Monday, December 17, 2018

Assessing Creativity


Michael G. Ford, M.Ed, Ph.D.
Co-Department Head, Science Department
Co-Director Global Scholars Program


As a reader of our blog, you are in a position that was shared by our AOA faculty during the start of the Creative Thinking Initiative. You probably value creativity in yourself, your children and your coworkers. You no longer require convincing that creative output is a cornerstone of the modern workplace and a key to the future success of our children. Even if you are already convinced of the value of fostering creative thought, you may have some uncertainty as to how an educational institution could undertake an evaluation of creativity in its students. The prospect of placing a numerical grade on creative student work may be both confusing and a little intimidating. I hope to convince you that the production of creative output arises from a learned set of behaviors and that with systematic and rigorous application of specific principles, it can be evaluated, ranked and scored. In this work, I will attempt to show what we have learned about the process of teaching our students creative thinking, and several ways in which we foster the development of these skills in the classroom.

Before listing a set of characteristics that we seek to encourage, I believe it is useful to consider what must be absent in an environment that seeks to foster creative thinking. A number of stereotypes and preconceptions surround the language used to describe the production of creative work. Additionally, while superficial evaluation of creativity as a line item at the bottom of a rubric has been present for years, it is only by pushing creativity to the forefront that full development of creative thinking can be made possible.

Creativity is Not Character

It is common in many settings to refer to ‘creative people’ as if all of their original, interesting and impactful work is the product of innate inability, instead of the result of long years of training and honing of a specific skill set. If we are to evaluate creativity, we must possess the mindset that creative thought is not solely the product of an inborn proficiency for producing interesting, useful and novel work. This shift does not require us to ignore personality traits and habits of mind that give some advantages in producing creative output, any more than we would be required to ignore writing ability, math proficiency or scientific aptitude. Instead, we strive to set up a process which improves upon areas of weakness and utilizes an individual’s characteristics to their best advantage.

Not a Niche Market

While it is natural to think of creative output being tied tightly to specific subjects such as language arts, visual and performing arts, effective education utilizing the ‘creativity toolbox’ cuts across all disciplines. In math and science, the trend toward Project-Based Learning (PBL) strategies, is really just a specific implementation of a strategy designed to make use of student’s natural curiosity by removing rigid framework, and allowing hands-on exploration of scientific and mathematical principles. As a science teacher, I have found great joy in giving my students the time and space to develop their own questions and to find surprising solutions to open-ended challenges. Placing an institutional emphasis on creativity across grade level and subject has also allowed AOA to develop a common language for encouraging and evaluating creative work.    

Evaluating Creativity - Product and Process

Almost all scholarly work on teaching and evaluating creativity contains some attempt to define creativity, an effort to delineate what it means to ‘teach creativity’. Instead of spending time with this academic exercise, I would like to share a specific set of traits and behaviors that we seek to instill in our students. When the faculty of Andrews Osborne Academy seeks to evaluate creative output, we are evaluating both the product and process of creative thought.

The Product of Creative Work - Novel and Useful

Any valuable piece of creative work must fulfill two basic criteria; it must serve a purpose or perform a function while also containing original thought. The purpose of an assignment seeking to develop creative thinking skills may vary broadly in scope, but always there remains a specific idea that the work seeks to communicate. If the student loses sight of the specific goal, they may turn in novel work which is irrelevant or otherwise unable to meet the requirements set forth by the instructor. Similarly, work which is a simple reworking of existing ideas would likely provide a product that may be minimally functional, but will not convey any sense of the student’s own perspective on the subject at hand.

Consider an assignment in which a student was required to create a graphical personal ad for a character from The Great Gatsby. The requirements of this type of assignment might be to portray the best aspects of one major character in an engaging visual format that would make the viewer curious to know more about them as a person. A student with a design background might spend hours on the interplay of color, font and overall design while ignoring the exploration of the character traits depicted in the novel. Conversely, a bulleted list of all aspects of the character’s personal qualities may lose a reader’s interest before they can engage with the text itself. The search for the ‘sweet spot’ where a novel presentation is able to meet a specific curricular goal is the challenge faced in any classroom seeking to teach the set of skills involved in producing quality creative work.
If we look at companies, groups or individuals that embody the creative spirit, we find this same union of function and novelty. Apple remains a tremendously successful company because its products combine a pleasing form with functions that lead the electronics field. Instead of ‘thinking outside the box’, successful creative endeavors maneuver gracefully within a specific ‘box’ better than their peers. 

