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Blog Posts for Creative Thinking

Insightful articles about 21st century skills, inquiry, project-based learning, media literacy, and education reform.

Helping Students Be Awesome

Submitted by King on Thu, 2013-12-19 13:00

My friend Oliver Schinkten knows 150 awesome human beings. They’re students in his Communities and leadership classrooms at Oshkosh North High School, and they routinely do amazing things.

Last year, each student in Communities found and interviewed a local veteran of World War II, the Vietnam War, or the Korean War. They prepared questions, conducted and recorded hour-long interviews, edited them into stories, and created keepsake DVDs for the veterans and their families. The students then planned and ran an event celebrating the service of these people and presenting them with the DVDs. Afterward, many families contacted Oliver to tell them how moving and powerful the experience was, and how the DVD was a priceless heirloom they would pass down for generations.

Pretty awesome stuff for high schoolers.

Or how about the hydroponics lab that the students are building? It isn’t just a 48-foot long hoop house that will raise fish and fresh vegetables around the year to be used in the cafeteria and sold locally. It’s also a STEM Learning Center, creating a living lab for students from Oshkosh North and offering educational tours to school groups from around the area.

And it’s being funded, designed, built, and staffed by high school students.

People often assume that Oliver is teaching a gifted class, but he has public-school students from all different backgrounds, with a variety of historic levels of achievement. He says that the difference is authenticity. When students realize that what they are doing matters and is real, they engage, and the results speak for themselves.

During the 2012 election campaign, the Communities classroom created a non-partisan Web site that factually reported on the many issues in that divisive campaign. Read more

Creating a Growth Mindset in Your Students

Submitted by King on Mon, 2012-03-26 23:00

Belief that you can become smarter and more talented opens the doorways to success. That’s what twenty years of research has shown Carol Dweck of Stanford University. She has identified two opposing beliefs about intelligence and talent, beliefs that strongly impact our ability to learn.

Mindset Chart

Though the fixed mindset has traditionally held sway, many recent studies show that the growth mindset better represents our abilities. Our brains are much more elastic than previously thought, constantly growing new connections. IQ and talent are not fixed, but are mutable based on experience and attitude.

In her book Mindset, Dweck outlines the dramatic effect that these opposing beliefs have on learners:

Fixed Mindset Growth Mindset
Wants to prove intelligence or talent. Wants to improve intelligence or talent.
Avoids challenges for fear of failure. Engages challenges to improve.
Gives up in the face of tough obstacles. Persists in overcoming obstacles.
Avoids hard labor. Sees labor as the path to success.
Treats criticism as an attack. Treats criticism as an opportunity.
Feels threatened by others’ success. Feels inspired by others’ success.
Read more

Serious Fun in the Classroom

Submitted by King on Tue, 2012-01-31 14:00
Serious Fun in the Classroom

Some very clever people are using fun to solve social problems. The approach is called “Fun Theory,” and it’s tackling all kinds of social ills.

For example, Kevin Richardson suggests creating a “speeding lottery.” Cameras that catch speeders can also recognize those who obey the speed limit. Speeders pay fines into a pot, and those who obey are entered into a lottery to win the pot. Check out the speeding lottery video. Fun!

The mayor of Bogota, Columbia, has his own approach to speeding. Anatas Mockus hired over 400 mimes to stand on street corners, making fun of bad drivers. His reasoning is that it is more of a deterrent to humiliate bad drivers than to fine them. His idea has worked, dropping traffic fatalities by more than half. Fun!

And recently, two 17-year-old Canadians named Mathew Ho and Asad Muhammad used fun theory to capture international attention for their backyard experiment. They sent a helium balloon nearly into space, including a Lego astronaut, which they filmed in flight. Fun!

What can fun theory do in my classroom?

