Module 8-Synthesizing

The NEW Way of Thinking Creatively

Jolene Roseth, CEP 818

“Creative people have always combined many ways of feeling and knowing simultaneously…equivalents melding sensual and intellectual concerns.”-Root-Bernstein (p. 309)

What is creativity as it relates to my class and my life?  That was the question I asked myself before reading about the seven cognitive categories for restructuring the way we teach and learn in education.  To be a creative person it is essential that people use a variety of strategies, tools, feelings, and knowledge to create and understand new knowledge.   Using the seven tools for creative thinking described in Root-Bernstein’s book Sparks of Genius: The 13 Thinking Tools of the World’s Most Creative People, one can expand and build on their ability to see and learn things not previously known.   Creativity is one of the most important tools for a child to develop in their educational years.  Having the ability to take a project and make it theirs, leads students to deeper thinking and a greater enjoyment of the school setting.  It builds confidence and skills at a deeper level than simply following directions by rote.

One must learn how to think outside the box using their pre-existing ideas and experiences to create something Novel, Effective, and Whole (NEW).  Creativity is unique, valuable, and aesthetically pleasing.  Using the acronym NEW, Mishra and Henriksen propose that novel ideas are new and surprising, and did not previously exist in that form.  A novel idea may hold no importance if it is not effective.  A creative solution is effective if the results hold value and are relevant.  Lastly, Mishra and Koehler (2008) add that creative solutions and products need more than the ideas being novel and effective.  They need to also hold a strong aesthetic presence and be considered whole.  These three terms:  Novel, Effective, and Whole must be combined and work together to define creativity. 

Great inventors have used their creativity to create authentically new ideas that did not previously exist.  For children, being creative is using ideas already presented and using them in new ways.  The concept of “twisting the knobs” to slightly alter an existing piece of work or creative piece is what many children, and adults alike, do to be creative. Henriksen & Mishra stated,  “…Creativity, though it may feel mysterious, is not magic, and is not out of reach of our understanding.” (p. 15).  In order to develop children’s creative thinking processes, teachers need to provide activities for children that will engage and enrich the ideas and knowledge they currently have.  To be creative it requires a wide range of opportunities and disciplines such as art, music, poetry, and theater to garner the wide variety of strengths and interests children have and use these to help develop creative thinkers.  

One activity that I would like to introduce to my classroom and first grade team is the concept of Reader’s Theater.   Reader’s Theater is a strategy used by educators to help students with fluency, by providing opportunities for repeated readings.  I have never used this idea and find the concept fascinating and feel it would be an exciting addition to my classroom.  It requires children to practice their reading skills, but also to foster their creativity by letting their personalities and unique skills come through.  I would take this a step further, and use this activity to create a modified play. “Engagement is a critical piece of building reading and comprehension skills and plays an important part in reading motivation as well.”  (Reading Rockets Website, http://bit.ly/1ysZWqL)  It would then allow for creative design of costumes, props, and music.  So much of today’s reading instruction is pouring information into their brains and hoping they learn it.  It’s sitting for long periods of time listening with little engagement or enjoyment for what is being taught.  How can I develop life long learners, when they are not enjoying the process?  It will be important to teach the basic phonological awareness skills, along with phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension.  Many of these skills can be learned through hands-on and active opportunities by allowing students to be involved in putting on a play.

Root-Bernstein laid out seven cognitive tools for becoming creative learners.  They include perceiving, patterning, abstracting, embodied thinking, modeling, and playing.  Each of these tools helps us to think about creativity differently and adapt our thinking and teaching to help others (and ourselves) become creative people.  By using these strategies to help create an activity that is both for learning and enjoyment, the Reader’s Theater concept will hopefully be a success.

The first cognitive tool we will look at is “perceiving”.  In Sparks of Genius, Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein state, “Initially, all knowledge about the world is acquired through observing, paying attention to what is seen, heard, touched, smelled, tasted, or felt within the body.” (Root-Bernstein, pg. 25)  What better way to observe good reading habits than to have children watch fluent readers reading?  To watch, observe, or perceive what it looks like to be a good reader, with accuracy and a smooth cadence, can give confidence to many children.  For children with less confidence, seeing others act out a scene, or even for those with few line who are still able to wear a costume, can give the reluctant reader hope that they will be able to do the same thing.

The second cognitive tool to foster creativity in my classroom is looking at patterns.  With the Reader’s Theater program, students would be able to use this concept when looking for and deciding on scripts to read. Creating patterns allows us to make sense of otherwise complex ideas, actions, and thoughts.  Patterns bring order to a world sometimes filled with chaos.   Having a story with repeating lines builds confidence in students.  The structure of Readers’ Theater also builds on the sequence and order students read their parts.  For instance in the script The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle, http://bit.ly/1G7cB8E the story lists seven narrators that read.  They start with readers 1-7 then repeat two more times with the same order.  The children would automatically be able to identify the pattern of who reads when.  Patterns are reassuring when there is order to them. 