Creative Thinking as a Process

As educators we are taught to value the process that leads to an end product even as we grade the end result. Assignments promoting creative thinking are no exception. A brief listing of each aspect of this process is useful in understanding how we develop these skills in our students.

Divergent Thinking - The first part of many creative endeavors is idea generation. Whether called brainstorming, ideation, or divergent thinking we ask students to generate possible ways to fulfill the stated goals of the assignment. In some cases, such as a building project in physics class, we may pay little heed to the feasibility of a given design, and may simply set a goal of generating as many solutions as possible.

Taking the ‘Deep Dive’ - Digging deeply, investigating thoroughly, and researching the work of others can help to provide a first screen of a set of possible solutions, and give fuel for the creative fire. In literature, this may mean a close reading of a specific passage, or the tracking of a character through a novel. In history, it may mean getting closer to primary sources to aid in understanding of the personal effects of important events.

Risk-Taking - Thoughtful risk-taking is part of any creative endeavor, requiring a student to be willing to attempt an unproven technique or design. While risk taking includes the acceptance of failure as part of the growth process (as is so fashionable to discuss in educational circles) it also means being open with personal ideas that may leave many feeling vulnerable. The ability to listen to one’s unique inner voice means accepting the risk that your creative work may not be highly valued by peers and teachers.

Convergent Thinking - Iteration, testing, editing - we have many ways of selecting one solution from many. Ultimately we are guided by our need to fulfil the requirements put forth in the stated goals of the assignment itself. During a long-term assignment - The Big Battery Build, students in my chemistry classes narrowed down possible battery designs based on the directive to produce the highest possible voltage while avoiding toxic or dangerous materials.

While development of the creative skill set requires us to examine both the process and product, it may not be possible (or desirable) to evaluate all aspects of creative thinking in a single assignment. In our science classrooms we might seek to emphasize a ‘deep dive’ - researching current gene therapy techniques, followed by the selection of a single technique (convergent thinking) suited to treating a specific genetic disorder.

While I have not fully explored exactly how creativity is assessed for individual assignments, I have attempted to give you a sense of what traits we seek to impart to our students. I hope to take an opportunity in future blog posts to better illustrate the shared language of assessing creativity and contrast traditional assignments with versions modified to emphasize creative thought. While I may have only begun the process of uncovering what it means to assess a student’s creative work, I hope that you have come to understand the overall goals of evaluating creativity in the AOA classroom, and that it may be less mysterious to those in our community as a whole.


Friday, November 16, 2018


School Athletics in 2018 – How To Do It Well

Scott G. McNevan, MBA
Assistant Head of School – Co-Curriculars & Residential Life
Athletic Director

It has been said routinely by coaches and administrators for years that ‘athletics are an extension of the classroom’.  This very American mantra (most countries do not embrace athletics so formally in their school systems) is more true today than ever.  As technology annually provides our students with more and more opportunity for inactive stimulation, it can be argued that the value of participating in organized school sports is at an all-time high.  While the value is inherently there, just as it is for learning about literature or social sciences, the delivery is something that many schools take for granted and should re-evaluate.  How can schools deliver quality athletic programming well in 2018? 

DEFINE SUCCESS

The traditional measures of athletic success are performance-based statistics.  How many games did the team win?  How many points did the player score?  How many saves did the goalkeeper make?  Similar to test scores in the classroom, these quantitative measurements provide us with information about output.  In this way stats are used to identify high performing teams and individuals.  However, it is very important for school leadership to avoid over-prioritizing traditional stats as the only measure of success.  In over-focusing on wins and losses we lose one of sport’s most teachable moments, context-based reflection.  In addition to competitive results, defining success for a school’s athletic teams and programs must include other contextual considerations like the starting point of pre-season expectations, injuries and other adversity throughout a season, the amount of improvement over time, academic performance of athletes, graduation rates, and representation of community core values.  It is a valuable exercise for school leadership to pause and reflect on what contextual considerations are most important to them outside of competitive results.  The real benefactors of this reflection are the student-athletes, who can begin to learn that winning and losing are relative and that defining success is context-based. 

ALIGN WITH THE MISSION

Every school has a mission statement.  Most athletic departments have a mission statement.  The exercise of creating a mission is important and valuable work.  It helps an organization realize its identity.  However, more important than creating a mission is living it out in day to day operations.  The mission is the lighthouse.  It is there to guide operating decisions through the good and the bad.  When things seem troubled and confusing, the mission is there as a beacon, helping a school to stay on course.  For athletics to be done well, the department, like all others at the school, must align with the mission.  School leadership must be very intentional about its athletic policies, ensuring that decisions are made with intent to reflect the mission, rather than in an arbitrary fashion. As an example, at Andrews Osborne Academy our mission is to develop students who can lead and serve in a global community.  To ensure our student-athletes don’t confuse team goals with the mission, we support participation in school activities outside of athletics, even during the season. This year the senior captain of the boys’ varsity basketball team also pursued a lead role in a school theatre production.  Restricting him from doing this due to ‘team commitments’ would not have aligned with our mission.  By being a part of both experiences, he is becoming more prepared to lead and serve in his community going forward.  