Fun theory is limited only by imagination—yours and your students’. First, use fun theory on a source of annoyance. What is your biggest pet peeve? What are you constantly reminding your students about? Here’s a beginning list:

  • Lateness for class
  • Forgotten homework
  • Sloppy mistakes
  • Chatting and texting
  • Not turning in assignments
  • Not putting names on assignments
Read more

Conceptual Blending for Creative Thinking

Submitted by King on Thu, 2012-01-19 13:24

Conceptual blending is a strategy that businesses use to inspire creative thinking, but it can also help your students think about and engage any topic.

What is conceptual blending?

Conceptual blending is combining two dissimilar concepts and using creative thinking to work out the dissonances. Here’s an example:

“How can we make our workplace more like a playground?”

Workplace like a playground

At first, you might ask—why would anyone want the workplace to be more like a playground? Work is work. Play is play. The two concepts don’t blend. But let’s think about what playgrounds do well:

  • bring people together
  • get them to collaborate
  • offer equipment that inspires creativity
  • encourage users to return repeatedly
  • create multisensory engagement
  • make people happy and healthy

Aren’t these desirable attributes for a workplace?

Read more

3 Simple Steps to the 4 C’s

Submitted by King on Fri, 2012-01-06 11:12

So you’ve heard of the 4 C’s—critical thinking, creative thinking, communicating, and collaborating—but how are you supposed to teach your own subject and the 4 C’s?

The good news is that the 4 C’s help you teach your subject. They aren’t content. They’re skills for gaining content. Here are 3 simple steps that use the 4 C’s to help students learn your subject:

Step 1: Prompt Critical and Creative Thinking

After introducing and modeling a new concept, prompt students to think critically and creatively about it. Assign a 5-minute activity that students complete individually. Here are some examples:

  • Sentence completion: Ask students to complete a sentence in as many ways as possible.
    Complete the following sentence in as many ways as you can: “The cell membrane helps the cell by . . .”
  • Definitions: Ask students to define a key term, providing its denotation, along with examples, synonyms, and antonyms.
    Define the term “executive branch,” giving examples, synonyms, and antonyms.
  • Problem solving: Ask students to list ways that a problem could be solved.
    List as many ways as you can think of that global economic inequality could be reduced.
  • Clustering: Ask students to write an important concept in the center of a piece of paper and to create as many personal connections as they can to it.
    Write “Supply and Demand” in the middle of a piece of paper and circle it. Around it, write ways supply and demand affect your life.
  • Modeling: Ask students to represent a concept visually, whether in a sketch, a diagram, a symbol, or some other form.
    Create a visual representation of entropy—a drawing, diagram, graph, or other visual.
  • Questioning: Ask students to write five questions about the current topic and to pick the most interesting one.
    Write down five questions you have about logarithms and pick the most interesting one.
Read more

Thinking Like Breathing

Submitted by King on Thu, 2011-11-17 10:43

Which is more important for today’s students, critical thinking or creative thinking? It’s a trick question. I may as well ask which is more important, breathing out or breathing in? “Whichever one I need to do right now” is one good answer to this last question. Another is “Neither—since I need both to stay alive.” It’s the same with critical and creative thinking.

The Thought Exchange

Creative and critical thinking are two halves of a cycle: inspiration and expiration.

  • Creative thinking draws in possibilities. It is an expansive process, filling you with new ideas from the outside. Creativity reaches beyond what is known and into the unknown . . . to discover something new. Creativity is not necessarily discerning. You don’t separate the nitrogen from the oxygen in the air before you breathe it in. Your chest simply expands, and in it comes. Creative thinking can be exhilarating, flooding you with new possibilities.
  • Critical thinking, on the other hand, sorts through the possibilities to do something practical. Critical thinking analyzes, applies, and evaluates. It categorizes, compares, contrasts, and traces causes and effects. It’s like separating the oxygen out of the air you breathe in, in order to enrich your cells, or extracting the carbon dioxide from your blood, in order to exhale it. Critical thinking takes what creative thinking has amassed and sorts it, keeping the best and discarding the worst.
Read more