Why Your Kid Isn't Creative.
Most parents want their kids to be inventive and clever -- perhaps even the next Steve Jobs. But parents also want their kids to perform well by the standard measures of success. Prioritizing one of those pathways, it turns out, may close off the other.
In the new bestseller Imagine: How Creativity Works, journalist Jonah Lehrer synthesizes the latest scientific research into creativity and offers tips for how ordinary people can become more creative. It's a timely subject. Businesses increasingly value workers who can devise customized solutions to complex problems. And improvisation is a key skill for people who want a career of their own design, instead of one dictated by an increasingly cutthroat corporate sector.
The good news is that most people start out with healthy creative instincts, and virtually anybody can improve their creativity if they want to. The bad news is that our education system and social mores discourage creativity. "We're very good at killing creativity in kids," Lehrer told me in an interview. "We kill it with ruthless efficiency. The schools have twelve years to sculpt your mind, and they end up convincing kids that they're not creative."
There's nothing new about the way pragmatic concerns and conformity displace playfulness and originality as kids mature. "Every child is an artist," Pablo Picasso once said. "The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up."
What is new is the emphasis schools place on rote learning, memorization, and especially standardized tests, which generate a kind of assembly-line uniformity to what kids learn in school. Creativity, by contrast, requires qualities that schools tend to discourage, such as daydreaming, uninhibited curiosity, hands-on experimentation and an unstructured, permissive environment.
Lehrer profiles one highly successful school, the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, where there are no textbooks or lectures, and kids spend most of their time working with music, art, theater or whatever their vocation is. Most schools don't operate that way, of course. It's also worth pointing out that many parents would be uncomfortable sending their kids to such an unorthodox place.
Lehrer also highlights one important theme I came across while researching my own book, Rebounders: How Winners Pivot from Setback to Success: the importance of letting kids fail. He describes a phenomenon known as the "fourth-grade slump," a point at which students suddenly start to censor their creative impulses. What happens is kids become more self-aware as they mature, and more eager to conform to social norms. They'd rather avoid something difficult than risk the embarrassment that might come from failing at it. They start to regard improvising as risky, suppressing their creativity. "This is why it's so important to practice letting ourselves go," Lehrer writes.
There are solutions, of course. Many parents instinctively want to "fix" the schools so that they do everything well: Teach the skills that society values most, while also teaching the creativity that will let kids stand out as adults. But that's not realistic. Most schools are appendages of a bureaucracy that serves many interests. They're capable of doing some things competently, but expecting excellence for all is a stretch.
This might be one job parents should handle themselves, instead of outsourcing it to the schools. We can start by tolerating, even encouraging, the kind of daydreaming and intellectual meandering that we too readily label attention-deficit disorder, as if it's a defect. Sometimes it's not. Parents who don't feel they're personally creative can find creative mentors for their kids outside the schools - -writers or artists or designers who seem to have an inventive knack. And exposing kids to many different things is crucially important, since creativity often happens when people connect seemingly disparate ideas, the way the Wright Brothers got the idea for an airplane by wondering if a bicycle could fly.
Lehrer invokes a maxim popularized by psychologist Angela Duckworth: Choose easy, work hard. That means giving kids the freedom to discover something they truly love, while making sure they know it takes diligence and grit to succeed at their passion. "It's going to involve failure," says Lehrer. "You have to be able to put in the work." The rewards may be well worth it.
Read more at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rick-newman/creativity_b_1451850.html?ref=education&ir=Education
http://www.languagecorpsasia.com
Showing posts with label Smart. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Smart. Show all posts
Saturday, May 19, 2012
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
Do Students Know Enough Smart Learning Strategies?
Do Students Know Enough Smart Learning Strategies?
What’s the key to effective learning? One intriguing body of research suggests a rather gnomic answer: It’s not just what you know. It’s what you know about what you know.
To put it in more straightforward terms, anytime a student learns, he or she has to bring in two kinds of prior knowledge: knowledge about the subject at hand (say, mathematics or history) and knowledge about how learning works. Parents and educators are pretty good at imparting the first kind of knowledge. We’re comfortable talking about concrete information: names, dates, numbers, facts. But the guidance we offer on the act of learning itself—the “metacognitive” aspects of learning—is more hit-or-miss, and it shows.
