IMAGINATION, CREATIVITY AND INNOVATION

The Innovative Educator: Suffering in Silence… Standardized testing from the view of an educator & parent : Guest post by Renny Fong ( TimeOutDad ) As our children are undergoing the gruel of the high stakes standardized tests in New York...

   "The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed"     William Gibson Is the release of iBooks Author and a growing range of commercial textbooks available on iBooks part of a transformation of Education or is it just a step along the road to a digital education revolution? In ‘new learning’ classrooms, teachers have embraced technology, have questioned the norms of teacher-student interaction and source content that suits need from multiple resources. The trend is to use technology to free student learning from narrow views of what Education is about and to free teachers where possible from some of the marking, progress reporting and assessment so that they can spend more time facilitating learning. Here are a few things that technology can be used to improve: 1. Instructional content Content is what traditional print textbooks deliver – and in most cases deliver well. Content is generally written by teachers and experts ...

In my opinion the biggest issue in the school system is that it has outlived its design. The whole system of teaching young people the same thing at the same time and at the same pace was designed to prepare a compliant workforce and willing consumers to staff and fuel Europe’s industrial revolution. Because it succeeded in its primary purpose it has been used as the model ever since. This is a ‘one size fits all’ view of Education. We continue to head down the road that is standardized testing, drill and practice and one-size-fits-all schooling. Schools are not measured on students’ ability to think critically, to be creative or expressive. They are measured by the number of students that have performed to minimum levels against standardized tests. For many of us who have been through the system, our memories of the classroom are often of boredom, repetition and a sense that we couldn’t get out of there soon enough. Given the wealth of resources available for the modern cla...

“Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.” Benjamin Franklin All my professional life I have been struck by the difference between remembering and learning . This may not be that surprising for someone who has been at various times a teacher, an author and a publisher. But there is a truth in the difference that continues to inspire me. While we are growing up we are taught to remember - to churn out facts or apply formulae that get us through exams. We are not taught to learn - at least not in formal education. Learning and remembering are not the same. Anything remembered can be forgotten. Anything learned is for life. Is it possible to 'un-learn’ how to ride a bicycle for example? Real learning comes when we take risks. We have to fall off a bicycle before we learn to ride. Sadly, we are taught not to take risks, but rather to give the expected answers that we have remembered by rote. If we left it to schools to teach us how ...

“Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school.” Albert Einstein For someone with a physics degree, who has nothing but respect for the great man, attempting to improve on something that Einstein said is tantamount to heresy. But here’s what I want to do and my justification for it. In the quote above, I want to replace ‘learned’ with ‘remembered’ or ‘memorised’. I think it is useful to make a distinction between remembering and learning . We can all recall memorising (or failing to memorise in my case!) lists of foreign language vocabulary for the next test. But how much good did it really do us? What percentage of the words on those lists is still with us now – or was even still with us a week after the test? The truth is that although we remembered the words on the list for the test – and some of us may have even passed the tests – we had learned little or nothing. Now I know there will be someone reading this who says ‘...

Innovation in business comes from having the right people, with the right skill sets and the right corporate culture. Sir Ken Robinson in his 2011 revision of his book ‘Out of Our Minds’ suggests that there are three related stages that lead to innovation. They are imagination (to bring to mind that which is not obvious to our senses), creativity (to take ideas and develop them into something of value) and innovation (to put new ideas into practice). To support and foster innovative behavior it is imperative that employees are encouraged to use their imagination, and to be creative with what they imagine. But our education systems are in many ways responsible for removing imagination and creativity from children as they go through the ‘one size fits all’ system because they were designed to train a workforce for the industrialization of the first world. There are two things I’d like to suggest. First, business leaders have to allow and encoura...