Education Innovation

Tales from the Wonder Emporium: Visual and Creative Thinking

Why is visual and creative thinking such an accepted business strategy? Why not education. Take a look at this sllideshare. Don't you wish your school or district thought this way?

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Linking on Thinking & Creativity

Education Innovation loves thinking about thinking. I also love linking about thinking.
Here are a few links on Creativity and Thinking that I found interesting.

Becoming an Outstanding Critical Thinker | Study Matrix

Do You Recognize These 10 Mental Blocks to Creative Thinking? Copyblogger

A Writer? Who, Me? Write on Wednesday blog

Direct Your Mind: How Can I Look At This As a Good Thing? PantsKicker blog

Intelligences, Intelligences, and More Intelligences

Intelligence is a buzzword these days. I came across this quote from Karl Albrecht in his new book Practical Intelligence.

“These ‘intelligences’ are now becoming increasingly familiar in the conversation of the popular culture. There is talk of ‘spiritual intelligence, ‘moral intelligence,’ and ‘emotional intelligence.’ In the business world it’s ‘executive intelligence’ and ‘organizational intelligence.’ In pop literature, there is ‘sexual intelligence.’ I suppose we’ll eventually hear about ‘financial intelligence,’ ‘real estate intelligence,’ and ‘gardening intelligence.’"   

In the interest of full disclosure I have read Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence, Albrecht’s Social Intelligence, and recently Justin Menkes’ Executive Intelligence. Look what Howard Gardner started!  It is Menkes’ Executive Intelligence that I will focus on here. Justin Menkes, author of Executive Intelligence defines intelligence as, “a distinct set of aptitudes that an individual must be able to demonstrate in three central contexts of work: accomplishment of tasks, working with and through other people, and judging oneself and adapting one’s behavior accordingly.”

OK, so what does that have to do with education? Ultimately, we have a responsibility to educate the next generation of business leaders. Every CEO from Bill Gates to Jack Welch to Steve Jobs begins their education in our classrooms. So lets take a closer look at Executive Intelligence.

Menkes states, “Executive Intelligence is the essential internal compass that ultimately determines how skillfully an individual’s actions will be. This does not mean that star executives do not listen to their instincts or to outside expertise; it’s just that they use their Executive Intelligence in deciding when to listen and how much to pay attention. After all, one’s own instincts or someone else’s opinions may help point the way to the right decision, or they may not. Executive Intelligence is the ultimate guide to knowing the difference. For instance, it demands great skills and sensitivity to recognize when a solution to a problem is well-supported as opposed to merely widely accepted. It may also take courage, because the truth does not always correspond to what is popular.”

Homework is widely accepted, but is it well-supported?  Some research seems to indicate that it is a valuable tool, while other research finds just the opposite. Whatever positive effects it has seem to be small and to gain even the smallest positive result it must be clearly and purposely designed. Most teachers do not put that kind of though into their homework. Usually it amounts to what was left over of some variation of evens or odds. Again, well accepted, but not necessarily well-supported.

Crucial to understanding Executive Intelligence is an understanding of the difference between knowledge and intelligence. Menkes states, “If we compare knowledge and intelligence to the functions of a computer, we can see that knowledge is like data that can be stored on a hard drive, to be called upon when it is needed. Simply knowing what is contained on a hard drive, however, tells us nothing about how efficiently that information will be used.”

“No matter how much we examine what information is on the hard drive, we cannot get any insight about the computer’s processor… and the processor is central to the functioning of the machine.”

So in essence, a teacher can play two roles. One type of teaching simply fills the “hard drive” with data (information, facts, dates, formulas, vocabulary, etc.)  Another type of teaching is similar to programming. It tells the processor how to use the data on the hard drive. It uses its “programs” to analyze, categorize, synthesize, compares, contrast, and create useful ways to use the data on the hard drive.

We are educating students to handle the problems of the future. They will need both the “data” and the “processor” to run their problem solving “software” effectively. “Both knowledge and intelligence are necessary for a good solution. Just as knowledge is not useful if it cannot be intelligently applied, intelligence is useless without sufficient knowledge to process.”

