideas and solve problems, rather than using technology simply because it is available. Models for integrating technology in the classroom are out there–-SAMR, TIM, PICRAT.  What is missing from these models is consideration of how the multimodal nature of digital tools and resources can and should influence how the technology is integrated into the curriculum in order to increase creative responses and improve student outcomes.

Intentionality is the key.  That is, choosing ways to deliver content should not be haphazard, but should be based on purposeful consideration of how delivery methods can positively impact student learning.  Most districts now provide every student with a digital device, and are ramping up access to online applications for learning, including learning management systems, content platforms, and platforms for creating digital products. However, with increased access to digital tools and applications comes the need for structure in how to use them effectively. My intention is to design a system that streamlines the planning process to help teachers integrate specific attributes of technology into their coursework in a purposeful way to ensure that students generate creative responses to achieve specific goals.

Educators today are constantly faced with finding ways to navigate remote learning and engage students who have been disaffected with learning by the intrusion of a socially-isolating pandemic and a sudden immersion into remote education, while at the same time ensuring that those same students are accountable for being present and learning what they are supposed to learn. My hope is that, through research, I can develop a method to help instructors at all levels to tackle these challenges with confidence and successfully develop online learning experiences for their students that result in creative responses and positive student outcomes.

I start a new job in a new district next week. Our first professional development activities will involve working with an initiative promoted by the Michigan Department of Education to write and assess student learning outcomes, a process every educator has been required to learn as part of their teacher training process, but also a process that tends to get lost amidst the plethora of responsibilities in a teacher's day. While I completely agree that the process is important, especially in light of knowledge and skills gaps that students today are experiencing, I also know that the topic will bring about great eye rolling from the teacher audience. So here's my next wonder: How can I move assessment of student learning outcomes from data collection to creative inspiration?

So, onward and upward!

Inseparable Links: A Whole Teacher Approach to Curriculum Design

As we emerge from the isolation of a pandemic, a whole new set of challenges emerges with us–gaps, burnout, chaos. But out of the darkness comes the opportunity to imagine a new story–a story that melds our individual lights into a collective luminescence.

Much is written about the ways in which teachers can “help themselves” avoid burnout and address their own social and emotional needs. Teachers are advised to reduce stress by making time for themselves, getting a hobby, or slowing down their work pace; they are urged to take care of themselves so they can take care of the kids. All of these actions are valid; however, equally valid is the view that making time for these approaches puts teachers further behind in their work.  And why is the burden of reducing stress something that teachers must do alone?  We argue that collaborative integration is one way to rekindle lost enthusiasm in a way that “the whole teacher” is supported without the onus of losing ground. We argue that all teachers benefit from shared responsibility. It is time for the silos to be dismantled.  

In the whole student approach to education, the CDC  advises that students need to be enveloped in a network of support provided by teachers, administrators and their community. We believe that these guidelines are equally relevant to teachers and can be realized by interdisciplinary collaboration and curriculum design.

Health.  Collaboration allows teachers to join forces in a synergistic union that helps alleviate emotional stress and prevents the physical and mental exhaustion that can result from too much to do, and too little time; a union that exemplifies the adage that espouses many hands, light work.  Collaborative, interdisciplinary strategies energize the creative process.

Safety. By implementing shared classroom practices and processes that promote collegial interaction, teachers mitigate the risk of failing to help students close learning gaps by focusing on key skills in multiple classrooms, and kindling student awareness of the connections between subject areas.  Integration helps teachers identify common learning gaps and how to create potential solutions to close them.

Engagement.  Working together, teachers from multiple disciplines participate in a dialogue that sparks innovation and creativity in the development of intriguing pedagogical tools that leverage common skills and promote inquiry. Protocols for productive dialogue lead to the design of effective instructional tools.

Support. Partnerships between teachers of multiple disciplines provide unexpected, and perhaps untapped, sources of assistance, encouragement, and inspiration as they help one another devise new methods to address not only traditionally hard tasks, but to address the lack of skills created by the chaos that has ensued in the delivery of instruction in the times of pandemic. Collaborative tools are the means by which teachers can tackle hard-to-teach concepts.

