“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.” – Pablo Picasso
Darya Zabelina and Michael Robinson of North Dakota State University conducted research based on this principle and showed that with the responsibilities and constraints of adulthood, the playfulness and curiosity of childhood can sometimes get lost and are instead replaced by conventional responses. In a recent paper, they took 76 undergraduates and assigned them to two random groups. The first group was given the following instructions:
“You are 7 years old. School is canceled, and you have the entire day to yourself. What would you do? Where would you go? Who would you see?”
The second group was given identical instructions but without the reference to being 7 years of age – they thought with their adult mindset. According to Zabelina and Robinson, the former group produced more creative work than the latter research group. Interestingly, they also discovered that undergraduates who were more introverted showed even greater sign of creativity of they were given the opportunity to work as a young child, without inhibitions and restrictions of being adults.
These are fascinating findings, but perhaps not completely surprising? Imagine working everyday without having to worry what other people thought; what would you do? Statement like the one above is also good to use as ice breakers in Department/Team Meetings and give you the possibility of starting discussions without worrying too much about the initial ideas.
We came across this slideshow on SlideShare recently which encapsulates not only the innocence of childhood but also what we could achieve with simple but creative ways of using text, images and post-its to communicate a message. The potential for using this format is immense and does not need to be very complicated. Whether one uses frame-by-frame animation in Adobe Flash or with a camcorder or digital camera, the results could be tremendous and the creative output for students very positive. This is something we will return to in our classrooms.
If you have a spare few moments please visit the creator’s website Betsy Streeter.
There has been a drive recently to use methods like the one just mentioned and companies like CommonCraft have started producing tutorials ‘in plain English’ using similar techniques to Betsy Streeter although the ones created by CommonCraft are likely to cost a few bob.
Using Stop Frame Animation in the classroom could have great potential not only for students’ learning but also for encouraging them to think about abstractions, concepts and to give them the opportunity to demonstrate their understanding in a practical way. The following two examples show how easily your classes could use Stop Frame Animation using post-it notes – mind you, you’d need quite a few…
Other ideas for using Stop Frame Animation in the classroom could be to:
make use LEGO to explain an event e.g. why William the Conqueror won the Battle of Hastings.
use stickies to create a conversation between two people as well as thought bubbles that explain how they really feel about each other’s comments.
encourage whole class participation by getting each student to add an element to a drawing or comic which creates the complete illustration.
similar to the one above but students only use photos and images to tell a story. This is recorded with each class so the story might change drastically depending on the group involved – great for discussions afterwards!
In this fourth part of Educational Mashups (see Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) we’re looking at a range of ideas from a cross-section of industries which can encourage us to become even more creative, or if the worst case scenario has already kicked in, break that dreaded writer’s or thinking bloc.
Take a Mini Retirement?
The remarkable designer Stefan Sagmeister realised that his studio was coasting, lacked spark and innovative ideas – not good for a forward thinking design studio. To halt the continuation of a potentially dire future Stefan decided to take time off. In his view, we spend approximately 25 years of our lives learning, then there’s another 40 years for working and 15 for retirement. To combat this lack of creativity and drive, Sagmeister decided to take 5 of the 15 retirement years and intersperse them with the working years leaving 1 year sabbatical every seven years.
Take a look at his talk at the TED 2010 conference where he explains his ideas further:
Most of the design ideas Sagmeister produced over the next 7 years came from that sabbatical. Take a look at his website to discover his amazing work and inspiring book Things I have Learned in My Life. Sagmeister does not advocate that you ‘just take time off’ without planning your sabbatical. On the contrary, he tried that and it did not work. He produced a timetable for thinking and stuck to it and there is of course that tiny little detail of funding your time off…
Sagmeisters timetable
As teachers and educators isn’t it impossible to take time of from work to reflect? Isn’t that a luxury we can’t afford? In some respects it is impossible, well at least if you wish to take 12 months. However, the potential to use some of your holidays as reflection time and experience booster, is possible and should be encouarged. Humour us here, take out a pen and paper do this:
Write down three things you’d always wanted to do but never seem to have the time.
Many of us can probably agree that holidays seem to disappear once started. Time off is spent visiting friends, catching up speaking to people on the phone, drinking good wine and going on that well-deserved holiday to the French riviera. Work, Love and Play. That’s the way life goes? In March last year Johannes decided to refrain from doing any additional work as he had just completed two books and two interactive CD-ROMs together with Neal. It was time for a long break. As Johannes’ wife became pregnant and because he also started a new job in September of the same year, rest seemed to be the perfect thing. This was a very exciting time of course and much of the time was spent preparing for the new arrival (!) but there was also plenty of time to read, listen to talks, watch good films, reflect as well as visiting interesting locations in the UK and Sweden. This time away from writing really provided space for thinking and developing ideas. It was also during this time that the idea for a new book came up.
