Creativity, Philosophy and Starting with Ducks

“So I said to this duck…”

I remember that was the opening line in the very first INSET I ever delivered. It was to the school in which I was working as a French teacher and I had been asked to contribute to an internal training day on differentiation. I had sat at my desk for about half an hour writing down a very erudite and worthy presentation, the sort of presentation that epitomised the word INSET. Worthy, dull, dry, theoretical, humourless and involving an overhead projector. I think I had probably considered renting a grey suit for the day too.

But then anyone can do all that, as long as they have the nerve to speak in public and the nerve needed single-mindedly to frustrate a group of fellow professionals. There must be another way.

Which is when the line came to me – “So I said to this duck…”. And that was enough. The remainder of the presentation ran easily from my pen and involved a whole host of school characters being interviewed by a duck to get to the bottom of differentiation in the classroom.

I mention this story not simply to highlight how a duck can you get out of tight spot but to show how we often do things because we think that’s the way they should be done, the way everyone else has done them, the way they’ve always been done. Although in actual fact it is just as valid to do them in wholly different way. This is the creative mindset. I also mention it because quite often the most improbable of starting points is the place to go to achieve the most creative results. If you want to go to Birmingham you could hop in a car and make your way onto the M6 or you could put a kayak under your arm and thumb a lift. They both get you there in the end but by very different routes. This is creativity in action.

The purpose of this edition of Burning Issue is to encourage creative thought in your school, in your teaching, in your management of your school and in your children. Not creativity in the often accepted but very narrow sense of ‘ooh, let’s do a play!’ or ‘come on a children, let’s be creative, get your aprons!’ but creativity in a broader, far more pervasive sense of thinking about everyday things in less than everyday ways.

In many ways it can be summed up simply in three little words:

‘Break the rules’.

Lighthouses, Darwinism and Surfboards

I don’t mean the big rules necessarily but those smaller ones, those unwritten ones, those ones that often we are not even aware of adhering to. It is something that I believe we as teachers are not very good at doing. This is especially true given the fact that we have achieved what we have achieved in our academic and professional life at least by doing what we have been told. But more of that later and how, as a strategy for success in the weird and wonderful world of work of the 21st century, that may actually be the least effective way of achieving our goals and moving closer to or potential.

Why is it important to break the rules then? Well, the survival of the species depends on it. After all, if we do simply repeat the experiences and expectations of the people who went before us whether that is our parents or our own teachers, then what we are saying is that this is as good as it gets, that the only way of doing something is the way that it has been done and if there were a better way then we would be doing it already. In the fascinating book The Lighthouse Stevensons author Bella Bathhurst points out a similar line in logic that was used by Trinity House, the board who were  - and still are – responsible for lighthouses in the UK. In 1635, to argue why there had not been any lighthouses built around the notorious Goodwin Sands, a treacherous area of shifting sands near the mouth of the Thames and one of the most dangerous stretches of water to be found around the UK, they stated:

‘If lighthouses had been of any service (around the area in question) the Trinity House as guardians of the interests of shipping would have put them there’.

Or coming at it from a different angle – and remember a creative outcome is often the result of a creative starting point – consider the theory of evolution and apply similar thinking to the world of thought. Evolution requires mutation. Without mutation living things do not prosper. If we think simply what others have thought then nothing changes. And if nothing changes the whole system comes to a halt.

So, when was the last time you had a ‘mutant’ thought? Have you ever thought something that no-one has thought before? Have you ever allowed yourself to follow through on that thought and see where it may lead  - what would happen if you crossed a cider press with a printing press? What would happen if you crossed a surfboard with a yacht? Or a maths lesson with a football match? What would happen if you started an INSET presentation with the phrase ‘So I said to this duck…’?

Of those four examples three of those thoughts have definitely been thought. The last I just told you about, the first two respectively produced Guttenburg’s moveable typeface and Newman Darby’s ‘sailboard’, the prototype windsurfer. The one about the maths lesson I just made it up. In fact I could have crossed numeracy teaching with anything - a soap opera, an episode of Animal Hospital, a walk around the school field, dinner time, the contents of a handbag, the inside of a gnu. Remember it’s the creative starting point that is so often the key to the creative outcomes. The end result might be the same – to learn how to do division perhaps, or how to understand ratios – but the process of getting there takes on a whole new perspective.

