EduCon 2.2

Presenters

Linda Nitsche

Owen J. Roberts School District

Thinking Creatively: Inventing the Possible

When:

Session One: Saturday 10:00am–11:30am

Where:

Room 311

Who:

Linda Nitsche

Affiliation: Owen J. Roberts School District

Conversational Focus/Audience:

All School Levels

Conversation Description:

Ken Robinson's TED talk, "Do Schools Kill Creativity?", challenges us to rethink schools to value creativity. As we stand at a crossroads where the strict content standards of No Child Left Behind may ease, allowing for a broader view of students' strengths and capacities, creativity is again gaining momentum as a key skill and capacity for the 21^st century. The Framework for 21^st Century Skills identifies Learning and Innovation Skills as a 21^st century outcome for students in order to be prepared for increasingly complex life and work environments. But, with little focus and attention on creative thinking, our teachers and schools are not well prepared with a wide range of techniques to guide students in meeting the challenges of their futures with creative and imaginative solutions. What tools and techniques can help us think creatively, work creatively with others, and implement innovations? How can we make creativity as important in education as literacy and treated with the same status?
Through this discussion we will explore strategies to advocate for and integrate creativity in the classroom, including frameworks for creative thinking and best practices to nurture and develop a supportive classroom culture. More importantly, we will discuss how could we use our reflections and synthesis as a foundation for real action that would help to scaffold others to value and infuse creative thinking into their work with students.

Conversational Practice:

Using a modified What, So What, Now What Protocol, we will investigate the idea of creativity in schools to address 21st century learning and innovation skills. We will exercise our own creative thinking, explore innovation in action, and reflect upon the possibilities for action, recording our insights on the session wiki.

Website:

http://inventingthepossible.wikispaces.com

Elluminate Rooms ( instructions for launching Elluminate )

Stream via Elluminate: Room 311 — Channel A

Comments

Dennis Richards said:

Looks like another powerful conversation, Laura. There's deep misunderstanding of the role of creativity in school and a lack of understanding of how to integrate it into our teaching protocols. Ken Robinson's The Element reveals what has happened to our students in schools because we have been killing creativity. And how many lost souls are never written about because they never really find their creative self. Please do, "reflect upon the possibilities for action" and may empathy and compassion move the conversation from the wiki to our classrooms. Thanks for this session.

Permaink

Sat 23 Jan 2010 03:59:28 PM EST