Clearly, in today’s environment of high stakes testing and accountability, the focus is brightly on measuring knowledge. Is this enough to prepare our students to be able to solve the problems they will face in our globalized world? Is this enough to give our students Executive Intelligence? Menkes has some thoughts on education. “From a young age, students are taught subject knowledge, not thinking skills. Abundant research shows that most classroom questions call for little more than retrieval of content. In other words, throughout student’s most important formative years of cognitive development, nearly all the attention is given to memorizing ‘the facts.’ Although numerous studies have shown that reasoning can improve with appropriate instruction, students are seldom challenged to really think.” 

If you’re the sort of person that reads blogs about education, then chances are you are not one of those types of teachers. However, the high stakes and high accountability environment of education today often leaves little room for a teacher to spend valuable time teaching creative thinking and reasoning skills.

Menkes quotes the former CEO of New Technology Management and current the Administrator of the U.S General Services Administration, Lurita Doan. “Why is it that the valedictorian of the class can’t translate that success to success in corporate leadership? In fact, it seems to be rarely the case. This is because getting an A in class has little to do with your ability to think. The ‘A’ student is the one that is best able to recite back what the teacher is saying. That shows the teacher, ‘This student really understands what I’m saying. She’s demonstrated that she’s absorbed what I am teaching.’  But all the student has done is regurgitate what they’ve been told.  In business, you’re almost always in uncharted territory and must be capable of thinking for yourself.”

No one can deny the importance of having good decision makers in our business organizations. Just think Enron, Tyco, or Global Crossings. Having good decision makers in the business world is crucial for all of us. Business is, after all, a consumer of what education produces. So their opinion is valid and should be welcomed to the discussion. However, they don’t have all the answers either. Menkes quotes Dick Parsons, CEO of Time Warner. “ Law school training is different from business school and other types of professional education. The focus is on how to think in ways that allow you to attack complicated problems and break them down into manageable, solvable units. This gives you the ability to really understand something, even if a first it seem overwhelming. And that technique is not just useful in law but in business as well, because in business, problems are often multi-layered and multidimensional. Law school training helps you to improve the thinking skills that help you to solve such problems.”

So even business has come to realize that a “hard drive” filled with “data” is not useful unless the “processor” and use “programming” and “software” to use the “data” effectively to solve problems.  What  questions should we be asking of ourselves?

Daniel Pink: A Whole New Mind Interview

From eSchool News...

" Author Daniel Pink discusses what it will take for students to succeed in an outsourced and automated world--and how schools should change their approach to education accordingly."

Thinking Better: The Productive Thinking Model Part 2

Continuing with my examination of the Productive Thinking Model laid out in Tim Hurson’s book Think Better: An Innovator’s Guide To Productive Thinking. Looking at student discipline with T.P.M.

Step 2 of the Productive Thinking Model is called “What’s Success?” As I lead my staff through an examination of issues related to developing a new discipline plan, we examined what was going on in step 1 and discovered our Target Future, we then moved right into step 2, which focuses on knowing when we have arrived at our Target Future.

Tim describes how organizations tend to view proposed change in one of 5 viewpoints.
1.    Things were fine before. I don’t see what good any of this is going to do.
2.    Anything would be better than the way things are now.
3.    Not as good as I’d hoped but not as bad as I’d feared. In fact, some of these ideas are okay.
4.    This is the (you fill in the ordinal number)  (you fill in the expletive) change program we’ve had in        the last (you fill in the cardinal number) years!
5.    There goes my workload again.

But, Tim adds, “regardless of which camp they are in, most people will also think the following: It’ll never stick.”

The Productive Thinking Model is designed to help pull people from the past and prevent them from getting trapped in former patterns. Tim describes the use of “Future Pull.”

“The purpose of What’s Success? is to create Future Pull: to make you care. Deeply. I like to think of this phase of the Productive Thinking Model as throwing a grappling hook into the future. You wind up and hurl the hook into the most compelling future you can imagine. It latches on firmly, and then you start to pull yourself into that future.”