In the company I set up around ten years ago - Independent Thinking Ltd - we have a very simple motto in order to ensure that we keep focussed on that spirit of creativity:

Do things no-one does or do things everyone does but in a way no-one does.

It informs everything we do and makes sure that we are always doing our best to be memorable (for the right reasons we hope) and that we pick only the best people to be part of our team.

But it was not always this way. At least not for me. I spent most of my formative years torn between wanting to be different but being too unsure of my own thoughts to be able to stand out, between uniqueness and camouflage. I was being trained to think about what other people thought but never trained to think about what I thought, let alone to believe that my thoughts actually counted for anything. I enjoyed great academic success but was schooled in other people’s thoughts and was never, ever asked that mpst powerful of questions – ‘well, what do you think?’

So the duck was quite a surprise, for me as well as my colleagues. You don’t see many duck references during a standard INSET day in a secondary school. Primary INSET might be different, I don’t know.

Kant Think?

I saw a quote the other day from the German philosopher Immanuel Kant from his celebrated essay ‘What Is Enlightenment’:

“Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one’s own understanding without another’s guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one’s own mind without another’s guidance.”

We didn’t anybody tell me this when I was 18 or even younger? How much of us have spent so long not being really sure that what we believe is true until we see it in somebody else’s words or hear it from someone else’s lips? How many teachers have neglected what they intuitively felt for fear of incurring the wrath – or worse, indifference – of an Ofsted inspector? At an INSET I was giving a while back along with an associate who happens to be a consultant paediatric neurologist there was a primary headteacher who had come along specifically for ‘words’. He wanted, he told us, the academic and neuroscientific vocabulary to take back to his staff to help them justify to the inspectors the reasons why they were doing the things they were doing in lessons. Not so much a ‘self imposed nonage’ as Kant describes but one inflicted on us in a system where we forever have the feeling that someone who knows better than we do is looking over our shoulder to tell us what we are doing is wrong.

As teachers we feel stunted by such a system, forever berating the powers that be for taking away our precious creativity and freedom to be ourselves in the classroom. Yet to what extent are we creating exactly the same spirit of fear and undermined confidence in our classrooms, even our successful classrooms with our successful children? Or perhaps especially in our classrooms with our most successful learners?

Lies, Damned Lies and Socrates

Looking back at my school career I can spot two big areas of concern now, areas that very nearly ruined my chances of success in adult life. One was the great educational lie that I fell for along with many others like me:

“Do well at school and you will get a good job”

One of the tools for thinking that I teach these days is based on the thinking skills programme called Philosophy for Children, of which more later. The simple tenet behind P4C as it is called is Socrates’ assertion that ‘an unexamined life is a life not worth living’. One of the only rules that I have in my P4C session is to ‘beware statements’. Put them both together and you end up with the notion that whenever you hear a statement, an assertion of truth, a claim that this is the way ‘it’ is you should usually stop, pause and have a look at things a touch more closely. After all, in my experience very few statements actually live up to close scrutiny.

As an example, consider the simplest of assertions, one that most people would agree with: stealing is wrong.

Get the children into ‘community of enquiry’ mode (the ‘community of enquiry’ is the process by which you do your philosophy in the classroom. It’s a bit like circle time but with less touching and feeling, as it were). Write the assertion up on the board and then go around the group and see the extent to which they agree with it on a scale of one to ten. Then lob in what one teacher refers to as ‘thought hand grenades’, questions that make everything different and that really challenge preconceived views.