Research has found that students vary widely in what they know about how to learn, according to a team of educational researchers from Australia writing in this month’s issue of the journal Instructional Science. Most striking, low-achieving students show “substantial deficits” in their awareness of the cognitive and metacognitive strategies that lead to effective learning—suggesting that these students’ struggles may be due in part to a gap in their knowledge about how learning works.
Teaching students good learning strategies would ensure that they know how to acquire new knowledge, which leads to improved learning outcomes, writes lead author Helen Askell-Williams of Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia. And studies bear this out. Askell-Williams cites as one example a recent finding by PISA, the Programme for International Student Assessment, which administers academic proficiency tests to students around the globe, and place American students in the mediocre middle. “Students who use appropriate strategies to understand and remember what they read, such as underlining important parts of the texts or discussing what they read with other people, perform at least 73 points higher in the PISA assessment—that is, one full proficiency level or nearly two full school years—than students who use these strategies the least,” the PISA report reads.
In their own study, Askell-Williams and her coauthors took as their subjects 1,388 Australian high school students. They first administered an assessment to find out how much the students knew about cognitive and metacognitive learning strategies—and found that their familiarity with these tactics was “less than optimal.”
Students can assess their own awareness by asking themselves which of the following learning strategies they regularly use (the response to each item is ideally “yes”):
* I draw pictures or diagrams to help me understand this subject.
* I make up questions that I try to answer about this subject.
* When I am learning something new in this subject, I think back to what I already know about it.
* I discuss what I am doing in this subject with others.
* I practice things over and over until I know them well in this subject,
* I think about my thinking, to check if I understand the ideas in this subject.
* When I don’t understand something in this subject I go back over it again.
* I make a note of things that I don’t understand very well in this subject, so that I can follow them up.
* When I have finished an activity in this subject I look back to see how well I did.
* I organize my time to manage my learning in this subject.
* I make plans for how to do the activities in this subject.
Askell-Williams and her colleagues found that those students who used fewer of these strategies reported more difficulty coping with their schoolwork. For the second part of their study, they designed a series of proactive questions for teachers to drop into the lesson on a “just-in-time” basis—at the moments when students could use the prompting most.
These questions, too, can be adopted by any parent or educator to make sure that children know not just what is to be learned, but how.
* What is the topic for today’s lesson?
* What will be important ideas in today’s lesson?
* What do you already know about this topic?
* What can you relate this to?
* What will you do to remember the key ideas?
* Is there anything about this topic you don’t understand, or are not clear about?
Read more at http://mindshift.kqed.org/2012/03/do-students-know-enough-smart-learning-strategies/
http://www.languagecorpsasia.com
What’s the key to effective learning? One intriguing body of research suggests a rather gnomic answer: It’s not just what you know. It’s what you know about what you know.
To put it in more straightforward terms, anytime a student learns, he or she has to bring in two kinds of prior knowledge: knowledge about the subject at hand (say, mathematics or history) and knowledge about how learning works. Parents and educators are pretty good at imparting the first kind of knowledge. We’re comfortable talking about concrete information: names, dates, numbers, facts. But the guidance we offer on the act of learning itself—the “metacognitive” aspects of learning—is more hit-or-miss, and it shows.
Research has found that students vary widely in what they know about how to learn, according to a team of educational researchers from Australia writing in this month’s issue of the journal Instructional Science. Most striking, low-achieving students show “substantial deficits” in their awareness of the cognitive and metacognitive strategies that lead to effective learning—suggesting that these students’ struggles may be due in part to a gap in their knowledge about how learning works.
Teaching students good learning strategies would ensure that they know how to acquire new knowledge, which leads to improved learning outcomes, writes lead author Helen Askell-Williams of Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia. And studies bear this out. Askell-Williams cites as one example a recent finding by PISA, the Programme for International Student Assessment, which administers academic proficiency tests to students around the globe, and place American students in the mediocre middle. “Students who use appropriate strategies to understand and remember what they read, such as underlining important parts of the texts or discussing what they read with other people, perform at least 73 points higher in the PISA assessment—that is, one full proficiency level or nearly two full school years—than students who use these strategies the least,” the PISA report reads.
In their own study, Askell-Williams and her coauthors took as their subjects 1,388 Australian high school students. They first administered an assessment to find out how much the students knew about cognitive and metacognitive learning strategies—and found that their familiarity with these tactics was “less than optimal.”
Students can assess their own awareness by asking themselves which of the following learning strategies they regularly use (the response to each item is ideally “yes”):
* I draw pictures or diagrams to help me understand this subject.
* I make up questions that I try to answer about this subject.