Challenge.  It is not a new idea that writing to learn is a critical skill.  However, there is a fallacy that suggests a good teacher can teach anything; the notion that teachers in other disciplines are well-equipped to teach students how to read informational texts or how to write and support their ideas with evidence is misleading.  Shared expertise allows each teacher to do what they do best; the challenge is to create learning opportunities that leverage the common ground between subjects. Interdisciplinary learning promotes transference of skills between disciplines in order to elicit and sustain academic growth. Knowledge and skills are transferred from one discipline to another during collaborative integration.

Multimodal Literacy and the Virtual Field Trip

We are strong believers in multimodal literacy.  The diagram shows what that might translate to in your classroom.

Multimodal literacies encompass all of our senses.  And so do virtual field trips!  Virtual field trips give teachers the opportunity to engage the whole student, from head to toe.  And there are lots of other reasons to use virtual field trips in your classrooms, too.  Virtual field trips ensure equity– everyone gets to go regardless of their ability to pay, or even their ability to get good grades or behave.

Virtual field trips show students new things. And because the destinations are new, students are going to want to have a conversation about it (they always do!).  If we arm them with new vocabulary, they can begin to have real conversations in specific disciplinary language.

Processing visual information is quicker and easier, and makes remembering easier, as well.  Once you see something new, you will always think about that every time you see the same thing again. Actually seeing something increases awareness and reinforces newly learned material.

Now the question is, how can you really use virtual field trips in the classroom?  You can use them to teach something new.  You can use them to teach observation and inquiry.  You can use short, quick student-made virtual field trips as formative assessments, and longer virtual field trip projects as summative assessments.  Virtual field trips can activate prior knowledge (where have the students seen something like this before) and help eliminate misconceptions.

The question really is what CAN’T virtual field trips be used for?

By encouraging students to improve their ability to make observations and NOTICE things by seeing or making virtual field trips, depth and complexity increases. Students step outside the comfort of their own narrow world view to examine other far-away places and expand their global perspective.  And the weird and wonderful are engaging, and can spark wonder and curiosity.  We need our students to be curious question-askers and answer-seekers, rather than passive recipients of the digital messages they are constantly bombarded with. 

Hopefully you are convinced that virtual field trips are a really great way to engage students and add depth and complexity to their learning. How do you make that happen?  Planning is critical.  We devised a virtual field trip blueprint to use when planning our own virtual field trips.  It’s a way to organize your thoughts.  It’s a way for you to be intentional about ensuring there is an educational purpose and structure to the work to make sure students gain academically from the experience.  Find our Virtual Field Trip Planning Kit on TpT. We hope you will use the tools and ideas in this packet to create amazing virtual field trip experiences for your own students.  Onward and upward!

A Rubric Isn't Useful Unless It's a Tool

A key component of assessment in the project-based learning process is the use of rubrics. A comprehensive rubric includes criteria that specify learning goals that demonstrate mastery of course outcomes, as well as criteria for those skills necessary to demonstrate expertise in the field, such as inquiry, argumentation, source analysis, inferencing and reasoning. Most projects have multiple rubrics for a variety of purposes. Rubrics may be used to guide students on depth and breadth of content research, on historical skills such as persuasive writing or contextual analysis, or on presentation skills. Often, skills-based rubrics can be developed once and used as needed depending on project parameters. For example, students may write an essay on historical context for one project, while in another they are writing an expository essay on laws relating to property rights in medieval London. Because the purpose for writing is different (context versus information), different rubrics are required. However, once the rubric for expository writing is developed, it can be used for any project in which expository writing is required. 

Using rubrics does not guarantee that students will be invested in self evaluation. In order for rubrics to facilitate learning and enhance metacognition, explicit instruction in the use of rubrics to evaluate their work must be given along with related content knowledge. Without a sufficient knowledge base, students will not be able to effectively use the rubric for their benefit. It is the integration of both metacognitive skills in using rubrics for analysis and content matter during instruction that enhances knowledge building.

While rubrics can be used by the instructor to assess project outcomes, the most important use of rubrics are for self-evaluation, feedback, and revision. Well designed rubrics serve as a guide for students, and with continued use enable students to become adept at monitoring their own learning.

Expand Your Classroom with PBL

Several years ago, I was fortunate to be given time and space to explore my beliefs about education. I realized that some of my thinking about teaching and learning had become skewed over the years, and I began to wonder what I could do to alter my thinking in a way that would benefit students.  I realized that my point of view was too narrow. Today’s students are digital natives—they were born and have grown up in an era where computers, smart phones and digital media are pervasive rather than the exclusive.  This technology has shrunk the globe by allowing students to reach out and contact someone on the other side of the globe with a few keystrokes. 