Here are some I prepared earlier. Try them with your children, see where the discussion goes:

• Who says it's wrong?
• What does wrong mean?
• Is it always wrong to steal?
• Is it ever right to steal?
• Is stealing without being aware of it still stealing?
• What is stealing?
• If I go into WH Smiths and read a paper without buying it is that stealing?
• What about if I just read the first page?
• Just the headline?
• What if I went in and copied out the newspaper into a notebook and walked away?
• Could you envisage a time when stealing might be right not wrong?
• What about a place where it could be right to steal?
• Could you ever steal something unavoidably?
• Was Robin Hood a better stealer than Ronnie Biggs?
• If you steal something from me that I don't want is that better than stealing something from me that's important to me?
• If you steal something from me that I don’t notice for a while is it still stealing?
• Is it not stealing up until the point where I realise that my possession is missing?
• What if I never notice it?
• What if you steal something and when I find out I say you can have it?
• What if you steal something from me that I myself stole from someone else?
• Can you ever steal from yourself?

Shall I go on…?

Now apply such a dissection of a statement to the notion that if you do well at school you will end up with a good job.

• What do you mean ‘well’?
• What do you mean by ‘good’?
• Could you ever do well at school and not get a good job?
• Does everyone who does well at school get a good job?
• Has anyone ever done badly at school yet still ended up with a good job?
• Is there any correlation between how well you do and how good the job will be?
• Is there a law of diminishing returns there – the better you do at school the less good your job ends up?
• Do you get to keep the good job?
• Do you just get one good job?
• Does doing well at school mean you can’t have a bad job even if you wanted it?
• Why is having a good job important?
• Why is having a job important?
• Does having a good job mean I will be happy?
• Could I have a job that everyone else thought was a good one but that actually I thought was terrible?
• Could I have a good job but hate it?
• If you never went to school would you end up with no job, good or bad?

Again, I could go on. But I won’t. Although perhaps I should.

Eager to please and pleased to be doing so well in an education system that asked me what others thought but didn’t really want me to think for myself I never questioned the ‘educational lie’ until after leaving university and seeing it as the ‘not the whole truth’ that it was. There are many people doing exceedingly well in the world of work without any qualifications. Yes, there are many with qualifications doing very well so it is not qualifications that are the issue here but there are also many people without qualifications doing exceedingly badly.

In a Michael Moore’s poignant and stupefying film Bowling for Columbine, South Park co-creator Trey Parker explains how at school you get the message that unless you do well in, say maths, you will ‘die lonely and poor’ when you are old. They don’t say those words (they say ‘do well and in school and you’ll get a good job’ but it amounts to the same thing) but that’s what the presupposition is and as children we take it all in and we learn not to think for ourselves but to do what we are told and to think what other people thought. Which doesn’t leave a great deal of room for ducks.

Say Sorry More than You Say Please

It also brings me to the other great problem that success at school racked up for me for my adult life, the unwritten rule for school success.

School success torpedo number two – wait to be told what to and do it well.

This was something that I excelled in and would never fail to do everything that was asked of me to the best of my ability. After all, that’s the secret of success isn’t it? Work hard, do what’s asked, try your hardest.

Again, it was only after leaving school that I realised that, as a strategy for success beyond the world of academia, such a strategy would actually get in the way of my achieving what I was really capable of? I realised that while I was sitting around waiting to be told what to do there were others out there just going ahead and doing it. And a lot of them a lot less qualified than I was.

One of the world’s most successful business gurus is America’s Tom Peters and I would recommend a book like The Wow Factor to all educational managers, if nothing else to show the importance of adding a bit of ‘oomph’ to the process of managing people. In this book he suggests that ‘it is better to seek forgiveness than ask permission’. That strategy alone has helped me to achieve so much more for myself and the organisations that I have worked for in my career from industry to advertising to local government to teaching than sitting around and waiting to be told what to do.

Which brings us back to the classroom. To your classroom.

Of Clichés, Classrooms and Cuckoo clocks

To what extent are you encouraging ‘independent thinking’ in your classroom?

Of all the workplaces that exist today the classroom must be one of the only ones in which we actually spent over a decade during our formative years, albeit on the receiving end. 99% of people starting work enter a brave new world on that first day of work from accountants to local government officers to brain surgeons, hairdressers and managing directors. It is only teachers who walk through the door on their first day of work and immediately immerse themselves in an environment from their childhood, replete with the same sights, sounds, even smells, where the rhythm of daily life is exactly how is was ten, twenty, even longer, years ago. Even some of the people may be the same if you return, as some do, to the very building which you attended as a pupil. In fact the only real difference is that you don’t have to knock before you go into the staffroom.

