Creative Thinking - essential for future work discursive.adamprocter.co.uk
@adamprocter I wonder how they are going to test for creativity in schools? I think that would be a tricky problem that could miss. Are they (PISA) assuming creativity is a transferable skill?
@johnjohnston yes that is a little concerning. They are saying it’s a teachable skill, so I suspect they may run some design thinking style challenges. Such as the paper clip challenge and divergent thinking Ken Robinson talked about this and children are much better at it but the ability is slowly schooled out of them
@adamprocter as a teacher I always feel a little aggrieved (blasphemy) at Sir Ken. I’ve seen him talk a couple of times, same jokes, didn’t feel very creative;-) Some of my class are incredibly creative with old building site pallets but not necessarily with paint or words.
Some creativity seems to depend or be interlinked with other skills. Quite a rabbit hole.
@adamprocter Our 11 year old son is in the gifted program where he spends a large part of each week being given problems/questions/ideas to work on. E.g. recently he was asked to design affordable apartments that would have suited immigrants to the US in the 1920s. The output was a report of his reasoning as well as a model of the apartments (I think this project was assigned 2 days, sometimes projects must done the same day). At the end of the semester each kid is assessed on around 20 attributes spread across 7 different categories.
I think this type of assessment is what would be needed for a creativity or problem solving program. It doesn’t involve numerical scores or letter grades but instead uses terms like ‘novice’, ‘apprentice’ and so on. It would be good to see a simplified version like this for the general student population in addition to teaching the ‘subjects’. But, at least here in the US, I think there are very few teachers who are equipped to teach this kind of activity and equally ill-equipped to make assessments.
I read the link and frankly wasn’t stirred by it. At least in our area we have teachers trained in instructing creative and making the assessments. I’d simply ask them how to expand it to the general cohorts and then start experimenting. I think all of the gifted teachers started their career with the general student population so should have a good grasp.
@ronguest @johnjohnston agree @johnjohnston ans @ronguest sounds good unfortunately in the UK the value of creativity, arts and humanities has been bashed and bashed by various governments and yet the creative industries as the largest and fastest growing economy here. So it’s all backwards. So anything that keeps reminding people that creativity and art are vital to society and more is always needed.