KEEP PERSPECTIVE ON THE LANDSCAPE

The landscape of youth sports has been changing steadily for the past twenty years.  Much has been documented about the rise of club sports, the loss of unstructured play due to technology, and the more frequent participation in year-round training for kids.  Despite one’s opinions on these topics, it is vital for a school to recognize and accept the reality of this landscape.  We are incapable of changing the greater environment of youth sports.  However, we are very capable of considering the realities of that environment and then being creative.  Many schools have made the mistake of taking a defensive posture regarding their athletics, asking families to ‘choose a side’.  Some have even instituted penalties for those that participate in outside training rather than with the school-endorsed program.  Schools should not so easily choose this adversarial position.  Sports-loving families are always going to find ways for their student-athlete to participate in programming that they believe is best.  Whether or not we agree with their thinking on this, it is a reality we should accept.  Keeping a big perspective on this and choosing to be creative in the ways we approach things can prevent a lot of frustration and encourage stronger relationships with families.  Examples of this usually involve compromise.  If a family would like their middle-school aged daughter to participate on both a club soccer team and the school team, seek a way to make this work.  Instead of blindly sticking to old policies that link attendance to playing time without any conversation, determine to be creative.  Perhaps the club team schedule can take priority and the player can be warmly welcomed to school practices and games when she is available.  Perhaps when she is available a starting role, while warranted based on caliber, is not granted while instead considerable playing time off the bench is agreed upon.  There are many creative ways to provide an outcome that benefits both the school and, most importantly, the student-athlete.

DON’T FORGET TO HAVE FUN

Students are experiencing higher levels of stress and anxiety today than ever before.  Pressure stemming from parents, outside club sports, social media dynamics, and normal adolescent turbulence is combined with growing academic pressure at many schools to create a very unhealthy equation for the student.  School athletics can avoid contributing to this.  While hard work, determination, and perseverance remain foundational expectations of any good coach, it is vital for all of us to remember that sports are supposed to be fun.  Inside the structures of training and practice, it is not only possible but necessary to incorporate moments of silly, goofy fun for student-athletes.  There are many moments during every season that call for some light-hearted play.  Sometimes it can be spontaneous, providing a disheartened team with 15 minutes to try a new, unstructured game just to break the tension.  Other times it can be planned, scheduling a light, fun practice to compensate for a series of tougher, more physical days.  One goal of every coach should be to see each student-athlete finishing their season loving that sport just as much or more than they did on day one of the season.  If we are not seeing smiles or hearing laughter from our student-athletes, we may be forgetting to incorporate enough fun into the schedule. 

BREAK THE CYCLE

One of the biggest challenges for school athletics is finding, developing, and retaining good coaches.  The demands of coaching in 2018 are significant.  There is a long list of certifications to complete, increased expectations from schools and parents, and evolving needs from student-athletes to deal with.  Schools should be sensitive to these demands on coaches, provide the resources necessary, and support them well.  However, one thing schools cannot afford to do anymore is turn a blind eye towards coaches who continue an outdated, unhealthy, unacceptable cycle of treating student-athletes poorly.  I’m not referring to the need for coaches to maintain high expectations or push their players out of comfort zones at times.  I’m talking about the boundaries regarding language, terminology, and appropriate methods of motivation.  There once was a day when coaches motivated more commonly through yelling, screaming, and emotional outbursts towards student-athletes.  Questionable language and intimidation were more widely accepted.  Thankfully, that day has passed.  Students still need a strong response from coaches at times.  What they don’t need is to be publicly embarrassed or shamed in front of their peers.  They don’t need to be screamed at routinely or motivated frequently through threats or aggressive behavior.  Most of the time when coaches act this way today, they are simply repeating a standard experienced from their playing days in high school.  They are continuing a cycle that must be broken.  The best coaches in 2018 are those who build a deeper toolbox of resources.  They are committed to being good communicators, highlighting goals and objectives, planning well, and staying relatively positive as a role model for their players.  Schools that look the other way and continue to support coaches who perpetuate this cycle do so at the expense of their own student-athlete experience.