* When I am learning something new in this subject, I think back to what I already know about it.
* I discuss what I am doing in this subject with others.
* I practice things over and over until I know them well in this subject,
* I think about my thinking, to check if I understand the ideas in this subject.
* When I don’t understand something in this subject I go back over it again.
* I make a note of things that I don’t understand very well in this subject, so that I can follow them up.
* When I have finished an activity in this subject I look back to see how well I did.
* I organize my time to manage my learning in this subject.
* I make plans for how to do the activities in this subject.
Askell-Williams and her colleagues found that those students who used fewer of these strategies reported more difficulty coping with their schoolwork. For the second part of their study, they designed a series of proactive questions for teachers to drop into the lesson on a “just-in-time” basis—at the moments when students could use the prompting most.
These questions, too, can be adopted by any parent or educator to make sure that children know not just what is to be learned, but how.
* What is the topic for today’s lesson?
* What will be important ideas in today’s lesson?
* What do you already know about this topic?
* What can you relate this to?
* What will you do to remember the key ideas?
* Is there anything about this topic you don’t understand, or are not clear about?
Read more at http://mindshift.kqed.org/2012/03/do-students-know-enough-smart-learning-strategies/
http://www.languagecorpsasia.com
Saturday, April 14, 2012
Playing Stupid Games on Smart Phones
Do You Spend Too Much Time on Smart Phones Playing Stupid Games?
Angry Birds, Fruit Ninja, Draw Something, Words With Friends: All these games are available right at your fingertips, wherever a smart phone, tablet or similar device is available. Are you addicted? When are you most likely to play games like this? Do you think they’re a waste of time — or do you see some value in them?
In the Sunday magazine, Sam Anderson writes about his own experiences with what he calls “stupid” games — games that you play “incidentally, ambivalently, compulsively, almost accidentally”:
I resisted buying an iPhone for what felt like several decades (it was, in biological Earth time, four years), because I was afraid of the power of its games. I spent my formative years becoming fluent in, and addicted to, the video games of the ’80s and early ’90s — the industry-redefining stretch from roughly Mario Brothers to Mortal Kombat. You could say that video games and I went through adolescence together. As I shed my exoskeleton of fat, Nintendo’s blocky pixels started to fuse into sleek 64-bit curves; as my voice lowered, video games’ plinky soundtracks matured into little symphonies; as my social circle expanded beyond my little clutch of sweaty and foulmouthed friends, the market for video games expanded into (or at least toward) similarly new demographics: adults, girls.
…Then, midway through the dark forest of my adult life, the iPhone came out. This presented a unique problem. It was not only a phone and a camera and a compass and a map and a tiny window through which to see the entire Internet — it was also a pocket-size game console three times as sophisticated as anything I grew up with. My wife, who had never been a serious gamer, got one and became addicted, almost immediately, to a form of off-brand digital Scrabble called Words With Friends. Before long she was playing 6 or 10 games at a time, against people all over the world. Sometimes I would lose her in the middle of a conversation: her phone would go brinnng or pwomp or dernalernadern-dern, and she would look away from me, midsentence, to see if her opponent had set her up for a triple word score. I tried to stay good-humored. I told her I was going to invent something called the iPaddle: a little screen-size wooden paddle that I would slide in front of her phone whenever she drifted away, on the back of which, upside-down so she could read them, would be inscribed humanist messages from the analog world: “I love you” or “Be here now.”
Inevitably, my high-minded detachment didn’t last long. About a year ago, unable to resist the rising cultural tide and wanting (I convinced myself) a camera with which to take pictures of my children, I gave in and bought an iPhone. For a while I used it only to read, to e-mail and to take pictures. Then I downloaded chess, which seemed wholesome enough — the PBS of time-wasters. But chess turned out to be a gateway game. Once I formed the habit of finding reliable game joy in my omnipresent pocket-window, my inner 13-year-old reasserted himself. I downloaded horribly titled games like Bix (in which you steer a dot in a box between other dots in a box) and MiZoo (in which you make patterns out of exotic cartoon animal heads). These led to better, more time-consuming games — Orbital, Bejeweled, Touch Physics, Anodia — which led to even better games: Peggle, Little Wings. One tiny masterpiece, Plants vs. Zombies, ate up, I’m going to guess, a full “Anna Karenina” of my leisure time. One day while I was playing it (I think I had just discovered that if you set up your garlic and your money-flowers exactly right, you could sit there racking up coins all day), my wife reminded me of my old joke about the iPaddle. This made me inexplicably angry.
