CREATIVE AND CRITICAL THINKING

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High School Painting a Picture of Our Creative David Mc Grath, HS Principal Schoolby In his popular TedTalk soon to top 15 million views, Sir Ken Robinson shares the endearing anecdote of a little girl in a classroom drawing a picture of God. The teacher leans in to break the news gently, “Honey, no one knows what God looks like.” The child replies with unscathed focus on her drawing, “Don’t worry. They will in a minute.” Such confidence and poise. So much to gain and so little to lose... she has not yet learned inhibition and taking chances is second nature to this five year old. The call for 21 st century schools to highly value and effectively teach creativity is loud and clear. We know the world is changing at a mindboggling rate. We know industrial economies are giving way to service economies. And we know that most jobs our children will occupy don’t even exist today. With instant communication and collaboration through video conferencing, social media and collaborative 2.0 spaces, we know our global interconnectedness is greater than ever and infinitely more complex. Last month we were at a hiring fair in San Francisco, Skyping with a candidate in Missoula who later that evening conferenced with our next high school principal and his family in Mexico City. Before the end of the fair, we had met candidates in person from all over the US and Skyped with teachers in the Philippines, Mexico and China. The very nature of knowledge is changing too. Like the radio and printing press before it, the Internet brings the next seismic shift of information away from the privileged and educated few towards the knowledge-hungry masses. With a few clicks of a mouse, people all over the world are enrolling in university classes through free online providers linked with top universities. Currently at ASFG, we have a growing number of teachers enrolled in free college courses through a web-based system called Coursera. However, with access to information expanding, the challenge becomes less how to acquire knowledge but rather what to do with it. The convenience of knowing stuff dissipates as the power of imagining stuff grows. IBM’s 2010 global CEO study, Capitalizing on Complexity, found that in our increasingly complex and interconnected world, “creativity trumps all other leadership characteristics.” march 2013 CON NEX ION 4 The degree to which we are highly creative determines more than ever our success or failure. In the tech industry alone examples are everywhere. Google conducts 5 billion searches a day while AltaVista is unknown to this generation of digital natives. Facebook soars and MySpace is a distant memory. We browse through Chrome and Firefox and have long forgotten our Netscape bookmark. Live Profile is prolific and most teens have never heard of ICQ. Innovators know that what works today not only may not work, but will not work tomorrow. Is this a new idea that imagination, ingenuity and creativity are essential skills of our modern era? Certainly not. To quote the over-quoted Albert Einstein, “The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.” Almost 50 years ago Ted Kennedy eulogized his fallen brother Robert, “some men see things as they are and ask why, my brother imagined things that never were and asked why not.” If we really want our students to “get ahead” in their own projected professional and personal paths towards success, they have to be able to imagine, create and innovate. To land that ideal job, or better said, to create that ideal job, our students need to be highly creative. But more important than preparing them for their own individual career and life paths, we teach creativity so that our students will be (cliché alert) global citizens and leaders of tomorrow. Can we invent our way out of the many self-created and self-perpetuated problems such as global warming, poverty and human aggression? I am optimistic, but without creative people, the answer is a resounding no. I believe our fourth ASFG learning goal, community contributor, more than individual pursuits is at the heart of our efforts to teach creativity. So if the call for creativity is loud and clear, how are we doing in education? Are we ahead, with or behind the curve? I’ll let the educational pundits argue on the theoretical stage. For us here in schools working with students, teachers and parents every day, our beliefs, decisions and strategies matter. Where should we focus our efforts? Let’s start by debunking some myths about creativity itself. What our learning community believes about creativity is as important as our determined strategies to teach it. Myth 1. Creativity is born and lives most vibrantly in the arts. I disagree. It is within the arts where creativity is most appreciated and recognized as an essential component to the learning outcomes. However, creativity needs to be highly appreciated and taught in the sciences and mathematics. A beautiful poem which envelopes us in the human spirit undoubtedly requires creativity. But so does a new scientific model or an unconventional strategy to solve a math problem. The quantitative reasoning developed in the sciences goes hand in hand with creativity. Myth 2. Creativity happens spontaneously often without out much practice or background knowledge. I disagree. I believe in “learning the basics” for true innovation seldom stems from a peripheral or shallow understanding of the conceptual building blocks within a particular subject. Myth 3. Creativity is an inborn trait and is largely unlearned. I disagree. Under the right conditions, with the right community values and with deliberate teaching and assessing, creativity can certainly be learned. Myth 4. Creativity is by nature immeasurable in any reliable way. I disagree... wholeheartedly. Assessment of creativity, while elusive, is an extremely important part of providing an education that promotes and specifically teaches it. On the last point, I, the enthusiastic quantitative thinker, Mr. McMeasurment, believe the most important next-step is to imagine and build agreement around, not only the conditions that will promote creativity but also the observable product of creativity. And I finally arrive at my thesis statement. For whatever endeavor we purport to be “effective” or “helpful” on our never-ending but infinitely rewarding journey to teach and learn creativity, we must first agree upon and then describe what a highly creative person does. Our efforts to teach creativity will only be a means to the end of being creative. As faithful backwards-designers, we must first imagine what would be the observable outcome of a highly effective program of creativity and then use those outcomes to determine if our strategies are working or not. To focus only on the conditions that allow for students to be creative and ignoring the assessment of creativity itself, is like building a beautiful playground but then never observing the students playing on it. Perhaps the easiest method of measuring our students’ creativity is applying a test like the Torrence Test of Creativity which measures five mental characteristics: fluency, elaboration, originality, resistance to premature closure and abstractness. A typical item on such test might ask students to come up with as many uses for a brick as they can. Or, students are asked to draw a picture incorporating a given figure such as