Emerging Issue: Creativity?

Seems odd that Creativity is stealing center-stage at the Emerging Issues Institute, Feb. 8-9 in Raleigh, NC.    Creativity, hard work, perseverance, and calculated risk have long been staples in the rise of this great nation.

Now, however, we seem to be stuck in the mud as an economic downturn drags on, resources tighten, and businesses/institutions search for answers.

According to an article in the News and Observer:

Creativity is one of those hard-to-define subjects that soon drift into talk of left brain/right brain characteristics and highfalutin references to “the cognitive age” and “the conceptual age.”

But everybody knows that the old jobs of priming tobacco and manning textile looms are gone, and the new jobs are much more likely to require hard thinking than back-breaking work.

So 1,000 leaders will gather at the sold-out conference to listen to such speakers as author Daniel Pink; U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan; Bill Strickland of Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild; Eric Liu, founder of Creativity Matters; and Mark Dean, IBM’s vice president for technical strategy.

In education, we would do well to revisit the place of quality and engaging literature, art, recreation, and music in the creativity revival.  But I would caution against throwing the accountability baby out with the bathwater.

Done correctly, the use of data derived from common assessments can inform creative decisions about students, staff, programs and schools…without which, we would often continue to be mired.

There is no dearth of scholarship and commentary on the topic of creativity.  Sir Ken’s video “Are Schools Killing Creativity?” is one modern example.

Just to be creative, I searched the term Creative on my blog and found these results.

The term Creativity on my blog yielded these results, the phrase Daniel Pink yielded these results, and the term Emerging yielded these results.

…and my all time personal favorite on Haulin’ Net when it comes to creativity is that I have had 19 job titles in education in the last 24 years.  I call it Riding New Gears.

Riding new gears is the essence of creativity.  It is literally and figuratively where the rubber meets the rode.

And that may be the challenge ahead of us if we are to embrace creativity as part of the solution to kickstarting economic and institutional engines.  It’s turning words and thoughts into organizational actions.

It requires leaders at all levels who are experienced in creative thought and creative learning for maximum educational gain.

Are We Ready to Race?

In “NC Submits Race to the Top Application” (1/22/10), The NC Public School Forum summarized the 195-page application as follows:

Governor Perdue announced this week that North Carolina’s $459.5 million application for Race to the Top was submitted to the U.S. Department over the weekend. According to the Governor, North Carolina’s application stressed four areas of improve and development for K-12 public education:

• Internationally-benchmarked standards and assessments;
• Development of data systems that measure success and improve instruction;
• Supporting effective teachers and leaders;
• and Turning around low-performing schools.

Gateway

On Monday, July 6, I join the faculty and staff at East Carteret High School, home of the Mariners.  I look forward to this opportunity to serve the students in the eastern part of the county.  East Carteret is located at the gateway to downeast Carteret County.  It links historic Beaufort, NC, with such down east communities such Bettie, Otway, Straits, Gloucester, Harkers Island, Smyrna, Davis, Merrimon, North River, South River, Atlantic, Sea Level, Cedar Island, Marshallberg, Williston, Lola and Stacy.

ECHS is the gateway that connects Beaufort Middle, Smyrna K-8, Harkers Island K-8, and Atlantic K-8.

East Carteret High School is a gateway of opportunities through which all students east of the bridge must pass on their journeys to post-secondary education and careers.  Similarly, West Carteret High School and Croatan High School serve the same gateway purpose for students from their boundaries in the county.

In times of tight economics,  global competitition, and unpredictable futures — high schools (or gateways) and the preparation they are responsible to provide — are as important and vital as ever.

I really look forward to joining the ECHS gateway and the charge of the Mariners.

Is it any wonder?

Excerpt: Zakaria’s ‘The Post-American World’ | Newsweek International | Newsweek.com

• The world’s tallest building is in Taipei, and will soon be in Dubai.
• Its largest publicly traded company is in Beijing.
• Its biggest refinery is being constructed in India.
• Its largest passenger airplane is built in Europe.
• The largest investment fund on the planet is in Abu Dhabi;
• the biggest movie industry is Bollywood, not Hollywood.
• The largest Ferris wheel is in Singapore.
• The largest casino is in Macao,
• The Mall of America in Minnesota once boasted that it was the largest shopping mall in the world. Today it wouldn’t make the top ten.
• In the most recent rankings, only two of the world’s ten richest people are American.

