Building Learning Communities 2014

Sir Ken Robinson claims that “creativity is as important as literacy”. In an age when most information is “Googleable” how do we craft assessment tasks that allow our students to practice divergent and critical thinking? How can we give them opportunities to both demonstrate their learning and their ability to apply and create knowledge, fostering the shift from consumption to production? More importantly, how do we move beyond the “assignment” stage and encourage students to be intrinsically motivated to make beautiful things on a regular basis? One of the greatest challenges is developing ideas, finding time, and offering opportunities for students work on creative projects. Even if you don’t have the luxury of  offering a project-based curriculum, you can still develop a steady diet of ongoing, “back-burner” projects that gets students to “dare to make and share”. This workshop will explore ways to instill a creative culture in your classroom, with everything from low-entry point crowdsourced uses of social media to the #showyourwork movement which asks students to be overt about their design thinking, creative process, and troubleshooting and contribute to collective knowledge. At the heart of personalized learning is creative freedom, but students often need a spark of inspiration, a design brief, or mentorship to get them on the road to making. Finally, we’ll look at teacher-as-creator as well, and the importance of transparency and curation in facilitating creativity in the classroom. “There is no win, there is no fail, there is only make” (John Cage).