At AOA we are committed to doing school athletics well.  We’re adding new programming, re-evaluating the ways in which we measure success, and establishing new goals for our athletic department.  It is an exciting time to be here.  Go Phoenix!
 

Monday, October 15, 2018

What is a Creative Thinker?

AOA students and teachers talk about their interests and what thinking creatively means to them.
*Editorial credit to Marina Vladova, M.A.Ed., AOA Upper School English Teacher 



Amy Yao
What is creative thinking about? 


For me, it is an openness. It is about discovering objects, stories, and traditions that have either been neglected or forgotten and transforming them into things that people feel will love again. Guo Pei is my favorite designer whose skill and imagination blow me away. She is inspired by tree roots and plants. Although I’m more of a minimalist, I enjoy taking long walks and am also inspired by nature as well as by the fairy tales that my grandmother read to me. Journaling is a great way to explore concepts, questions, and doubts. During our junior year at AOA, we created nature journals where we got to explore and practice some of the Transcendentalist ideas that we read about. For my Senior Experience, my art teacher showed me how to create a tactile idea-journal and helped place me with an incredible local designer who showed me how to incorporate traditional patterns and upcycled pieces into new designs. I got to go through an entire process of creating garments for an individual from start to finish. This involved multiple redos! I’m so excited to study fashion design at Parsons this year!


Amy Yao graduated from AOA and is a freshman at Parsons School of Design in New York.


Madelyn Conley
What is creative thinking about?


For me, it’s about developing a wide perspective and many reference points to draw on. The things I treasure—my maternal Japanese great-grandmother’s red dancing shoes and fan and the soft-shoes (ghillies) from my father’s Irish side of the family—reveal how curious and sentimental I am about the past. I see culture as a spectrum of many components where understanding one drives me to want to dig deeper and know more. As I practiced the traditional Japanese fan dance, I began learning about my great-grandfather’s life in Camp Jerome, an internment camp in Arkansas to which thousands of Japanese Americans were relocated and incarcerated during WWII. AOA has students from every continent, and it’s great to exchange ideas. Drawing on multiple perspectives gives you an opportunity to create a wider, more interdependent web of friends and a dynamic identity for yourself. I look forward to studying environmental science at Reed College.


Maddie graduated from AOA and is a freshman at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.


Luke Frisbie
What is creative thinking about?


It’s just expressing yourself through whatever shows it best! I love working on my drawing tablet, and I’m really into stop-motion and animation. I can take any question or incident and animate it. For example, is April Fool’s Day a holiday? I have a YouTube channel and like to collaborate with kids here that I know and kids from around the world. Sometimes I’ll team up with others to use their voices for characters that I’ve created. For AOA’s International Week, my friend told me an Indian story and I animated it. I see design as perspective-taking and am always looking for opportunities to work with other kids. I like stories that play with time. Years don’t really go by that fast, it’s just that when you don’t remember what happened you say they do. If people lived forever, they’d probably remember differently, and each year would be like a day. If this suddenly happened to us, we’d have to adjust. It could be a gift or a curse depending on how you lived. Attitude is everything.


Luke is a current seventh grader at AOA.


Dawn Driggs
What is creative thinking about?


I treasure my record albums—Bowie, Beatles, Marillion. I still listen to them and look at the artwork. So much gets lost with downloads. Seeing the artwork on the album gives me a “rounder” experience. This is what I bring into the classroom. This is my fourth year at AOA, and I love finding creative ways for students to have a “rounder” exploration of other cultures. Passport to World Cultures is a program for our first graders. It is a way to cross borders and to invite families to share stories, songs, history, artwork, food, and friendship. Creative thinking isn’t difficult to develop with younger children, because creativity hasn’t yet been “untaught”. Six-year-olds don’t even know yet what’s in the box; everything is outside the box for them. I try to give them the tools and space to not be afraid to make mistakes and to see how mistakes can blossom into new and useful ideas.


Dawn Driggs has an BSBA in Accounting and Finance and is Montessori certified. This is her nineteenth year in education and her fourth year teaching at AOA.


Glenn Pihlak
What is creative thinking about?


It’s about planning and tinkering, a process that begins purposefully but is never really finished, and this is enormously fun. I’ve collected postcards from over forty countries that I have visited, some in which I’ve lived and taught. Travel is an iterative process determined by the traveler, people he or she meets, and unexpected circumstances. This summer, my wife and I went up to Lake Michigan. The only things I had actually planned was to go to a soccer match and kayaking. Otherwise, we had some nebulous ideas. This left us open to experiences where we’d stop and indulge. We met people who shared our passion for hot beignets and blueberries in half-pint containers. Just like I prefer traveling with an open-mind and ill-defined goals to pre-packaged tours, I don’t settle on fixed outcomes in the classroom. In my ninth grade World Literature classes as well as in the Senior English Seminars that I teach, “What if” is a question that always succeeds to bring greater depth to class discussion and written response. Our readings serve to uncover how writers explore new encounters, environments, successes, and failures.