After eight months Neal and Johannes meet up to discuss the idea for a fifth book and they both agreed to start a blog to keep ‘brainstorming’ ideas, and in essence, write small chunks of the book online something which they did with Exam Class Toolkit (many of those core ideas can still be found on the old website). We had not discussed any writing projects for more than a year and it was that time away from writing that inspired us to start Take the Plunge (which is migrating soon). Moving forward and becoming more creative requires us to broaden our horizons just like Stefan Sagmeister so when you plan your break or holiday next time why not include moments of reflection and new experiences that are not neccessarily linked to work.
Making the ‘dull’ interesting
How often do we miss, skip or ignore some of the minor things that happen or appear during a normal working day? Read each statement below and immediately say/write down what you do:
when students enter your classroom?
during the first 5 minutes of your Department/Team Meetings?
if a student arrives late?
What do you do then – prep, hand out worksheets, wait? Chat to colleagues; go through the agenda? Tell off the student; ignore them; show them to a chair? What do you think students do outside your classroom while they wait for you; or what colleagues do whilst you talk them through the agenda and so on? If we consider that these seemingly insignificant issues can make a difference and try to use our imagination to make them matter then we are not only developing our own creative teaching repertoire but this process could, indirectly, lead us to encourage students to examine the details in the fabric in whatever they do. Sounds a bit far-fetched? Watch this brief clip to see what we mean:
Being creative about minor details could also make students’ learning experience more enjoyable. If you want to make students remember your lessons as something different and making them feel positive and engaged when they walk through your doors or get your colleagues inspired in meetings, then consider how you could make the dull more interesting.
Here are a few examples of using the smaller details to your advantage:
take photographs of the students as the walk in and then at the start of the lesson show a selection and ask them what they were thinking or felt as they walked in
use QR codes outside the classroom and get them excited about what they will learn (see this post on using QR Codes in your lessons) even before they walk through your door
if you have a new student to the class, and particularly if they arrive late, shake their hand and introduce yourself, then show them to where they should sit
Can we make a movie, Sir? Or, How to Get Students to Listen
Students enjoy producing their own mini movies, either by piecing together other people’s clips or by recording their own dramas. Some of these can be amazing movies particularly when they have gone out of their way for example by using Green Screen technology or used different locations to enhance the content of the production. Sometimes, however, without the guidance by the teacher, the movies students create can lack substance and are simply a ‘fun thing to watch’ – a wasted lesson. Next time one of your students ask if they can make a movie to answer the key question of the lesson why not challenge them to write a script and create an animation that illustrates the key messages of that script. A bit unclear? Watch the first 30-40 seconds of the movie below to see what we mean:
This brief animation was produced by The Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) and uses Barbara Ehrenreich’s talk ‘Smile or Die’ to encapsulate key segments of her speech – great speech by the way. If students use this way of presenting their information and the script will have to be purposeful and the illustrations clear.
If you want students to really listen to an audio clip, understand a piece of text or make them watch that important documentary without having to play video bingo or fill-in-the-blanks-as-you-watch, then showing them examples of animated typography can inspire them to listen more carefully, particularly if they have to create one themselves. The following audio has been taken from the movie Snatch and the producer of the animated clip could quite easily have used a combination of Prezi and a standard video editor to create this effect – students could do a similar version on their own:
Using typography, even at a very basic level, can engage students more creatively in their work. This is worth exploring further. Here is a series of links if you would like to look into typography a bit more:
In the first part of this post we greatly criticised advice on creatively for jumping in at the deep end and urging people to try something differently. While we wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment, this approach comes too early in the process. Before you can do anything else, you really need to know your subject – and you need to know it well.
However, good subject knowledge alone does not make you creative – it might, though, help you to win Mastermind. Most teachers have good subject knowledge, but we would argue that too few keep up with research in their area (I once reccommended Charles Leadbeater’s book ‘We Think’ to a Economics colleague I met on a course, he replied “Hmm, I don’t really read about Business and Economics, it doesn’t interest me.” How can you effectively teach a subject that doesn’t interest you?). Once you have a base of knowledge you can more effecvtively add to it and make use of quirky stuff.
