by admin | Apr 30, 2014 | Blog
This post originally appeared on Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21), the leading national organization advocating for 21st century readiness for every student. P21 brings together the business community, education leaders, and policymakers who believe our education system must equip students with rigorous academic coursework and the skills to be successful employees and citizens. View Original >
Driving Question: How Can We Assess Creativity in the Classroom?
Explicitly and effectively assessing creativity is one of my passions. I was lucky. My parents put me into many arts programs, music programs and the like to build my creativity. Later it would become an area of study as I practiced vocal jazz, and sung in my musicals and chorale groups. In fact, it was that work I can strongly attribute to my current creative abilities which I have been able to transfer into “non-arts” subject matter and ideas.
Indeed, we know creativity is not limited to the arts, but that also means we need to provide instructional opportunities for students to be creative in all subject areas, be assessed on creativity, and improve.
Let’s be clear, we are using the word “assess” here. Assessment does not “equal” grading. Those are two different things, although the can complement and build upon each other.
Some schools do put in a creativity grade, while others may feel uncomfortable doing so. Regardless, students need to know where they are at in terms of the creativity in order to set goals and improve. Assessment does this with or without grades.
Unpacking Creativity
The first step to assessing creativity it to know what it is. Despite popular belief, it is not a nebulous concept. Creativity, in fact, has quality indicators to it that help us to understand what it looks like and how we build our creative skills. Rubrics exist that articulate these quality indicators, such as the Buck Institute for Education’s Creativity rubrics for elementary and secondary grades.
In a rubric published in the Ed Leadership article “Assessing Creativity,” Sue Brookhart describes the category of very creative with the description “Ideas represent a startling variety of important concepts from different contexts or disciplines” as well as “Created product draws on a wide variety of sources, including different texts, media, resource persons, or personal experiences.” In BIE’s K-2 Creativity rubric, two quality indicators are “I can help pick the best idea” and “I can think of ideas for what to make or do in the project.” These are some samples of helping students understand what creativity looks like, and gives them quality indicators. We need to unpack creativity in this way because students may or may not know what it is, let alone how to get better. Simply saying, “Be creative,” will not give students the specific goals to work toward.
Creativity with Content
Creativity doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Students must have some “thing” with which to be creative. For example they can be creative with World Religions content knowledge or solve linear equations in a creative way. In addition, tying creative thinking to an important concept or idea provides a great opportunity to assess more content-based standards along with creativity; giving them both equal footing in the assessment plan.
When teachers design a unit or project, they begin with the end in mind, target specific content skills and objectives that they want students to learn. From there, they consider how students can be creative with that content. What context will they give students that demands they be creative with the content? What voice and choice will theygives students in products students will create?
Consider this example. A teacher might design a unit where she wants students to learn about world religions, as well as speaking and listening skills. From there, the teacher might come up with the context about discrimination that occurs with world religions and tasks student with uncovering and solving this issue of stereotypes and discrimination. Next, the teacher might provide voice and choice to students in the products they create as well as the audience they intend to target. While the learning of content and skills is focused, the space and demand for creativity is there as well.
Formative and Summative Assessment
Teachers can assess creativity in a final product or in summative assessments. If the unit or project calls for a creative product, a criteria for evaluation might be creativity in addition to the content skills and knowledge students have to demonstrate. However, if teachers intend to summatively assess creativity, but they must formatively assess in order to scaffold appropriately and to have students build their creative thinking skills.
Paired with a good rubric, they can formatively assess one or many quality indicators of creativity. Students can set goals and reflect upon these creative goals. As the final product calls for creativity, journals, reflections and even oral individuals can be used to check for creative indictors. These formative assessments can be used as self, peer and teacher assessments to improve creative skills. It further fosters that creativity is a process. For a quality final product that shows creativity, the creative process must be valued through formative assessment.
Assessing creativity must be intentional when teachers plan instruction. If we want our students to be creative, then we must assess it. It we want creativity to be valued as much as content, then it is must be assessed just like content. The good news is that it can be done, and we have the tools to do it!
by admin | Aug 14, 2012 | Blog, Edutopia
This post originally appeared on Getting Smart, a community passionate about innovations in learning. By covering important events, trends, products, books, and reports, Getting Smart looks for ways that innovation can help reframe historical problems and suggest new solutions.
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If you want students to collaborate it is imperative that educators establish this as a norm at the beginning of the school year. Great teachers leverage group work and collaborative activities and projects in their curriculum and instruction, but oftentimes teachers “push-back” with the difficulties of having their students collaborate. I agree, it is a daunting task, but I always respond, “How have you taught them to collaborate and providing scaffolding of that skill?” This is the key! If you want your students to collaborate effectively, you must give the opportunity to do so, as well as give the necessary instruction in skills and scaffolding.