Glenn Pihlak has a MS in Education Policy. He has taught World Literature, American Literature, and several Senior English Seminars and chairs the English department. This is his sixth year teaching at AOA.


Mike Ford
What is creative thinking about?


It’s about beauty and function. I love gadgetry—to use and display. I have a century-old balance. It still works, and I find it beautiful. It’s unusual these days for things to work for more than a few years. I also have a Geiger counter and like to turn it on. Students are surprised to learn that radiation is all around us. In fact, there was a uranium glaze on Fiestaware from the 1950s. Thinking creatively also means digging deeper, being able to see instruction as a set of constraints that function as a launching point and not an end in itself. The paths vary, and some I would have never envisioned. Science is not linear; there is movement and bouncing between hypotheses and experience. Creative thinking also depends on one's willingness to work in groups, break up jobs, and support one another in exploring hunches to the point where students reevaluate their relationship with the subject matter.


Mike Ford has a Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and has taught Chemistry, Biotechnology, AP Biology, and Genetics. He chairs the science department and co-directs the Global Scholars Program. This is his fourth year teaching at AOA.



Tuesday, September 11, 2018

Schools MUST Teach Students to Think Creatively

Larry Goodman Ph.D.
Head of School


Let’s be clear - “creative thinking” is not the same thing as “creativity” any more than critical thinking is the same thing as “criticism.” Nor am I advocating that schools need to teach students to be creative any more than I would suggest schools should teach students to be critical. But I AM saying that schools need to teach students to think creatively, just as they teach students to think critically.

“Critical thinking” is convergent - calling for one to think toward what is already known; “creative thinking” is divergent - calling for one to think away from what is known. But while “critical thinking” is a foundational part of virtually every curriculum in the United States, “creative thinking” amounts to little more than a rhetorical flourish on most schools’ websites. This is a big mistake - and one that schools should work hard to change.

Already in the 1950s Professor Ellis Torrance was writing on the concept of creative thinking while at the University of Georgia. Torrance labeled four categories in which the scale and scope of one’s creative thinking could be measured: fluency (how many ideas one can generate), flexibility (how readily one can transform one idea into another), originality (self-explanatory), and elaboration (how extensively one can build-out an idea). All of these thought patterns move away from what is already known.

Also developed in the 1950s was a hierarchical model that educators have used ever since to determine how sophisticated one’s understanding of a concept is. At the bottom of this hierarchy are mental tasks like memorization. A student can memorize the capitals of every State in the Union without knowing too much about any of those cities (or States) - which is why this cognitive skill (memorization) is “low man on the totem pole.” By contrast, evaluation is at the top of the hierarchy; if a student has to evaluate how effective city A is as a capital of State B, then that student necessarily knows a great deal more about the capital and the State. Initially, the hierarchy was comprised entirely of critical thinking (convergent) skills. But by 1992, educational theorists recognized the crucial role of creative thinking (divergent) skills and replaced “Evaluate” at the top of the hierarchy with “Create.”

Here’s why this is so important.

Our schools focus almost exclusively on critical thinking - on thinking toward what is known. Students’ understanding of any content area (as reflected in grades) is judged almost exclusively by their ability to memorize, analyze, synthesize...to think convergently. This creates - and then reinforces - a mindset that ambiguity is bad and that one needs to think only toward what is already known.

Now consider this. We’re told that in 2018, 50% of what a first year college student learns in a technical major is outdated by her junior year! No sooner do we get comfortable with one set of “facts” in any given situation, than we discover that those facts have changed. We now live in a world punctuated by change and ambiguity - precisely the aspects of cognition that our schools teach our students to fear and avoid!

If schools are going to prepare students for success in our rapidly changing world, they have to teach students how to navigate ambiguity - not avoid it. They need to teach students how to think divergently - how to think creatively.

To do this, schools have to value creative thinking - they actually have to teach the distinct skills involved in creative thinking and provide feedback (grades) for students in these areas as they learn to master these skills. I’ve written about this in some detail and you can find that article here.

What we hope to show in future blog posts on this site is how we teach creative thinking - and how we assess
creative thinking - at Andrews Osborne Academy.