Friedman sums it up well in his book The World is Flat (2007):

It is now possible for more people than ever to collaborate and compete in real time with more other people on more different kinds of work from more different corners of the planet and on a more equal footing than at any previous time in the history of the world—using computers, e-mail, fiber-optic networks, teleconferencing, and dynamic new software. . .we are now connecting all the knowledge centers on the planet together into a single global network, which... could usher in an amazing era of prosperity, innovation, and collaboration, by companies, communities and individuals.

Information from anywhere in the world is instantly available.  Databases containing information on everything from maps to natural resources to worldwide environmental concerns may be downloaded in just a few moments. Globalization requires that today's students be prepared for a changing world.  But technological savvy won't be enough because today's workplace requires that individuals communicate and collaborate with people worldwide.So I wondered, how can a teacher use information from beyond their curriculum, or even beyond the borders of our own country, to help students become more globally aware and help to ensure success in their lives beyond high school?  

With this revelation, I realized that my classroom was too limiting.  It is easy for a teacher to become myopic in the small, compact universe which is the classroom, restricted in scope and content by administrators who have become entrapped in a “teach to the test” mantra (despite convincing evidence that the tests are not a good measure of what is taught).  Teachers are encouraged to use “real world experiences” to enhance learning in their classrooms.  But if the lesson only involves only what is specified in the curriculum and the teacher’s role in establishing curriculum has regressed to devising ways to help students get right answers on tests, how real can it be?  Students should not be building their reality from what is on a test, nor from what is in the media—social media included!  So I wondered, how can a teacher breach the classroom walls and nurture student learning in a way that is authentic and meaningful?

And then I attended a conference on project-based learning.

Grading and PBL

Current notions abut assigning grades take on a different aspect when viewed through the lens of PBL. 

For instance, consider the idea that giving daily grades is a good thing--isn't it?  If students have to prove their knowledge often, I'll know exactly what they know, right? And if I've given lots of graded assignments, then one or two missing assignments won't cause them to fail.  That's fair, right?

Not so.  Giving lots of graded assignments creates more work--for both the teacher and the student.  Instead of spending time pondering how best to engage students in their learning, reflecting on why a certain concept is so hard to teach, searching for ways to increase collaborative accountability, or a multitude of other worthy endeavors, teachers spend hours and hours looking at student work--much of which does not meet minimum expectations--and entering grades that only reflect the minutiae of what students are supposed to learn.  Instead of digging into content and creating solutions to complex problems, students spend time looking for papers in their backpacks, scribbling incomplete and shallow responses to questions, or guessing what to put in the blank to avoid zeroes in the grade book.   Imagine if assignments were fewer, deeper, more engaging, more relevant.  Imagine if students were taught how to give precise, considerate critique to each other along the way, so that by the time the teacher views the work, it is as exceptional as the student can possibly make it.  Win, win.  Students feels successful.  Teacher feels successful.  But that can't happen if there is a graded assignment every day.  There simply isn't time.

Daily grades are also no guarantee that students are actually competent in the subject matter.   A daily grade is an opportunity for a student to replicate how to solve an equation or write a complete sentence.  But regurgitation is not knowing.  A daily grade might be an indicator that at that particular moment, the student hasn't mastered a skill.  But it's not a reflection of what that student might be able to do with support.  Besides, poor daily grades are discouraging.  For students who struggle, poor daily grades can be a reason to stop caring.  Instead of daily grades, imagine if teachers presented intriguing problems that could be solved through the real work of the discipline.  Imagine if that same teacher provided students with rubrics that represented the evolution of how their thinking and comprehension would change as they explored a subject deeply in order to solve that intriguing problem.  Imagine if students were taught to use these rubrics to evaluate their own learning, and to share their progress with their teachers.  Would you even need daily grades?

Giving an abundance of graded assignments to ensure students pass their classes dilutes the meaning of every assignment.  Grades are supposed to reflect what students know, not their ability to hit the submit button or turn in an essay.  Does it really take 30 grades to prove their knowledge?  After guiding students through rigorous problem-solving methodologies, deep discussions, peer critiques, and sturdy self-evaluations, teachers would know exactly what their students know and don't know.