Week of Creativity

Funny how a week can have a theme through coincidence, or maybe someone is trying to tell me something. In reverse chronological order, in grad class we talked about whether the makeup of school was killing students creativity? Are we educating them in a complete manner? Are we neglecting certain aspects of it? Nearly every educator has seen Sir Ken Robinson's TED talks but they are worth watching again. Lots of fundamental assumptions we make about education that maybe we should being to reexamine. Is anyone going to do it? Probably not outside of small pockets of charter schools and private institutions. Second, on Tues at a talk put on by google Chris Craft discussed the importance of teachers being role models for modeling creativity. Often the teachers are the road block to allowing a student to being creative. His example was a student who really wanted to learn more about coding. He didn't know how to code so he taught himself, so he could in turn teach the students. How often do teachers go out and learn a new skill so they can bring it back into the classroom. The skills we grew up learning, are not always the skills this generation of students are interested in. Just as we encourage them to learn new material and be creative, we need to as well. The best way to do that is to simply do it, but then communicate with the students what you are learning. A simple suggestion he gave was replacing/adding to your "What I am reading now..." poster with "What I am learning now..." Mine will be going up shortly.