Creativity, Literacy and Gaming: An Anecdote about Little Big Planet

My six years old son has been asking me to help him spell lately. "Dad" he shouts from the general vicinity of the TV "how do you spell test? Oh I got it". After a few questions I was curious so I came to see what he was doing (the yelling back and forth was getting less fun). I see Itai perched on the couch in front of the tv manipulating characters and obstacles as he is creating a level in the game LittleBigPlanet. He was integrating writing, his knowledge of games, and design decisions to create a game level. As I was expressing my wonderment about his creativity Asaf who is 16 turned to me and said. "He has been doing it for months!". "I knew he playing" I said "but has he published them online?" "Yes", was the answer, "he made about a hundred, but he can publish only 20".

My thought is something like this: while we argue about how much technology and how should be part of our children's educational experience they are actually moving ahead. But only if we give them great tools to work with: Lego, iPads, LittleBigPlanet, all commercial ideas yet all outstanding educational tools. With some guidance children of this generation can become the most imaginative generation the world has ever seen- combining powerful tools, experimenting and social dimensions. Piaget talked about the child as a scientist learning about the physical world about her. Now after the physical world they can start exploring virtual worlds of possibilities- expanding the potential for development.
This somehow made me hopeful.
Trailer About LittleBigPlanet Publishing

Teachers goin' Mobile

I am spending a good portion of my waking hours at the KDS Reading Center this summer. Class starts with introducing iPads. My students last year have never used an iPad. This year I have about 20% that have personal iPads. Now we provide everyone with an iPad for use during tutoring while some educational systems are buying devices in bulk, teachers are buying individual devices and changing their own classroom circumstance from the bottom up.
At first the potential expenditure considering teacher salaries took me a back a bit. But then I reflected that teachers have always supplemented what districts and schools provide with things they bought on their own. This is just a single larger purchase, on the other hand unlike a glue stick it is not just for the classroom.
A single teacher owned device in the classroom is not a solution for technology integration, but it is a start. If supported with some casual professional development it can become the foundation to wider, successful mobile adoption when student devices become reality. As with other technologies, small scale use will produce local expertise that can be leveraged when wider implementation of mobile happens at the school.
Of course schools can help along by purchasing a few devices for teachers...

Creative Teaching, Personal Growth, and the Brain Drain

Take one: One of our presenters in the Tech EDGE conference (coming next week for the third time) told me when we had a few  minutes that she was tired of how slowly her district was transforming. She felt that after 5+ years at the forefront of technology implementation she wanted to move to better and bigger things.
Take two: At the NETA conference last spring I came face to face with a sobering reality. Here was a crowd eager to learn, eager to grow and be creative in teaching. We heard exceptional speaker, learned new applications and had way too much coffee together. But conversations around the tables and the professional reality of many of the presenters (and I suspect participants as well) was in transition. Many were working at the district level, ESU (Educational Service Units), some even for technology companies.

The question is whether education or more specifically teaching is experiencing a "brain drain". Is it possible that  teachers leaving the profession after 5-20 years experience because they cannot be creative and innovative in large bureaucratic systems? The data I have is anecdotal (there is a dissertation in this I am sure) but still intriguing. It is possible that creative and innovative teachers seek out more education, professional development and new ideas. I have long held the belief that there is a point in a teacher's career that she feels that there must be something else out there beyond the district. That when teachers seek out professional development, graduate degrees and new projects. The irony is that the new knowledge and innovative ideas can be exactly the thing that starts distancing them from the classroom until they cannot see themselves going on and start looking for alternatives. When the opportunity is there they get a doctoral degree, become teacher educators, or perhaps go work for Apple.

Why now? I think that there are structural reasons in public education that may be encouraging the "brain drain". On the one hand the increased pressure on teachers to "perform" on high stakes standardized measures constrain curriculum and creativity leaving little to no room for experimentation. This is contrasted by the fast paced changes in technology and society. The difference in rate of change is staggering. Finally, it is more socially acceptable and often necessary to change careers at least once in adulthood.

While I understand the urge to make personal changes I wonder if the state of public education might be progressively hurt by this phenomenon. Are the best minds running in the other direction? It could be that this is "The new normal" for education. The challenge is not just having a younger less experienced teaching force, it is that a good portion of the veteran work force are exactly those who are less likely to innovate and lead positive change. Now, to be totally honest, I am not in the classroom anymore either. I made the same move. How, I wonder, can we create schools that will allow teachers like that to stay, grow, and innovate without leaving the profession? Should this even be a goal?