We believe it gets slightly more complicated though. Knowledge is great and will impact on your teaching – read Dylan Wiliam at the Association for Learning Technology Conference for proof – but it will not on its own make you more creative. For this you need to take a lesson from Bananarama:
It ain’t what you do it’s the way that you do it
And that’s what gets results
Teachers need to actively engage with research and writings about the process of teaching. They need to dive in and revel in the art of teaching. As deliverers of INSET, we often hear teachers talking about what they would like from a session, and invariably the majority say ‘Lots of practical tips and activities that we can use straight away.’ We can see the logic in this and it might have an impact on lessons for the rest of the week. This is want many teachers think that they want, but it is not what they need. As Geoff Petty puts it:
It is one thing to know what methods work, quite another to understand why. Without understanding why they work we are most unlikely to use them effectively. We will also be unable to criticise constructively our own and others’ practice.
His book and the now more widely known ‘Visible Learning’ by John Hattie make explicit what good teachers should be doing in the clasroom and back this up with the reasons why.
Understanding the mechanics of teaching is essential for being creative. Only when you understand what needs to be done and, more crucially why, will you be in a position to make a judgement about where a leftfield creative idea might fit in and be effective. Right now, teachers need to be reading and talking about Hattie and Petty – Neal has broken down part of Hattie’s research and included it in a teaching and learning newsletter that will go out to all staff (the section is called ‘Top Hattie’). In another publication (2002), Hattie lists the following top traits of expert teachers:
1. Expert teachers set challenging goals
2. Expert teachers had a deep understanding of teaching and learning
3. Expert teachers monitor learning and provide feedback
There are sixteen in total and they can be downloaded from Hattie’s website as a pdf. There is more research out there and we have made a list of some of our favourites on our innovative ict site.
Knowing about teching and being actively engaged with the way it fits together and why things work in the classroom is going to be more of an event than simply turning up. Think about the feeling you get when you decorate a room yourself. You could have ‘got someone in’ to do it, but when you have cleaned your brushes and step back to see the fruits of your labour it feels good – even if it did take the best part of two weekends. Why is this? Is it just a minor sense of achievement – as close to creating your own Sistene Chapel as you are going to get? In some ways it is, but is is also the fact that you did it yourself and you made it happen.It was you that laid out the dust sheets to protect the floor, you that cut in the walls at ceiling level, you that switched to gloss paint for the woodwork. You figured out what needed to be done and why and then you did it. Buying the right colour of paint does not get the job done.
The same applies to teaching. In a recent blog post Nick Dennis showed how subject knowledge and understanding the mechanics of teaching can be combined to form an effective lesson. He talks about the role of Technology in creating engagement and not just as another way for students to research.
What this illustrates is that teachers also need to be reading about their subject, and we really like the idea of using department meetings as reading groups. Give everyone the same book, read it and talk about how it can be used. It would cost very little – find something in the Waterstones 3 for 2 sale – and would have a massive impact on learning.
Okay, so all this would take up time and that is something we are all short on. What we will say is that teachers need strictly prioritise theb tasks they have to perform and reading both subject content and educational research needs to be near the top of the list. We appreciate this is hard and that teachers have a multitude of things to do, but research should be one of those things. David Allen is a respected Time Management Guru writing in Wired UK :
A vast majority of professionals are in “emergency scanning” mode. Their self-management consists of checking for and acting on the loudest immediacies – in email, in the hallways and on the phone. Everything else is shoved to the side of the desk, and to the back of their mind. Because they’re focused only on “priorities”, and are paying attention only to the most intheir- face stuff, everyone else has to raise the noise level to “emergency” mode to get any audience at all. Sensitivity and responsiveness to input are criteria for the evolution of a species; and many an organisation has a nervous system that keeps them low on the food chain…
I’m not voting for throwing strategy to the winds, nor giving equal weight to all the options of where you could put your focus. You’re always setting priorities by simply doing one thing instead of others. I’m recommending you strive to maintain a view of the whole picture, leaving nothing – little, big, personal or professional – uncaptured, unclarified and unorganised. Then constantly question what you think is the most important thing to be doing. Pay attention to the still, small voice that probably does know what needs your focus. Challenge the assumption that it always has to be the “most important thing”, which may be based on a preconceived strategy from a limited context.
It is not a simple task, but as Depeche Mode once said:
Is simplicity best, or simply the easiest?
If teachers want to be creative and teach outstanding lessons then they need to first become well read professionals, with a strong grasp of the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of teaching.
If you are working in different geographical areas and struggle to meet regularly then you need to find easy yet effective solutions to ensure that your collaboration does not suffer. Also, these ideas work well if you simply wish to kick-start the collaboration before meeting. Here follows a series if ideas that could help maintain a continuous creative working relationship:
Wallwisher: the creative wall
Wallwisher.com: great for sharing ideas – click to view example
Wallwisher.com is an online notice board where you create the content by adding interactive stickies to the board. This online tool is superb to use get the creative flare sparked up amongst colleagues. Sign up and start your own wall, then your co-workers can upload images, share ideas and links. Wallwisher is ideal to use a couple of days before the big planning meeting as it gets everyone thinking, then you start the meeting by going through the team’s examples.
