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What should learning look like when schools reopen?

Over the last few months schools and teachers have had to drastically change teaching and adapt in real time to school closures. As summer approaches and schools start planning for the next year, they are yet again faced with the possibility of full or partial closures. However, the pandemic is also giving us an opportunity to try different models of learning that can be beneficial even in the long-term. 

Covid-related school closures have created a situation where in-person interaction has become a precious resource. Maintaining adequate physical distance, temperature screenings, and frequent deep cleanings are all adding a significant expense to normal day-to-day interactions that we had come to take for granted. We now need to treat classroom time as a precious resource―by conserving it and using it mindfully where it’s most effective. For example, a teacher giving a lecture to a classful of students is not a good use of classroom time as students could do that just as well remotely. 

The most effective way to structure learning would be to prioritize classroom time for building skills that require interaction and can’t be developed in isolation, while leaving individual work for offline.

Skills that need active interaction time with peers and teachers primarily fall under the 21st century skills umbrella – skills like creativity, critical thinking or collaboration. So it makes sense to “flip” learning along the boundary of 21st century skills and academic content. Here are some activities that would benefit most from in-person time, where the teacher plays the role of a coach or facilitator in helping students develop critical skills. 

Creativity and Collaboration

A key thinking pattern that underlies creativity is associative thinking―the ability to combine different ideas into something meaningful. When students discuss and build on each other’s ideas toward a common solution, they are exercising their associative thinking. The same skills also build healthy collaboration – instead of students trying to compete with each other to make their idea “win”, they try to include everyone’s ideas as best as they can. Teachers can help build these skills by observing how students interact with their group members, and guiding them to include all voices and focus on joint problem solving. 

Critical Thinking

Critical thinking is when an individual improves the quality of their thinking by applying intellectual standards. It includes underlying skills like reasoning, evaluating, analyzing, judging, inferencing and reflecting. 

Socratic questioning and classroom discussions are a good way to discuss open-ended issues and build critical thinking. Critical thinking can be done both online or face-to-face, but there are differences. In online discussions students tend to use more evidence based reasoning as they can research before making their argument, while in face-to-face mode students listen to other ideas more and expand on them due to the spontaneous nature of the discussion. A blended model that capitalizes on the advantages of both models, can be a useful way to build critical thinking.  

Project Based Learning

Project based learning provides an avenue for students to be engaged in active, real-world problem solving. For students to gain most from PBL, they have to encounter and struggle with key concepts and skills behind the project. They build their thinking and knowledge in an experiential manner as they actively problem solve, by themselves or within a group.

The pandemic is causing significant disruption to the learning process and will require restructuring of lesson plans to address additional closures. Prioritizing 21st century skills for in-person classroom time can help stimulate students to think, engage in discussions, stay connected with their peers and learn from them. 

The full version of this article appeared on edCircuit. 

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3 indoor activities to build creativity

With current school closures and approaching summer holidays, most parents are worried about the impact of extended breaks on learning for their children. While most of us associate academic work with learning, there are many different ways for children to learn and build crucial skills during these times. Students learn as much, if not more, from play and social interactions than with pure academic work. 

Here are three different ways to stretch your child’s thinking and build cognitive skills like creativity and critical thinking, in a much more stress free way.

Reframe challenges as opportunities

One powerful way to build an innovation mindset is to reframe problems as opportunities that are just waiting for a creative solution. The easiest way to find problems is with day to day activities and chores that children engage in. 

Ask your child what activities and chores they find inconvenient and how can they improve that experience. When posed as a challenge, children can come up with clever ideas. One of our students, who found cleaning his pets’ cages gross, came up with a clever idea of a new kind of trash bag with drawstrings all around that can be used to line the cage. When you need to clean the cage, you just have to pull the drawstring and all the mess gets caught in the bag.  Another student came up with the idea of a remote controlled mechanism to take out regular trash so you don’t have to carry a stinky bag for a long time. 

While not all ideas will be immediately helpful, it helps children to start thinking of problems as opportunities that they can find clever solutions to.   

Join the imaginary play

Young children can spend, what often feels like, an inordinate amount of time in imaginary pretend play. However, pretend play is also a child’s cognitive playground – where they can freely practice how to think and problem solve in different situations – and in the process build a deeper understanding of the world around them. 