Farheed Zakaria does a masterful job of outlining the shifting position of America in the global context. None of his comments should come as a surprise to anyone who has kept up with the literature.

His outlook is not one of doom and gloom. There is a place for continued success of individuals in the global economy. It will be ushered in by creative associations, integrations, and capitalizations—not by entrenched isolation.

Will we rely on the current model of high school to get us there? If we are not evolving that time-honored institution, it too will stack up globally like many items on the bulleted list above . . .

If it doesn’t already.

Constellations Yet Undiscovered

The internet joke goes something like this:

Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson went on a camping trip. As they lay down for the night, Holmes said: “Watson, look up into the sky and tell me what you see.”

Watson said: “I see millions and millions of stars.”

Holmes: “And what does that tell you?”

Watson: “Astronomically, it tells me that there are millions of galaxies and potentially billions of planets. Theologically, it tells me that God is great and that we are small and insignificant. Meteorologically, it tells me that we will have a beautiful day tomorrow.

What does it tell you?”

Holmes: “Somebody stole our tent.”

It’s no joke—In education we have built up lots of tents over time. They are our familiar places that keep us secure. Retiring to our tents is what we have always done. Our tents are our traditions. . .our parameters.

When tradition and parameters are removed, we can see constellations yet undiscovered,
new arrays of stars wanting but a name,
boundless new horizons-opportunities-pathways-visions-dreams,
fresh starts.

Or, we can simply see that our tents are missing.

School Without Walls

North Carolina Virtual Public School (the five-minute video)

Carteret County Schools NCVPS MIid-Term Report—

Total Students This Semester:  29

A:  11

B:  2

C:  3

D: 2

F: 4

WF: 3

WP: 2

Drop: 2

Out on a Limb with CSI

It’s not really too far out on a limb to see computers eventually replacing a few teachers in bricks and mortar schools.

Already we have students in labs, media centers, and home environments taking NCVPS and Learn and Earn On-line classes. Two bits of good news here. We haven’t lost a teacher to this yet and the on-line students still have teachers, though they are in distant places.

NCVPS and Learn and Earn are working hard to revamp the on-line learning environment. The worthy goal is to evolve beyond Blackboard and make the learning experience richer and more compelling.

This plausible crime scene demo is an example of such innovation embedded into an actual writing course. Take some time to work through the instructional sequence that begins like this:

Part One of the instructional sequence takes you to the crime scene. Rollovers give various details about evidence. Then you have to type an answer to a question about the crime scene.

Part Two, complete with rollovers and question, depicts victims and suspects.

Part Three, Victims and Suspects II, delves deeper into the crime. In like manner it features rollovers and three questions.

The sequence then takes you to Crime Scene II, The Wooded Area. This has key evidence and two more questions to answer.

The exercise concludes with all of your written answers displayed next to the answers from the detectives. This allows you to compare, contrast and refine. Then the killers are revealed.

This learning exercise is based on an actual murder case in North Carolina. It is packaged into a course offered by UNC-G iSchool that allows high school students to take college courses for free.

I took the test drive of the crime scene pre-writing activity and agree that it will yield consistent and compelling value over time . . . especially for today’s students.

Were You This Person Too?

Parable 2.0 from Teaching Generation Z begins like like–

Once upon a time, not so long ago, a bright-eyed idealist ICT (edtech) coordinator discovered Web 2.0. It was love at first sight and he then started his own blog. One thing led to another as these things do and before long he was publishing wikis and attending online conferences and bookmarking madly and commenting all over the place. And while his own learning took off at an unprecedented rate, he struggled to work out how to utilize these new tools and methodologies into his own classroom.

But he stuck at his new web-enabled style of learning, eventually establishing himself as a C list edublogger. He read “The World Is Flat” and “A Whole New Mind” as texts of almost biblical influence and networked worldwide with Americans and Kiwis and Brits and Canucks and even fellow Aussies. Teachers at his own school snickered at him at first, skeptical about his time management skills because after all, what hard working teacher has time to poke around on the internet?

For those still alive in “school futuring,” the theme for The School Administrator (Feb. 2008) is Globalization and Education. If you’ve read Friedman (World is Flat) and Pink (Whole New Mind), you can refresh on their thinking in Pink’s interview of Freidman titled “Tom Friedman on Education in a Flat World.”