One of the tools that can be used to establish Future Pull is the Imagined Future (IF). You imagine what it would look like if your Imagined Future was a reality. Basically, you imagine a day in the life of your future. What do you see, hear, feel, think, etc?  What is happening?  This requires some divergent creative thinking ability. Surprisingly, this was an area that we struggled a bit with. We try to teach creativity to our students, but we struggle ourselves. Not wanting to get too bogged down, we came up with a few points to put on our list and continued moving forward.

The next tool we used is called DRIVE. The DRIVE tool is used to define the characteristics of a successful outcome. The DRIVE tool enables us to develop a set of observable Success Criteria.

Do: What do you want your eventual solution to do? What must is achieve?
Restrictions: What changes or impacts must you avoid?
Investment: What resources are you willing to allocate? What are your “not-to-exceeds”?
Values: What values must you live by in achieving your solution?
Essential Outcomes: What are the nonnegotiable elements of success? What measurable targets must be met?

Our Do’s: affect change, everyone on the same page, seamless, clear, fair, encompassing, motivation, and raise expectations.

Our Restrictions: time, attitudes, varying expectations, and perfectionism.

Our Investments (Resources): time, equipment, Multi-purpose room, staff, and people.

Our Values: equity, respect, accountability, moral development, and discipline with dignity.

Essential Outcomes: attitude, buy-in, training, and excellent plan.

So we have now developed a clear picture of where we are and where we want to go with Step 1:What’s Going On and have a sense of what it will look like if we arrive at our imagined future in Step 2: What’s Success.

One of the difficulties I found as we have gone through the process is that many people are tentative to get very creative and divergent in their thinking. We are so used to having ideas judged that we aren’t used to just letting ideas fly free. This is where the ability to ask insightful and thought provoking questions is really useful.

In addition, as a facilitator, it is very difficult to manage the session and also contribute ideas of your own. My brain was on overload as I tried to pull ideas from the staff and also ensure that I was participating my adding my own ideas. I guess that is why organizations often bring consultants like Tim Hurson, Greg Fraley, Dan Roam, or Andrew Razeghi into help with the process. When we were done I needed a nap, but I was so energized. I loved it. I absolutely loved it!

Brain Rules

Yesterday I posted on the book Brain Rules by John Medina. Seems I am not the only one enjoying the book. One of my favorite blogs is The Engaging Brand by Anna Farmery. I have been reading her blog for over a year and I always find some interesting tidbits.

In her recent post, she pulled these points from the book... (I've added my own commentary)

• The brain on average is 2% of body weight but takes 20% of the energy that we consume.

           (One more reason we need to ensure our students' eat a good breakfast and lunch.)

• The learning performance is deeply affected by the emotional environment in which the learning takes place.

            (So, students don't learn if they are being screamed at, are afraid to fail, or worried.)

• We lose attention every 10 minutes.

             (Uh oh, teachers, make sure you change it up, or re-direct because you don't have long.)

• Emotional arousal focuses attention on the gist of an experience at the expense of the details.

            (So again, we don't learn well when we are afraid, nervous, worried, or mad.)

• We need to derive meaning from the words to recall the details

            (Teachers, make sure you connect vocabulary to meaning in memorable ways.)

• Interruptions cause a 50% increase in how long it takes to complete a task and will lead to 50% more errors

 (Principals, quit with the announcements over the P.A.)

• People usually forget 90% of what they learn within 30 days

             (Wow, state tests go back at least 8 months. That's a problem.)

• When presenting, the audience needs to be hooked in the first 3 minutes.

            (So, "Open your book to page..." is not a hook. Try something original please!)

• The brain can hold 7 pieces of information for less than 30 seconds.

    (Students need some think time to digest your instruction.)

• A 26 minute nap can increase performance by 34%

 (So kindergarten had it right all along.)

• People learn better from a combination of words and pictures

   (Teacher, quit talking so much. Use pictures and make it visual.)

• Vision takes up half of the brains resources

 (We like to look at things. Refer to above.)