In more elaborate forms, pretend play can grow into fantasy worlds or paracosms, where a child constructs an entire imaginary world with its own rules and systems. Michele Root-Bernstein, Professor and creativity scholar, found that engaging in building fantasy worlds as a child was indicative of creative accomplishments in adulthood. Highly renowned people across different disciplines like the Bronte siblings, Nietszche and Mozart invented imaginary worlds, as did a large number of MacArthur genius award recipients. She believes that the creativity involved in building fantasy worlds, equips children with skills like imagining, empathizing, modeling, problem solving and rule-breaking that are essential for any creative work. 

Pretend play and paracosms also provide an opportunity for parents and other family members to help stretch their child’s thinking. You can join your child in their fantasy world and co-create situations that need to be addressed or problems that need to be solved. In doing so, you give them a safe space to experiment with ideas while building a deeper understanding of society. 

Add counterfactual thinking to reading time

The benefits of reading books with your child, from cognitive to social emotional are well known. In a study designed to understand the effect of reading in toddlers, children were assigned to an intervention group or a control group. The intervention group received age appropriate books and additional reading time compared to the control group. The results of the study showed that families in the intervention group that did shared reading with their toddler groups, and not just reading aloud, showed significantly larger vocabulary scores compared to the control group. 

Parents can give an additional boost to shared book reading times by adding counterfactual thinking, which builds both creative and critical thinking. Save some time after reading a book together to discuss the book and pose additional questions. You can create different counterfactual questions by modifying or adding an event in the story or by changing characters and settings. For example, what would have happened if Dumbledore never gave Harry Potter the cloak of invisibility, or what would the story of Snow White look like in modern times? Sharing your ideas to the same prompts after your child shares theirs can help improve their ability to think in more diverse ways.  

The original version of this article appeared on edCircuit. 

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We’ve partnered with Belouga to grow creativity globally!

Our popular How To Be An Inventor course has been selected to join Belouga’s collection of educational resources and is now available to educators and students around the world through this global learning platform. Belouga provides students and teachers with meaningful learning experiences, sourced from the most reputable learning organizations across the world. Belouga’s mission to build community and foster curiosity makes them a perfect partner to build an innovative mindset in students all over the world.  

Technological advances like AI are making routine jobs redundant and radically changing the nature of our workforce. Jobs that require creative problem solving are growing, while predictable jobs decline sharply. It’s not surprising that LinkedIn’s data shows that creativity is the top most skill employers look for. Now more than ever our educational system needs to adapt in ways that foster creativity instead of stifling it. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, noted psychologist and expert on creativity, puts it succinctly, “In the Renaissance creativity might have been a luxury for the few, but by now it is a necessity for all.”

Our approach, reflected in our How To Be An Inventor course, is to build underlying thought patterns, like associative or reverse thinking, that lead to creative ideas. The course takes a hands-on, minds-on approach to learning and engages students to think both creatively and critically. Over the last few years, we have run different versions of the course and have had several of our students win national level awards for their ideas! Needless to say, we are excited that students and educators all over the world can now access the course through Belouga and build critical 21st century skills.  

The course is available on Belouga as a five-part series to fit within the platform’s collaborative online learning environment. It provides more than two and a half hours of content to increase creativity and innovation for students globally. 

About Belouga

Belouga was founded in 2017 with the mission of making education impactful and accessible on a global scale through peer-to-peer and classroom connection, communication, and collaboration. Realizing the rapidly changing landscape of technology and education, the Belouga team looked to create a central location, which takes the heavy lifting out of global education, and provides teachers and students with a personalized learning experience through community and content without sacrificing creativity or curriculum needs. Learn more at https://belouga.org/ 

See the full press release here. 

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How Play Helps Creativity and Learning

Some of the most groundbreaking innovations didn’t get their start from a serious effort to solve a problem but from much more frivolous, playful ideas. After the first music boxes were invented, people got interested in making programmable music boxes that could play different music when the cylinder was replaced. But this basic idea – that the behaviour of a machine could be changed – became the catalyst for more serious inventions like the programmable Jacquard loom and the general purpose computer. 

Most people tend to dismiss play as childish and silly. However, a playful approach to problem solving can bring out fresh, creative ideas that may not have surfaced otherwise. Not all environments encourage play, though. 

Mitchel Resnick, Professor and Director of the Lifelong Kindergarten group at MIT, uses the metaphor of playpen vs playground to differentiate the different kinds of play they support. A playpen is a restrictive environment where children have limited opportunities to explore, whereas a playground promotes open exploration, problem solving and creativity.