Friedman expounds upon the virtues of liberal arts in conjunction with math/science, the rise of the generalist who can integrate and has a renaissance view of the world, and the power of an individual’s imagination as a market force.

Pink: You’ve got schools moving ever more toward routines, right answers, and standardization — at precisely the moment that the wider world is moving toward novelty, nuance and customization. It’s scary. And it’s not the fault of teachers, principals and superintendents. In fact, the more time I spend in schools, the more I realize how heroic the work they’re doing really is.

Friedman: My favorite story is about [Apple CEO] Steve Jobs’ speech at Stanford’s graduation. He says, “You know, I dropped out of Reed College and had nothing to do so I took a course in calligraphy. And it all went into the Mac keyboard!”

From the Fischbowl: Embedded below is the 2005 commencement speech by Steve Jobs at Stanford that is referenced in the Pink/Friedman interview. . . He tells “three stories from [his] life” —

Were you this person too? What are you doing now?

Of Academies and Academic Freedom

Much discussion in education today centers on academies, or focused learning communities. Freshmen academies, or academies that focus on the transition from middle to high school, get a lot of play. Our good neighbors at Jacksonville High School are out front with this reconceptualization of high school.

Academies can be thematic. Over 15 years ago, I worked at Benjamin Banneker Model Academic HS in Wash, DC. The theme was college prep. Therefore, it was an early version of a thematic academy.

Academies can be specialized on career. Jacksonville HS boasts three other academies: Education and Training Academy, Health Sciences Academy, and International Studies Academy.

One academy that is getting a lot of play right now is the Science Leadership Academy (SLA) in Philadephia. It has a dynamic, future-forward leader in Chris Lehman. The school embraces technology assets like1:1, Moodle and Drupal. It hosted EduCon 2.0 .

But one thing I recognize quick about SLA is the way its leadership enables the over-the-top and transparent academic freedom of its teachers.

Just watch this embedded YouTube video below to admire the technique of the SLA science teacher as he gives a compelling, entertaining, and relevant treatment of Global Warming for his students and a global audience.

As Dave Sherman points out in Good Teaching Trumps Everything (LeaderTalk):

To start, the Science Leadership Academy (SLA) is an incredible high school. If I am ever presented with the privilege of starting a new school from the ground up, I would model it based on the way the SLA was created. Forget the fact that this is a high school, and my interests lie at the elementary level. Good teaching is a constant, regardless of the level or age of the students, and deep learning can and should take place at all grade levels, and beyond the walls of the school.

Real teaching is about creating opportunities for students to become involved in critical thinking, questioning, problem solving, inquiring, researching, and authentic learning. It involves teachers setting up situations where students become self-directed in their learning; where students feel safe to take risks, and possibly fail, before some new knowledge becomes ingrained. Excellent teachers recognize that different students learn differently, and that one size does not fit all.

And good leadership trumps that which is suspect. Awesome school leadership is about empowering teachers with the resources, habits, logistics, and mindset to enable 21st century teaching and learning.

Administrators in Step

School administrators need to be in step as are these four. And being in step as a leader means having the vision not just to stay current with the times but also to be just over the horizon.

As we step into 2008, I pause to reflect on some themes from my first four months back at a school—after nearly a decade away.

• People and relationships: Unlike any other calling, school leaders work with countless individuals and their triumphs/challenges on a daily—make that hourly—basis.
• The unexpected: Just when you think you’ve seen it all, you turn the next corner.
• The thrill of victory: sports scores, grade reports, and classroom observations
• The agony of defeat: sports scores, grade reports, and classroom observations
• Just put a cot in the office: from morning traffic duty to tracking down student rides home after the ball games
• Energy: 1250 teenage students
• Fatigue: constant motion on a 90-acre campus
• Weight loss program: constant motion on a 90-acre campus
• Symphony: big-picture or systems thinking; all puzzle pieces must fit perfectly
• Management: not the most difficult part of the job, but an easy trap in which to get caught
• Instructional Leadership: the high-value, high-touch, high-concept, and transformational pure gold. In a time and place that demands departure from the status quo of high schools in America, the real exercise of extreme school leadership is not to give short shrift to this last bullet.