Anna will be interviewing John Medina for an upcoming podcast. I recommend you check back into her blog for it. Thanks Anna.

"Death of Education, But the Dawn of Learning"

"Every turned off device is potentially a turned off child."
"We have a classroom system when we could have a community system."
These are just a few of the thoughts shared in this great video called Learning to Change.
(Thanks to Scott and Dangerously Irrelevant)

Here are some more ideas from the video.

Relationship, Community, Connectivity, Access, Content Developers, Communicators.

"Nearly Now"

• Reflect
• Retract
• Research
• Repeat

The New 21st Century Set of Literacies

• Find Information
• Validate Information
• Synthesize Information
• Leverage Information
• Communicate Information
• Collaborate With Information
• Problem Solve With Information

Now take a look.

Here is a list of the speakers in the video.

Keith Kruger

Greg Whitby

Greg Black

Julie Evans

Stephen Heppell

Yong Zhao

Cheryl Lemke

Susan Patrick

Chris Dede

Karen Greenwood Henke

Daniel Pink

Ken Kay

and Deborah Baker & Barbara S. Nielson

Big Word Project: The Intersection of Education and the New Approach to Meaning

These words are mine. I bought them. Let me explain. I came across the Big Word Project from one of my favorite blogs Ugly Doggy. It is an interesting idea dreamt up by two creative thinkers in Northern Ireland. Their idea was to let people redefine a word by linking it to a particular website.

I chose Intersection and approach because for me they represent the philosophy of this blog. It is an intersection of many ideas and education. It is also about having a different approach to what we do in education. (Innovation and Education were already taken!) Ugly Doggy conducted an interview with the creators.

Here is one of the interview questions and answers...

Are the words pre-approved (you have a list and what is not there can't be used) and therefore finite? Or ANYTHING that is in a dictionary can go there?
- Lee: Not at all, anything that's a real word can be used. We're using the Oxford English Dictionary as reference. We have about 180,000 words on the site but we're missing loads so feel free to suggest more. We're not including places or names (unless the name is in the dictionary).

This got me thinking about its relation to education. If a word can take on multiple meanings and even take on locations on the world wide web, then what else could a word be connected with? A word could be connected with a picture, a sound, a smell, a country, a person, a movie, a song, a poem. If you think about it, this has some pretty powerful implications for education. We are moving from a "there is one right definition of a word" to a "a word can mean multiple things and those things will be specific to each individual." Word and meaning will take on many more meanings and concepts, and those can be individualized from a country, a culture, a group, or an individual.

One right answer for the question "What does approach mean?" or "What does Intersection mean?" is evaporating into links and tags meaning, unique to every person. This is getting very interesting.

White Lines Go Away: Creative Idea for Innovative and Greener Paper

Last night I was reading Peter Sheahan's book Flip. Chapter 4 is titled Absolutely, Positively Sweat The Small Stuff. His theory is that all businesses have to be fast, good, and cheap, but they must offer an x-factor in addition to the other three. A business must be all all four, that is they must be fast, good, cheap and green, or responsible, or beautiful, or easy, or fun, or healthy.

Today I came across a great example creativity, innovation, and, in this case, being green.

Whitelines is a paper company that used the creativity of thinking the opposite and came up with a great idea.

"Writing paper with dark supporting lines has been around since medieval times when iron gall ink was used for its lasting dark colour. It took until our recent time before the idea of making a writing paper with white, “non-conflict”, lines got known from an idea of the designer Olof Hansson. Writing paper with white lines is now a patented solution."

There X-factor is being green.

"Whitelines is glad to announce that a great step to reduce our environmental impact has been taken through a deal with the paper producer Stora Enso. Whitelines will by that be able to offer a carbon dioxide neutral paper as base in our products."

A great example of doing the opposite as a way to get to a new idea. Being green is a wonderful bonus.
Check out their website for more info. WHITELINES

Thinking Better: Using The Productive Thinking Model Part 1

I read Tim Hurson’s book Think Better: An Innovator’s Guide to Productive Thinking and have been dying to have an opportunity to experiment with The Productive Thinking Model that he so skillfully describes in the book.