Modeling is another cognitive tool Root-Bernstein explains in their book.  This concept intertwines with these other forms of creativity, abstraction and embodied thinking.  They state, “Models can be formulated only after a real system or situation has been intensively observed, simplified by abstracting critical features, rescaled for human manipulation, and embodied physically or expressed in some verbal, mathematical, or artistic form.” (p. 230) These concepts of modeling, abstraction and embodied thinking would help foster my student’s creativity.  These cognitive tools will work well together when working to create a classroom scene that represents our story.  If we were to read and perform the story The Hungry Caterpillar, one can imagine a small tiny caterpillar that is eating an apple.  For a play we often have to use items that represent the characters or props.  The students would have to use their imagination for how to depict the caterpillar.  They would use this form of abstraction to bring the characters and scene to life.  Would they think of a costume, design a pattern on paper to represent its body, or bring in a stuffed caterpillar? Or would they have bushes or trees, and if so how would they decide which materials would represent the tree? They would have to scale their models to fit the scene.  Since this is a small play they would need to “act” out parts of the story. Using our bodies to physically interact by touching and feeling builds a stronger connection between our physical self and the knowledge to be learned or gained.  Perfect example of “embodied thinking”.   

Playing is what most children enjoy the most.  Any opportunity to learn through play becomes an opportunity for children to use their creativity.  Creating the opportunity through a Reader’s Theater activity, allows students the ability to play and learn at the same time.  The symbolic play of make-believe helps children act out what the characters, think, do, and feel.  They get to dress like the character, think like the character, and act like the character.  In Root-Bernstein’s book, the authors state, “Playing is therefore more than just exercising other tools for thinking; it is a tool in and of itself.” (p. 249) Play is a great motivator!  It fosters, creativity, interests, and pure enjoyment for learning.

The synthetic approach to creativity is bringing all of these ideas together.  We must combine our thoughts, feelings, memories, and knowledge to transform our thinking. (Root-Bernstein, p. 296)  Creating a structure for my classroom by introducing the Reader’s Theater idea, cultivates a thorough and synthetic opportunity for creative learning.  Education has shifted back and forth over the years regarding what is being taught and how it’s being taught.  Our current education is a strictly scripted curriculum through specified reading programs and specific math curriculum that teachers are being told to “teach this way”.  There are fewer opportunities for teachers to be creative and this leads to fewer opportunities for students to express their creative abilities.  “We need not change what we teach.  A synthetic education requires only that we change how we teach…” (Root-Bernstein, p. 317)  Bringing together all curricular areas, such as art, music, and other core classes, we can create a classroom that creates diverse learners.

I have learned this semester that all students have the capabilities to be creative learners.  Learning how to teach students in a way that allows them to utilize the seven cognitive tools for creative learners will create life long learners. Students will be able to use their knowledge and their imagination to produce innovative and original ideas. “Education is meant to open many doors, leading to many rooms.” (Root-Bernstein, p. 325)  As these doors open, so do the doors that lead to unlimited potential in children. 

Book/Journal References: 

Henriksen, D., Mishra, P. & the Deep-Play Research Group (2014).  Twisting knobs and connecting      things:  Rethinking Technology & Creativity in the 21^st Century. Tech Trends (58), p. 15-19.

Mishra, P., Henriksen, D. & the Deep-Play Research Group (2013).  A New Approach to Defining and     Measuring Creativity:  Rethinking Technology & Creativity in the 21^st Century.  Tech Trends (57) 5, p. 5-13.

Root-Bernstein, R. & M. (1999).  Sparks of Genius: The 13 Thinking Tools of the

           World’s Most Creative People. Houghton Mifflin Company:  Boston & New York

Other References:

Interview of Kelly Strouse, former Kindergarten teacher in East Lansing, on “What is Creativity?”

Website:  Reading Rockets, http://bit.ly/1ysZWqL

Website:  Dr. Young’s Reading Room, http://bit.ly/1G7cB8E

Elevator Pitch:

I've created a Glog to share my ideas about using creativity to guide reading and promote creativity.  Here is my link:  http://joroseth.edu.glogster.com/cep-818-creativity/

Twitter:
You can find my tweet by searching #CEP818.  My name is @Joroseth

Module 7-Playing

How Do I Love Thee-Play

The Activity:

          Playing is one of the most important skills for learning.  Unstructured and unguided play allows for children to interact and explore objects for purposes other than they may be intended for.  In Root-Bernstein’s book, the authors equate play as “…a tool in and of itself.” (p. 249)