Team Building: Most teachers take time at the beginning of the to do team building activities to create a community in their classroom. These are great activities that can be intentionally tied to creating a culture of collaboration. Have students participate in an activity like the “Human Knot,” and then reflect individually and in a discussion about the effective and non effective ways they collaborated. After many activities like this, have students create or co-create the norms for collaboration in the classroom. When students create the norms, through reflective activities, they are more likely to own them.
Explicit Instruction: Teachers must model good collaboration. There are many ways to do that. Perhaps you get a group of teachers together and do a fishbowl activity where students watch for effective collaboration. Another lesson might be watching videos of examples and non examples of teams working together to analyze the best ways for students to collaborate. To build authenticity, consider bringing in adults from a variety of fields to share how they collaborate. Through this and other activities, teachers can give explicit attention to the collaboration in the instructional design and build the relevance for the skill itself.
Technology: There are many tools out there that can help foster a culture of collaboration. Whether Edmodo, TitanPad, or Twitter, use technology tools to push students thinking of what it means to collaborate. In addition, you the teacher now have documentation of that collaboration that can be used in the assessment process. Make you choose the best times to use these tools throughout curriculum, but also model and teach students how to use the tool. Teaching collaboration through technology can help build the 21st Century skill of Digital Citizenship. In fact, collaboration is leveraged in the ISTE NETS for Students, further espousing collaboration as critical in person as well as digitally.
Assessment: Coupled with instruction, collaboration must be assessed along with the content in the class. This leverages this as a true 21st Century Skill that is transferable across content and tasks. Using rubrics for collaboration, teachers gave give focused feedback to students on what they are doing well, and how to improve. As 21st century skills like collaboration gain more and more clout, they can be included in the grade-book, as a standard to be met and built upon. Great schools are assessing not only critical content, but also collaboration as crucial to student achievement.
As educators plan for the next year, it is critical that they use some of the strategies above, as well as others, to create a culture of collaboration. Through intentional instruction and scaffolding, we can set our students up for a successful year of collaboration with their teachers, their peers, and experts in the field. We can empower our kids to be effective collaborators in and outside of school!
by admin | Jul 28, 2012 | Blog
This post originally appeared on MindShift a site dedicated to replacing familiar classroom tools and changing the way we learn. MindShift explores the future of learning in all its dimensions – covering cultural and technology trends, groundbreaking research, education policy and more. View Original >
Video game company Valve is going deep into the education world with a new initiative using Steam, their free online game platform where users can download games and communicate and play with other players. The initiative is called Steam for Schools, and a free educational version is now available to teachers to use in the classroom.
What makes it unique for schools is that all functionality unrelated to education is disabled and only certain games are made available for teachers and students.
The first major games used in Steam for Schools are Portal and Portal 2. In the games, the main character solves puzzles and problems in a three-dimensional world. As it’s explained on the site: “Players primarily interact with the world by using a hand-held portal device to place interconnected portals on walls, floors, or ceilings. Once a pair of portals is positioned any object entering through one portal will exit though the other.” In addition to these two versions of the game, there’s also a Portal Puzzle Maker, whereby teachers can make their own puzzles for students to solve.
For those willing to experiment with games in class, some ideas on how to use Portal:
PHYSICS: One of the most obvious targets of Portal is the use of concepts in physics. From exploring gravity and friction, to terminal velocity and conservation of mass, there’s a wealth of specific sub-topics within general physics that can be targeted explicitly. In addition to learning and exploring these concepts through playing the game, students can create their own games.
MATH: With the puzzle-maker, students learn about parabolas, volume, and even statistics. Students can play games created by other students and collect and chart data on a research question . Even spatial reasoning, an early-years math target, can be learned through both playing Portal and creating puzzles. It’s all about targeting a specific math learning objective, and creating a lesson plan that uncovers that target through the gameplay and game creation.
LANGUAGE ARTS: Portal has a narrative arc and story. There’s a protagonist, setting, plot, and other literary elements. Teachers can focus on one or many of these elements and have students track and analyze, for instance, how the choices they make as the character affects the story; or perhaps creating a plot map for the first few levels of the game. In this way, Portal can be used to support lessons crafted by teachers, engage students in a different way of thinking about these elements, and help teachers scaffold learning for look at a text later.
CRITICAL THINKING, PROBLEM SOLVING: Portal is a puzzle game, so players are continually thinking critically about solving problems. In addition, students work together to play and design games.
Valve has set up a site called Teach With Portals where teachers can not only submit their own ideas, but look for others.
Have you tried teaching with Portal? Tell us about lessons plans and challenges in classroom implementation.
Check out the video showing how the company promotes the use of the game for learning.
Portal in the Classroom
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