The Creativity Gap

Rick Martin, writing in the Tech In Asia blog, recently posted the result of a study done by Adobe about attitudes toward creativity. The results are summarized in the article and in the graphic below.

And the results are eyebrow-raising. Japan is seen by everyone as an incredibly creative place–except by the Japanese themselves! And an astonishingly large number of people in Japan (78%) said creativity is something reserved for people in the arts community. I don’t mean to sound alarmist (OK, actually I do), but this should set off the same  bells and buzzers and active responses that PISA results do. But as Mr Martin and some of the response posters to his blog article state, Japan is a fantastically creative place. In fact, perhaps it may be because Japan has such a high level of creativity in almost everything, that people have a different view of creativity in general. This needs to be considered further…

Garr Reynolds on Making Lectures More Engaging

 

 

 

 

 

 

Last month at TED  in Osaka, Garr Reynolds gave this presentation on how to make lectures (lessons) more engaging. The talk is only about 20 minutes long but it is full of wisdom and presentation wonderfulness. The themes of engaging visuals for presentation and interaction in learner activities are very nicely dealt with.

But here is the problem: teacher-centeredness. Most teachers (in Japan, the main source of examples for Mr Reynolds, but also in other places) can see a presentation guru up on stage at a TED or other event and draw a direct connection to their own situation. Adding more visuals, better coordinating your slides and your message: these are things that the type of teachers who attend this type of conference can transfer fairly easily to their own classroom situation. The harder part, the really really hard part, is making a shift toward a more learner-centered, creative learning environment. Mr Reynolds offers some nice ideas, chiefly making higher ed classes more similar to elementary school classes. That will work for college-level higher ed, but it seems to be a hard thing to transition into for jr. and sr. high school teachers for many reasons (time, tests, training, expectations, teaching culture, infrastructure, to name a few). In a previous post, I described the present norm as I see it in English language classes at high schools and some of the reasons why this norm is accepted when it should be unacceptable.