Subject: Creativity, Innovation, and Food

Posted by Chad Green on 10/20/2010
In Reply To:Creativity, Innovation, and Food Posted by Zachary Lawrence on 10/17/2010

Message:

Zachary,

Thanks for sharing. I fully agree with the first three words of your message ("People are conditioned"). You don't need to say much more than that because the rest of the message merely conveys more of the same idea. In fact, those three words define what I would call the "human narrative," the very boundary conditions that we must transcend if we wish to understand and extend our current thinking about creativity, curiosity, and imagination.

Let's take a look at the human tendency to protect what we value by formalizing it and squirreling it away from public view. If we value creativity, curiosity, and imagination, then what institutions immediately come to mind when I mention those words. Do you perchance think of ivy league universities, think tanks, and private research centers?

Well I say poppycock! :)

Everyone, including you and me, now has access at their very fingertips to the latest research and ideas if they only wish to open their eyes to the potential of our technological tools and infrastructure. And I mean everyone.

Speaking of nonsense, has anybody checked out the What Works Clearinghouse lately? It is the very manifestation of this conditioning! If you really think about it, WWC represents the implicit view that K-12 educators simply cannot make sense of the latest research and be innovative on their own, as evidenced by the pablum that the website produces that is supposedly in a language that we can all understand.

Instead, what WWC should've done is created a research-based WWC-like process and trained teams of educators in its implementation (e.g., the expert review panel is a proven evaluation method), and then encouraged them to scan the landscape of ideas not just within our national borders, but globally, so that we can develop a more global understanding of the practices that we want our students to emulate as global citizens (e.g., see link to Colorado's new academic standards). We have the technology to do this today. Everybody does (or should)!

In short, to solve this problem, consider establishing your own think tank (e.g., expert review panel) to encourage sense-making and interpretation (i.e., deep learning) of complex concepts in a way that emulates what will be expected on the part of the SEA/LEA as a whole. I use these expert panels all the time in my work. They come in very handy when you want to transcend current boundary conditions.

Chad

Link: http://www.cde.state.co.us/cdeassess/UAS/CoAcademicStandards.html

Follow Ups:

Creativity, Innovation, and Food - Bill Braun 10/20/2010 
Creativity, Innovation, and Food - Chad Green 10/20/2010