On Inspiration

It is the end of the year in our school district so my children came home with all that was left in their class. Oren who is in second grade came back with his writing notebook. It turns out he has been prolific and wrote among other creations a 13 chapter story. I give full credit to his fantastic language arts teacher Todd. What I found curious among his story is his take on Khoya. Khoya is a digital book on the iPad made somewhat famous through a TED presentation. The book itself delightfully integrates visual, musical and text elements while taking advantage of interactivity (see review and demo here). Oren has created his fan fiction- version of the story with borrowed vocabulary, storyline, and characters. Yet the story had a lot of him as well. I relearned what I already knew and we keep hearing from research. Reading with and to your students and children is crucial, it expands their vocabulary and world of ideas- it makes them creative and gives them a foundation from which to soar.

Art Education & the World

This post is a little preachy. I thought about it for awhile and decided to nevertheless publish...
After spending 5 days discussing the 2015 redrafting of the millennium goals with an emphasis on learning I started thinking. Here is an opportunity to have broader say in the way the leading countries impact the development of education in the developing world and we- we go to basics. The tone is similar to my previous post on new literacies and the narrow definition of what students all around the world need.
The discussions around the tables were about reading fluency, phonics and in some circles empowerment and local control. Before we lose our focus and make other nations repeat our tortured paths to education and follow in our footsteps through the power of our funding let's try to learn from the mobile wireless revolution in the developing world.
I've used this metaphor before and I think it still applies. For developing countries to get to where they want to be they do not need to necessarily follow every step that the the developed world went through. In fact, they can and probably should decide on their own priorities and leapfrog to that place.
This is where goals in arts can be really put into place. Encouraging the continuation and expansion of local art forms, atrisanship and culture should have equal footing with decoding and fluency. The integration of rich meaningful experiences will help enhance children's school experiences and prepare them for a full meaningful life. The revolution should be making school relevant and delightful with music, visual art, dance as well as writing and math. The whole world is striving for creative citizens- not for decoders who can perform simple tasks. Technology and creativity can help bridge those differences and increase the diversity in the world of ideas. So my call is simple: lets make room in the new goals for something more than basic education. We should not wait until the "basics" instead it should be part of the basics making education a full experience that can leapfrog whole generations into the 21st century.

Location:Lincoln,United States

Diversity in the Teaching Force

While not directly related to arts integration nor literacy it is a topic that I've been thinking about quite extensively lately.  We are embarking on a path that will increase the number of diverse pre-service teachers. The goals are two-fold. Enriching all students in our program by having diverse viewpoints and personal histories that will help all children understand their increasingly diverse students. At the same time increasing the diversity in the teaching profession so students have role models that look familiar. I am in no way suggesting that African American students should have only African American teachers or vice versa. I am just suggesting that the data we collected shows such disparity that we have to act and act now. Link to the full file is here.

World Literacy Summit

I am spending a few days in Trinity College in Oxford as part of the World Literacy Summit. We are also trying to create a declaration going forward www.oxforddeclarartion.org.
What has gotten me thinking is the feeling that we are talking about old literacies and we are neglecting new literacies that will really provide a leg up in development.
My question is somewhat neo-marxist in its tone but important to contemplate. Are efforts in the developing world to extend old literacies foundational to integrating them into the 21st century OR are we setting them up to be a century behind so they can stay our industrial periphery while we reap the befits of the information age and knowledge economy?
The best answer I heard was this morning with a focus on adult literacy with Friere's work using the REFLECT process as presented by David Archer from ActionAID International. Let the participants define the parameters of literacy instruction as you help problematize their goals and foster discussion.

I just wonder how much of this work is filtering down to the larger development projects and their evaluation efforts is the true challenge.

Location:Trinity College,Oxford,United Kingdom

Back to Creativity- A Response

I find myself in a discussion on creativity with Kurt Knecht and Bob Woody. I come at creativity from the psychological research side and my experience conducting research on the integration of arts into the elementary curriculum for a decade. I did not measure creativity, in fact I resisted some of the pressures. I find that most measures of creativity are artificially focused on a small subset of tasks without extensive validity to back them up. I am not opposed though to the social science  endeavor studying the phenomena as Kurt has said. I come at it from the educational side and my understanding of how our political and educational leadership systems work.