          An activity that I would use to introduce rhyming words would include a variety of tools and activities.  The task would be to identify in a variety of nursery rhymes, words that rhyme and words that do not rhyme.  To incorporate technology, I would set students up during a center time with iPads with a specific rhyming application and headphones.   The student’s job would be to wear headphones and listen to the songs.  When they hear a pair of rhyming words they should clap.  When no rhymes are heard they shake their heads “no.”  When the rhyme is over, the students then draw pictures for the rhyming pair (i.e. wall and fall).  For an added activity, the kids could draw other pairs of rhymes they heard, or listen to multiple nursery rhymes and complete the activity.  There are several other extension activities that could be done with this.  The students could use sentence strips and rebuild the nursery rhyme by putting them in the correct order, act out the nursery rhyme, or use a splitter to have multiple children listening to the same nursery rhyme and then do a turn and share to identify rhymes both students heard. 

The Reflection:

Nursery rhymes have been around for hundreds of years. They are a part of most children's early childhood memories.  Much of the time these rhymes are simply read to children.  There is little opportunity to interact or explore through play when read during story time.  Though in many classrooms including Preschools, Kindergarten, and even First grade classrooms these rhymes can be used to foster play by providing a variety of games and activities.  Through unstructured playing with letter cards (taken from words in the nursery rhyme), little toy characters for re-enactment purposes or used to create their own stories or rhymes, felt boards, and technology applications on iPads or other tablets, children can use play to explore the concept, but most importantly to have fun with the materials. 

          
          I love what Root-Bernstein states on page 248 regarding play,  “…play has no direct or directing purpose outside of itself.  Play is simply for the fun of it, for the enjoyment of doing and making without responsibility.  There is no success or failure in play…however, to say that play has no inherent goal does not mean that it’s results cannot afterward be put to good purposes beyond motivating enjoyment.”  To play at home or school, children are capable of interacting with toys and materials regardless of their direct purpose.  Children can manipulate toys to fit their style and choices for creativity. 
           

The Creative "I" Project-Part 3

The Creative "I" Project:  Architecture of Space

          The space I chose is less for creativity and more for helping me to engage on the task at hand.  It allows me a quiet and what I see as a tranquil secluded place even though it exists within my family room.  It is the space I choose to go and work on lesson plans, readings, and graduate work assignments.  My dog, Louie, often enjoys sitting with me looking out the window or snoozing.  During the spring semester, I frequently will sit with a hot cup of tea, as my husband keeps the fire going in the fireplace next to me.  Ahhh…it’s quiet, it’s comfortable, I feel loved by my dog and husband, and for some odd reason I am able to tune out my children as they play around me sending Nerf bullets zipping by.  In moments of deep thought, I look out the window as I think and contemplate the issues presented to me by my professors, and form my ideas while preparing my responses to assignments.  I enjoy the light that the little corner offers, both natural and from reading lights and track lights above me.  It is the chair my husband indulged me with when I began my Master’s program.  It is the chair that I pictured myself sitting in for long periods of time, reading and working on my projects.  It has been “that” chair and “that” space which has helped me both physically, mentally, and emotionally work towards my Master's.

Summary:

          As a teacher, I typically set up my classroom before the year begins with everything in its place.  The classroom library is in the back of room away from the Smartboard, the tables are up front to optimize the view of the board.  The book boxes are close so they can get their folders without wasted time and the calendar area has all it’s parts set up nicely.  Each and everything has its place.  After reading the article, “Rethinking Technology & Creativity in the 21^st Century: A Room of Their Own” I have come to realize that this workspace at school I’ve created is a top-down model.   

          Now to think about my “study” space at home, I realized I attempted to work in several locations before settling on the “study” corner with my new chair.  Again I approached this with a top-down strategy.  My thoughts were to set up the best learning environment that I imagined.  A table was a necessity with space to set out all my books with strong lighting.  That was my optimal “study” space I envisioned.  So I started my studying at the noisy kitchen table (with good lighting, I must say), then moved to my bedroom where I thought the quiet would help, to the front living room which was uncomfortable, to my cozy chair in the corner.  It was a comfortable chair, in a quiet corner, but still helped me feel connected to my family.  The fireplace next to it allowed for me to place my caffeine (as all students seem to need), a warm feeling of content as I worked through my class assignments, and a view of outside.  After much trial and error, I realized that for me my optimal learning space was that soft comfortable leather chair in the corner, with my computer on my lap, my book next to me, and my dog giving me some love by cozying up to me.  I realized that I needed to adapt and my environment needed to adapt to fit my needs for the “best study spot”.   With this idea in mind it is clear that Christopher Alexander believed that, “…architecture emerges from the lived experiences of people.” (pg. 6)  With this philosophy, my natural instinct to seek out an environment that worked for me, it required different locations within my house, and understanding that moving my chair to the corner would have the greatest impact on my ability to focus and succeed.