EDIM508 Creativity

Schools are destroying creativity.  This assault is being done both explicitly and implicitly.  When schools fail to acknowledge and recognize creative efforts among students, they are passively diminishing creativity.  When schools actively accost students for providing the "wrong" answer, they trounce on creative attempts.  There is a strong emphasis on academic standards, learning targets, and standardized testing.  With this push to become uniform, there is little room for students to perform individually and develop their own original ideas.

Sir Ken Robinson focused his talk on being right or wrong.  Robinson's talk covers the idea that students are now afraid of being wrong, that being wrong has become the worst thing a student could do in school.  Our worksheets, tests, and projects have developed a climate of factual expectancy.  When students are concerned about THE right answer, they stop concerning themselves with the learning to get that answer.

Robinson's talk provides cultural significance and history to this observation.  If schools have evolved as a support structure to industrialization, then they have met the goal of creating industrialized workers.  But we have progressed far from an early industrial civilization.   It is time for classroom instruction to catch up and surpass.

In Science, I want students to make mistakes.  I want students to become engaged in the material and develop their own learning experiences and understandings.  I want students to learn through play instead of protocol and procedure.  The idea of investigating and receiving wrong answers creates opportunity for feedback and development, refinement and enhancement.  Wrong answers are a part of science.

Technology can help with that.  There are many tools available for students to explore.  Many PhET simulations can be used as scripted learning, followed by freeform exploration.  As assessment products, tools such as xtranormal.com, glogster, prezi, voicethread, and more offer great opportunities.  These tools simplify the technical requirements for creativity into little more than the creative process.  xtranormal allows students to create animated videos without knowing how to draw or edit.  Instead, the students create dialog and use the web tools to attach the dialog to animated characters.  A project I could envision with this tool would be planetary studies in Earth and Space Science.  The students could find creative ways to inform the viewers about planets, such as travel agents, news reporters, visitors from other worlds, etc.  With artistic license, the students share key ideas about the planets.

Creativity is important.  Students who can develop original ideas, analyze and develop abstract relationships are in a position to command the postindustrial world.  As the technology progresses, the ability to create and share becomes more available and the demand for automatons reduces.

Robinson, K.(n.d.). Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity | Video on TED.com. TED:Ideas worth spreading. Retrieved November 17, 2011, fromhttp://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html