It is widely perceived that America's advantage in the world is it's creativity. We once manufactured, engineered, were well funded and had a technology edge. As a society we feel that America has lost its edge and we are worried looking for our advantage over China and other threats. Our political system needs to manufacture a solution that will get them elected. The way things go the next logical step is to say: well if our advantage is creativity then how do we promote it from kindergarten and how do we really know children are creative? At this point the big testing companies will offer a test of creativity- a standardized one and we will create a generation of students "uniformly creative" then discover it didn't work and blame teachers and unions. My reluctance is really fear of a series of intended consequences that leads to less time for music and art in school because we have to teach creativity.

Finally a note about the nature of creativity. I believe that creativity is rooted in a deep understanding of a domain as a precursor. Lehrer describes the study of mopping to find a new solution. The key part of the story for me was that Continuum designers studied mopping for 6 months then learned from an expert who was years at the task, that is I believe he described the evidence that creative innovation is actually linked to doing! The second aspect the Lehrer highlights and I actually agree with is having the space to try, fail and retry. It is where schools have the hardest time creating the time and space to experiment. We have packed the curriculum with so much "stuff" so many standards and tests that teachers are hard pressed to find time for their students to experiment and wonder per Kurt Knecht or play per Margaret Latta. Without this space to be wrong creativity is a risk not worth taking.

This space for risk with the notions of Flow and Studio habits of mind are the best linkages to elementary education (my domain).
So in summary I do not think we should shy away from studying creativity, only that we should be very careful as both Kurt and Bob emphasized shy away from over generalizing. My suggestion is always to go back to the original studies and avoid the urge to read journalistic versions.

A Flipping Rant

Khan and Gates

No, its not what you think and it is still a clean blog. I spent some time thinking last week on flipped learning a term that is in very real danger of becoming a cliche. It started with Khan and his academy that I have discussed before and even recommended on my netcast. I have actually used a version of a flipped classroom in a methodology course I teach in the summer using the Khan academy mini lessons to help students go through the fundamental calculations in descriptive statistics. More recently Hake a prolific observer of science education has posted a series of responses to the quality of the Khan academy instructional approaches (very old fashioned really) that can be seen here. I agree with much of what's been said there but here I have another point to make.
Everyone is hailing this approach as the new silver bullet- new thinking about education that will help transform education. I have the sinking suspicion that the support for this model is actually rooted in two very irrelevant sources. The first is the observation that the instruction on the Khan academy video's is in fact very old fashioned. It is exactly the same thing that I had in Math when I went to school, the only difference is that you can watch it your time repeatedly without driving your teacher crazy.
The second reason this approach is deemed great is that it is supported by someone that has never been an educator and knows very little about learning theory. We love innovators in education that come from other realms and can show educators the light.

Students discussing the media they read at home
during Literature Circles

My rant, however, goes in a very different direction. English language arts and social studies teachers (primarily) have from the dawn of time been flipping their classrooms. They sent students home with the direction of consuming media (books, movies, photos, source documents). The  in class everyone discussed the novels, source documents and produced projects about them. Yet, this does not occur to CNN, BBC or Bill Gates. It turns out that every high-school teacher has been doing it for years. So why do we like when Khan does it? again because it is in math, because it is coming from outside education, because first he made his millions in the stock market and then he discovered education- such a sacrifice. Much more than a teacher that has skipped the getting rich part and dedicated his life to children without the benefit of earnings and Bill Gates loving embrace.
My flipping sisters and brothers who teach in flippin' ways you were there first and will still be there even after Khan fades into distant memory.

An atypical post: Empathy and the act of Artistic Creation

Last week I had two encounters with artists that expressed an empathetic link to exceptional students. Last thursday I went to listen to my son performing as part if the Lincoln High Slam Poetry team. Before they performed we had the pleasure of listening to Chris August Slamming. His most potent poetry seems to have emerged from his interaction with students with disabilities when he was a special education teacher. An example is in this selection that reminds me at times of Taylor Mali. That night I started thinking about ways this experience with students makes us more empathetic in a way that finds its way into an artistic outlet OR maybe it is a shared sensitivity that manifests itself in teaching and caring as well as for creating.