The Creative Blog:
Blogs are commonplace nowadays and the list of blogging software is growing steadily and it’s fairly straightforward to set one up having little or no coding experience. The idea behind the creative blog is to keep a running discussion on a key issue, and change the issue regularly. For example, one school comes up with the topic for discussion and the teachers share ideas by adding comments. One particularly good way of keeping the creative flow going is to have regular times when staff or departments add their thoughts e.g. at Department Meetings. At the end of the set time frame, e.g. every half term, the post is printed to PDF or Issuu /ZinePal for easy sharing and to put the creative thoughts onto paper.
Simple Video-Conferencing:
You might have tried to do video-conferencing but you found it slow with poor audio and video quality? Although some methods are still annoyingly poor, some tools are in fact very good e.g. MikoGo.com . This service is not only free but also very straight forward and all you have to do is to register and download the MikoGo widget which you use to meet online.
Each time you want to start a session simply launch MikoGo and copy the session ID and then email/phone whoever you are meeting with and they enter the session ID – done! If you are doing vid-conf individually then inbuilt or basic webcams are fine. However, if you want to capture more than one person you’d benefit from a Point Tilt and Zoom video camera. They can be pricey but there are cheaper alternatives. The PTZs are great as they enable you to involve people around the room by ‘Pointing’ the camera and then zooming in on the person.
Collaborative Mapping:
This process is simple and only requires the people involved to sign up to a mind-mapping website that allows for sharing and collaborating on the same mind-map. There are many such tools available like for example:
CoMapping.com $25/year (approx £15): This is a superb tool as it gives users the possibility of collaborating on the same map at the same time.
Bubbl.us Free: Another solid application where people can work together on the same maps although not at the same time.
The strength of these types of online tools lay in the opportunity to sketch out rough ideas whilst at the same time build on each others’ thoughts. Many of such mind-mapping websites also give users to possibility of uploading images, adding links and even documents of various kinds. These more powerful features tend to involve a nominal charge, like with CoMapping (or MindMeister.com), but it is worth the money spent as you can lead, develop and collaborate on very large projects quickly and easily without much delay or complications. We have worked with both teachers and students on different projects and everyone agrees that it made collaborating more engaging and efficient – students benefited greatly during group work particularly when it involved a longer independent learning project spanning across a half-term as they could continue to work from home or simply just uploading documents, images and audio files to use when they returned to school.
If you haven’t tried any if these ideas yet then why not use one or two of the examples with a current collaboration, you will not regret it.
I had the pleasure of meeting the educational officer of a local puppet theater the other day and it got me thinking about the power of active and ‘hands-on’ learning as well as the opportunity for pupils to consider both the finer details and the bigger picture no matter the subject or topic. There are a number of different ways to using puppets in your teaching and a great possibility to involve pupils of all ages in creative projects in and out of school.
Produce your own puppet:
Puppets can either be supplied or, even better, the class create their own either one per pupil or one puppet per group ( three-four pupils in each group). There are online guides to creating puppets and local charities can also provide expertise for a nominal fee. By producing their own versions they are immediately exposed to a series of challenges:
– they need to consider the finer details like what their character will wear and the reasons for this e.g. think about space/time and purpose; facial features e.g. what’s happened in their lives to make them look calm, grouchy and so forth.
– consider the context and the bigger picture and how their character will ‘slot into’ the story as well as the evolution of the character.
– by creating their own puppets they will also internalize their own stories about the characters, what they like, how they would react to different situations and so on. This means that pupils take the process more seriously than if they were asked to produce a piece of extended writing – it’s their little person!
Moving Stories:
Another possibility for using puppets in the classroom would be for schools to document the Puppet Play either by frame-by-frame animation, recorded video footage or, using tools like MikoGo.com to stream the play live to invited participants e.g. another class in another school.
I particularly like the latter option as it requires pupils to plan their stories carefully and rehearse well before streaming the play to the other schools and pupils tend to take their projects and roles more seriously if it involves an external party – they want to impress them! This could also involve the audience in a different way if they were given the opportunity to stop the play in motion and ask questions about the story, actions and particular characters. The puppeteers and the director then must think on their feet and adapt the play accordingly or simply answer the questions posed by their audience.
Adopt a Puppet:
I think this has immense scope particularly if a class decides to produce their own puppets. Essentially classes swap puppets and build new and exciting ways of using them. One way which pupils really enjoy is to use the characters as ‘talking heads’ to introduce new topics, as revision aids and to summarise key issues of a topic.