“One of the problems with problems is that they usually begin with a mess.”

I found a mess to work with.

“But if things weren’t messy or getting messy, there would be no discontent, and there wouldn’t be a need for productive thinking in the first place. The mess comes when we begin to realize that things might be better than the are..”

The mess I found centered around the problem of student discipline. While discipline is not officially a part of my job description, I had spent many months watching staff and students get more and more frustrated at the “mess”, so I volunteered to take the staff through The Productive Thinking Model to see what we might find at the end of the process. I was limited to one staff meeting, so we only able to get through steps 1 and 2 of the process, so we will be re-visiting the rest of the process at another meeting.

Step 1: What is Going On?
Sub-step 1: What’s The Itch?
An Itch is described as the discontent or irritant that compels us to want to change.

Most of the staff had and “itch” to be sure, but we needed to go through the process of discovering all the itches. So I facilitated a listing of all the itches that we could come up. I put no limits on what was considered and itch. If it bothered them it went up.

Some of the itches we listed were:
No system, student behavior, “Broken Windows” theory, paper work, before and after school, parents.

We then tried to makes clusters of itches based on common themes or characteristics.

(picture of our partial list)

Sub-step 2: What’s The Impact?
In this sub-step our goal was to discover what it is about our itches that concerns us. Which itches are a priority? Why?

We again made a list and then selected which seemed to be the most important to work on. What I found interesting was that after just two sub-steps we were talking in a way that was very different from what most of the staff expected and we were discussing ideas that may not have come to fore if we had just a “normal” discussion.

(sample list)

Sub-step 3: What’s The Information?
In this step we tried to understand what we already knew about the issue and what we needed to know about the issue. I used a thinking tool called KnoWonder. Essentially I made a T-chart with the word “Know” one side and the word “Wonder” on the other. For those of you who teach, think of a KWL chart.

We listed things that we knew about the issue and things we wondered about the issue. It is a very useful tool for getting some perspective on the problem. I found that some creative questioning helped to generate a good list. I did my best to ask questions that would generate ideas for the list.

(sample list)

Sub-step 4: Who’s Involved?

The next sub-step was getting a clear idea of all the people involved in this itch.
“How we see things depends on where we stand…”

We generated a list that came up with the typical stakeholders: teachers, students, parents, administrators, support staff, and community.

Sub-step 5: What’s the Vision?
In sub-step 5 we attempted to create a vision for the future or what the model calls the “Target Future.”

“The Target Future is the place you want to get to. It doesn’t tell you how you’ll get there; in other words it is not a solution. Rather it’s a brief description of a future in which your issue is resolved and your Itch no longer irritates you.”

I listed sentence stems on the board that said, “I only we could..”,  “I wish…”, and “It would be great if..” I used these sentence stems to facilitate a list of Target Futures. This was one area where I had to be more active in encouraging ideas. Some were hesitant to state their Target Future because the immediately started to think about how it might be accomplished. I reinforced the fact that we are simply stating what we hope for, and not worrying about the details. I think the staff was surprised that what they listed on the board was is some ways very different from what they might have walked into the room initially thinking.

Once we were done generating our list, we then used a thinking tool called I3.

“I3 allows you to determine which items on your list will be useful to work on. I3 stands for the three criteria you use to evaluate the items in your list: Influence, Importance, and Imagination.”

We used symbols (check mark, triangle, and a flower) placed next to the items on our list to get a visual sense of what we had influence over, what we thought was important, and if it would require some imagination.

Some of the Target Futures that seemed to hold a lot of promise was the creation of a flow chart, acknowledging  positive behavior more frequently and systematically, and staff training.

(sample list)

After completing all 5 sub-steps of Step 1, we had a great sense of what was going on with our discipline “Itch.”

I will discuss the result of Step 2 in a later post. I might add here that one of the most useful things for me as a facilitator was having some one who would chart the ideas for me. It was hard to do both and stay in the flow.

Coming Up Step 2: What’s Success?