Later in the week I read Kurt Knecht's (a friend and fellow blogger) post about deciding to become a composer. In it he concludes with: "After that morning, I knew two things. I didn’t want to play in places with non-union stagehands, and I wanted to learn how to write music that could make mentally handicapped children clap."

I do not really think that all artists have more empathy. I think there are too many examples to the contrary, but I think that in the act of creating for an audience there is at times a sense of audience (and both my examples are from performance art) that makes us more empathetic. To do that successfully an artist must achieve at least a limited sense of empathy.

The interesting piece in this empathy sense is that empathy is a "pay it forward" idea. I think that when an audience is privy to this empathy they are automatically more empathetic towards the person (think Teebo). In Chris's case it makes his word choice and other choices easier to swallow because he did show us a different side as well. 

I think that the same can hold for kids- performance and artistic creation can foster their sense of empathy as well.

Teaching Art Online

A prospective graduate student came by a few weeks ago. His goal as he stated it is to minimize damage to rural students by providing quality arts instruction online or through distance education in other means. I worry.
I told him that I worried, arts education is a field that requires demonstratin, proximity and more than anything else mentoring. This kind of mentoring is extremely hard to reproduce at a distance. I think that the ability to look at the dancers moves from multiple perspectives, the painters brush strokes or the guitarist hands are crucial elements that cannot be done at a distance. I teach distance courses and Ithink some of


them are great- but not in arts education or arts integration.
My second concern was that by creating online replacements we urge districts that have stuck by their specialists and invested in them to stop. If the quality is there, they might say, why not save a bundle. So what can be done instead?
Here are some ideas:
1. Train classroom teachers in arts integration and enhance their understanding through studio experiences with local artists and museum resources.
2. If online lessons are created integrate them with rich artist in residence programs- mandated not just as an option. The experieneces must be bundled and truly integrated.
3. Educate school boards and administrators about the importance of the arts.

Do not let rural schools do without arts....

Learning Design in Educational Apps

In the past few weeks I have started a netcast on using iPads in k12 education (tech edge on iTunesU). My co-host Allison and I spend quite a few hours every week trying to find apps that are educationally sound. The challenge is quite real. What we've learned may not be surprising, but it spells opportunity or disaster. Most of the "educational" apps are based on implicit and false theories of learning and design. This is not a failure of understanding a specific domain (say social studies) but instead a failure of understanding how we learn.
So what do I mean by opportunity or disaster? The opportunity exists for innovation to take over the marketplace with excellently designed educational apps. The disaster will emerge if after schools invest heavily in mobile devices and fail to deliver on learning simply because the apps that carry the lad are subpar.
We will keep looking fir educationally sound apps (or try to get close).
Check out the website and connect to the netcast:
http://cehs15.unl.edu/cms/index.php?s=18&p=190



- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Thinking Fast and Slow in Education- Part 1

I am currently reading Thinking Fast and Slow by Nobel prize winner Kahneman (see a book review here). I am still processing some of the information (or thinking slowly...) but I see some obvious implications for teaching and technology. The first is the positive bias- we almost always underestimate the challenge and overestimate our capacity, the second is our lack of ability to intuitively understand statistical properties of the world around us.
In  1999 I saw this first hand in a classroom. In a summer school based on Bob Calfee's WordWork we had one kindergarten teacher who claimed to have gone through the eight-week program in three weeks. We were surprised but she claimed that all of her students have a solid grasp of all short vowel CVC words and are ready to advance beyond it. How do you know? we inquired, she replied that she has been observing her students being successful in making words. Since we assessed students in every classroom on a biweekly rotation we soon had some results from the classroom. Only four out of 18 students could actually produce the patterns reliably without repeated teacher cues. In essence the teacher saw her best students succeed and conjectured that all of her students could.
This is the reason that we should have an emphasis on formal assessment points in which we can get an honest estimate of what our students can do- not what we believe or want them to. Often I hear teachers saying - I know this student can do a lot better - yet they didn't. Now, sometimes it is true and due to some setting event, then a retest is in order. But if a student is consistently under-performing in a well designed assessment opportunity- then we have simply overestimated their capacity based on effort, our support for their work etc.

In technology and especially project based learning that is emerging as a major component in the (welcome) push for 21st century skills we need to make sure that we have a solid way to assess achievement that circumvents our biases and gains a real windows to what students can do.