Students: Tell us about the games that have taken up your time. Have they ever had a “scary power” over you? When do you tend to play them most? What do they do for you? To what extent do you agree with Jane McGonigal, who argues games aren’t an escape from reality but an optimal form of engaging it? What do you think of what Mark Pincus, founder and chief executive of Zynga, said recently about how game mechanics “will be the most valuable skill in the new economy”? Do you ever want to stop playing? What do you think you might do with the time instead?
Read more at http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/05/do-you-spend-too-much-time-on-smart-phones-playing-stupid-games/?ref=education
http://www.languagecorpsasia.com
Angry Birds, Fruit Ninja, Draw Something, Words With Friends: All these games are available right at your fingertips, wherever a smart phone, tablet or similar device is available. Are you addicted? When are you most likely to play games like this? Do you think they’re a waste of time — or do you see some value in them?
In the Sunday magazine, Sam Anderson writes about his own experiences with what he calls “stupid” games — games that you play “incidentally, ambivalently, compulsively, almost accidentally”:
I resisted buying an iPhone for what felt like several decades (it was, in biological Earth time, four years), because I was afraid of the power of its games. I spent my formative years becoming fluent in, and addicted to, the video games of the ’80s and early ’90s — the industry-redefining stretch from roughly Mario Brothers to Mortal Kombat. You could say that video games and I went through adolescence together. As I shed my exoskeleton of fat, Nintendo’s blocky pixels started to fuse into sleek 64-bit curves; as my voice lowered, video games’ plinky soundtracks matured into little symphonies; as my social circle expanded beyond my little clutch of sweaty and foulmouthed friends, the market for video games expanded into (or at least toward) similarly new demographics: adults, girls.
…Then, midway through the dark forest of my adult life, the iPhone came out. This presented a unique problem. It was not only a phone and a camera and a compass and a map and a tiny window through which to see the entire Internet — it was also a pocket-size game console three times as sophisticated as anything I grew up with. My wife, who had never been a serious gamer, got one and became addicted, almost immediately, to a form of off-brand digital Scrabble called Words With Friends. Before long she was playing 6 or 10 games at a time, against people all over the world. Sometimes I would lose her in the middle of a conversation: her phone would go brinnng or pwomp or dernalernadern-dern, and she would look away from me, midsentence, to see if her opponent had set her up for a triple word score. I tried to stay good-humored. I told her I was going to invent something called the iPaddle: a little screen-size wooden paddle that I would slide in front of her phone whenever she drifted away, on the back of which, upside-down so she could read them, would be inscribed humanist messages from the analog world: “I love you” or “Be here now.”
Inevitably, my high-minded detachment didn’t last long. About a year ago, unable to resist the rising cultural tide and wanting (I convinced myself) a camera with which to take pictures of my children, I gave in and bought an iPhone. For a while I used it only to read, to e-mail and to take pictures. Then I downloaded chess, which seemed wholesome enough — the PBS of time-wasters. But chess turned out to be a gateway game. Once I formed the habit of finding reliable game joy in my omnipresent pocket-window, my inner 13-year-old reasserted himself. I downloaded horribly titled games like Bix (in which you steer a dot in a box between other dots in a box) and MiZoo (in which you make patterns out of exotic cartoon animal heads). These led to better, more time-consuming games — Orbital, Bejeweled, Touch Physics, Anodia — which led to even better games: Peggle, Little Wings. One tiny masterpiece, Plants vs. Zombies, ate up, I’m going to guess, a full “Anna Karenina” of my leisure time. One day while I was playing it (I think I had just discovered that if you set up your garlic and your money-flowers exactly right, you could sit there racking up coins all day), my wife reminded me of my old joke about the iPaddle. This made me inexplicably angry.
Students: Tell us about the games that have taken up your time. Have they ever had a “scary power” over you? When do you tend to play them most? What do they do for you? To what extent do you agree with Jane McGonigal, who argues games aren’t an escape from reality but an optimal form of engaging it? What do you think of what Mark Pincus, founder and chief executive of Zynga, said recently about how game mechanics “will be the most valuable skill in the new economy”? Do you ever want to stop playing? What do you think you might do with the time instead?
Read more at http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/05/do-you-spend-too-much-time-on-smart-phones-playing-stupid-games/?ref=education
http://www.languagecorpsasia.com
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