So how does one create a healthy playground? Here are a few ways to promote play in student work.

Tinkering

Environments that support guided and open exploration have been found to be more effective in student learning. To allow for more tinkering, allocate time during projects for students to explore different ideas or directions to pursue, even if most of them don’t lead to any success. Similarly, allocate time for students to iterate after they have chosen an idea and started developing it more. Asking students to explain the thinking behind their ideas also helps them discover shortcomings that they can improve as they iterate. The focus during tinkering is not to judge ideas, but simply to understand and help students elaborate the idea in as much depth as possible. 

Social Interaction

Most play has a social element that allows ideas to be exchanged freely. Creating a space and time where students can explore others’ work and bounce ideas off of each other also helps in improving creativity and learning. The best ideas in a group setting tend to filter to the top and get incorporated by different teams. While this may feel like “cheating”, it’s how most innovation works in real life – by merging bits and pieces from others into your own unique creation. 

One way to increase healthy social interactions, is to teach students how to critique others’ ideas and allow them to suggest constructive improvements to other projects. When done well, this builds both social cohesiveness as well as critical thinking. 

Intrinsic Motivation

Creativity flourishes in environments that foster intrinsic motivation and suffers under extrinsic motivation. When students are intrinsically motivated they are more likely to explore and take risks. A focus on grades or scores can push students from intrinsic motivation to extrinsic motivation. Instead of external grades that evaluate project work, use self-evaluation forms so students can assess for themselves what aspect of their project could stand to improve. 

Play can be a powerful way to bring out student creativity and enhance learning. By creating a low stress environment where students can freely explore their own ideas and share with others, some of the beneficial aspects of play can be incorporated into student project work. 

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How To Build Creative Confidence

Albert Bandura, a psychologist and Professor at Stanford, who first proposed the concept of self-efficacy, discovered that people’s beliefs about themselves plays a huge role in how they feel, think and act. People with a strong belief in their abilities tend to take on more challenging tasks and persist despite failures. As Prof Bandura explained, “A strong sense of efficacy enhances human accomplishment and personal well-being in many ways. People with high assurance in their capabilities approach difficult tasks as challenges to be mastered rather than as threats to be avoided. Such an efficacious outlook fosters intrinsic interest and deep engrossment in activities.”

However, self-efficacy can take some time to develop. Here are three ways to ensure students continue to build some creative confidence during the school year.  

Build Mastery 

Before students can build any confidence in an area, they first need to learn and become proficient in that area. A first grader is not going to feel confident about tackling double digit addition in mathematics, until he can easily do single digit addition. According to Bandura, building mastery is the first and the most important step in building self-efficacy. 

From a creative confidence perspective, that implies building creative thinking skills, like associative or analogical thinking, that can be used in problem solving. So starting with simple challenges that exercise the creative muscles, and give students a chance to master different creative thinking approaches can go a long way in building confidence. 

Stretch, But Attainable Goals

Before students can take on challenging tasks, they need to first feel confident about their abilities. Experiencing successes, even small ones, builds confidence whereas early failures can lead students to question their abilities. Only when students have developed a strong sense of self-efficacy, are they persevere through failures. 

To build skills and confidence, create sub goals that stretch students’ thinking a little but they are able to achieve their goals with a reasonable level of effort. For example, asking students to come up with at least one idea using a specific technique before challenging them to come up with several. However, if the goals are too easy, then students might come to expect easy successes and will not build the confidence to persevere through more challenging tasks.  

Supportive Environment

Students learn as much from others as they do independently. When students see their peers solving problems creatively, they are more inclined to believe that they have the same abilities. In a similar vein, when teachers (and others) encourage students to keep going despite setbacks and express confidence in their abilities, students start to believe in their own abilities as well. For example, if a student isn’t sure about how others might perceive their idea, let them know why you think their idea is cool and worth pursuing. 

This expectation maps to the social persuasion in Bandura’s self-efficacy model. In an encouraging environment with positive expectations, a student might conclude, “If others think I am creative, then I must be creative.”

Teaching students creative thinking techniques, setting appropriate goals and creating a positive environment and expectations as students practice problem solving, can build their creative confidence. Armed with this confidence, students will be willing to take on challenging tasks, persevere through failures, all of which will set them up for success both in the short-term as well as long-term.