the one below. Such measures are appealing because they provide norm-referenced scores of creativity that allow us to step back and see beyond our local school context. But the short-comings of such a standardized approach are widespread. Our efforts to assess the teaching and learning of creativity must be more robust and more centered in authentic projects. In-house examples at ASFG such as our emergent curriculum in early childhood, Invention Convention in elementary, Project 20/20 in middle school and our senior projects in high school result in demonstrations of creativity that might not reliably show up on a standardized test. Our daunting task to robustly assess creativity endures but so does our resolve. We continue on this journey of imagination... So let’s together paint a picture of a creative school. Or, write a poem or a play. Storyboard a short film, AutoCad a blueprint, and for those mathamagicians out there, create and test a formula that predicts the interplay of essential variables of a creative school. Whatever our creative lens, let’s picture it…. What do we see? What color are the walls and where do they stand? How is the furniture arranged and in what unique architectural spaces? What do we hear? What sounds emanate from the classrooms, halls and playgrounds? Hammers pounding, drills boring, keyboards clicking? Who is speaking, who is listening and who is the audience? What do we smell? The musty scent of crisp pages in a classic novel? The distinctive air around a freshly printed 3D model? The richness of tilled earth from our school garden? What do we feel? The human touch, the sorrow of a theatrical tragedy, the exhilaration of improv, the calming reassurance of a scientific experiment well-designed and evidence well-collected and interpreted? And, most importantly, at the end of the day, after we establish the conditions in our school that encourage creativity and continue to explicitly teach it, how do we know if our students are successful in learning to be creative? What observable outcomes, projects, products and performances will provide the evidence that our students are ready to participate in our ever changing, increasingly complex and interconnected world? High School march 2013 CON NEX ION 5
ASFG´s Instructional Programs march 2013 CON NEX ION 6 Learn Neuroscience – or Gardening! by Julie Villand, Instructional Programs Director We all search for lifelong learning opportunities – ways to grow personally and professionally. In the past, returning to university implied a career change, a lifestyle change, and a financial burden. But these days, the technologically equipped and connected home means a major shift in opportunities to continue learning. With the Internet, the only hurdle that prevents most of us from taking courses in computer programming, human physiology, songwriting, or business strategy is the struggle to choose from so many interesting fields of study and the juggle of time management. Massive collections of online material such as iTunesU, TedTalks, Khan Academy, and YouTube supply today’s learners not only with entertainment, but rich sources of knowledge. These websites give us insight into an increasingly dynamic world where knowledge was previously limited to the information attainable in our geographic area. At times, browsing the Internet can be a let-down because the quantity of superficial and weak information sources exceeds the reliable information. We combat this frustration by attempting to follow only trustworthy sources. Universities and world-renown professors qualify in most situations. Elite universities that offer Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are a new source of quality information that allow learners to experience a university course from wherever they are. MOOCs are free, non-credit, online university courses. Not all educational experiences are created equally, and neither are MOOCs. MOOCs can be a collection of raw video, high quality indexed video, document collections, quizzes, chats, and collaborative networks. Although limited, MOOCs allow for some interaction among professors and students. Some MOOCs even make use of learning platforms that adapt to the information you have mastered and allow students to move forward at different paces. Some traditional reward systems still exist within MOOCs, such as point systems and final certificates of completion. Charles Darwin once said, “It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive, but those who can best manage change.” MOOCs bring a whole new opportunity for those who have inquisitive minds and enjoy new learning situations. MOOCs allow us to learn collaboratively with others around the world. It is a fact that collaboration is an important trend today. It allows us to investigate the world from a variety of perspectives. Can our education be of quality if we ignore the global collaboration possible today? Can we grow professionally and personally without participating in experiences that expose us to these opportunities? By answering these questions, MOOC experiments have proven to be the ones to follow. Elite universities are giving us the opportunity to experiment with learning in a collaborative setting. Free education from these major organizations is appreciated, but is this just pure philanthropy? Will there be a future return on the investment for these organizations? Universities can extend their reputation internationally through branding, and successful professors can gain a global following previously only accomplished through writing books. In addition to these self-fulfilling reasons, universities can receive massive amounts of data on learner behavior. But more importantly, universities understand that they cannot isolate themselves from the global collaboration trend; MOOCs are allowing them to be leaders in this movement. The choice to study Introduction to Music Production at Berklee College of Music (www.coursera.org), The Ancient Greek Hero at Harvard (www.edx.org), or Frontiers and Controversies in Astrophysics at Yale (oyc.yale.edu) is now possible with a web search among the top MOOCs. Our new personal challenges are to self-organize, choose, plan, allocate time, and complete a course. Regardless of your chosen or current career, the desire to keep studying is a reality for many. A MOOC is an experiment that we all should test. Doctors can learn how to program, computer scientists can learn to appreciate Roman architecture, artists can learn English composition, and teachers can learn neuroscience. Learning within a global community provides the opportunity to participate in the critical and creative thinking that will help us discover new connections, parallels, problems, and sustainable solutions that are so necessary in all of our lives. Enroll in a course today – try browsing www.coursera.org or www.edx.org to get started. march 2013 CON NEX ION 7
Page 1 and 2: From our LEARNING GOALS Our ASFG co
Page 3: Editor’s note Joaquin, 5 th grade
Page 7 and 8: PE & Sports 10 ASOMEX ASFG Guadalaj
Page 9 and 10: Library 14 Taking Time to Read marc
Page 11 and 12: Early Childhood 18 Drawing to Learn
Page 13 and 14: Early Childhood 22 El pensamiento c
Page 15 and 16: High School 26 THE ENHANCEMENT OF C
Page 17 and 18: Early Childhood 30 march 2013 CON N
Page 19 and 20: Middle School 34 The Fish Pharaoh:

CREATIVE AND CRITICAL THINKING

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