It’s not a situation that encourages you to have creative thoughts. After all, a great deal of creativity is born out of conflict and frustration. As is often pointed out in Italy they went through years of unrest, turmoil and bloodshed and produced the Renaissance. Switzerland has had centuries of peace and produced the cuckoo clock.

And to compound the problem, the very fact that we have made it through the school system, into the university system and out at the far end to go back into the school system meant that we must have done very well at school in the first place. The classroom is somewhere that doesn’t need to change because, well, it was alright for me.

For those of you who are parents, how often do you catch yourself saying the very same things that your parents said to you? Those ‘Oh my god, I’ve become my mother’ moments. Now in the classroom how often have you had those ‘Oh my God I’ve become Mrs Bennett from Class 4B’ moments? Well, if you have had them you must, in the name of all that stands of creativity and progress, fight them. Whenever I am asked for advice by NQTs I always suggest two things – one is to stay out of the staffroom (although admittedly that is more something for those starting their careers in a secondary school) the other is to avoid, at all costs, teacher clichés. Put down this edition of Burning Issue and make a quick list of all the teacher clichés you can think of. If you are in the staffroom ask your colleagues or, at home, ask your family – partner and children. Here are four to start you off:

‘We’ll be in your time soon...’
‘I didn’t say talk did I!’
‘Would you do that at home?’ (to which the astute child responds ‘Well, you’re writing on the walls with a felt pen, would you do that at home?!’

Make a list and put it up in the staffroom. Then vow as a staff never to use them ever again. Change your swear box into a cliché box. If you find yourself saying something that you know thousands of teachers up and down the country are probably saying too then put in a pound. When your box is full give the money to some charity that will look after worn-out phrases and exhausted expressions that are no longer useful.

It might seem a little thing but whenever I observe lessons where teacher clichés are used they never seem to work and only serve to weaken the teacher in the children’s eyes in much the same way as threats that aren’t followed through on. What’s more, the process of looking at and changing one’s language is a fairly simple step on the way towards developing a more creative mindset.

I firmly believe that we are innately creative but sometimes we need little rules and techniques to bring that creativity out into the open. It’s like learning a new technique in a sport. You may be able to play golf or badminton well enough but then you learn a new little technique that can make a big difference and you have to remember to use it at first before it becomes part of your ‘habitual’ way of thinking.

Fold your Arms to Change the World

And in many ways, habits are what it’s all about. So much of our life is simply habit. Some estimates are as much as 90 to 95% of our actions are things we do without even thinking about them. So do the habits you have in your classroom hold you back or move you forward? Hold the children back or move them forward? Are the things that you are not thinking about getting in the way of improving your teaching more than the aspects you are focussed on? An often quoted way of feeling what a habit is like – or rather doing something non-habitual – is to fold your arms naturally and then to fold your arms the ‘other’ way. The first will be the habit and will feel right, the second will feel wrong, even though it’s just different. In the first instance the connections between the brain cells involved in the process of folding your arms that way are so well used and the myelin sheath that insulates the connections and so facilitates speedier and more effective distribution of the electrical impulses used in the process so well developed that you don’t consciously have to think about it, it just happens.

Or try clasping your hands together in front of you prayer style, then re-clasp with the other thumb on top as you work your way down. Again, what you have is the difference between habits and ‘not yet habits’, not between the right way and the wrong way. Indeed research shows that challenging these habitual patterns is part of what is needed to maintain a healthy brain as we grow older.

How to Keep Your Brain Healthy into Old Age

1. What you eat – you especially need to take on board anti-oxidants which sort out the free radicals that do a great deal of damage to our bodies and brains. Tea, cocoa, red wine, blueberries, strawberries, kale. Did I mention red wine?
2. What you do – healthy body healthy mind, something all good scholars of Latin know as mens sana in corpore sanum. We know there is a link between the development of the body and the development of the brain. Make sure you stay active physically and that your children are doing their PE, their dance and movement, their Brain Gym.
3. What you think – mental exercise helps keep your brain healthy longer, even, controversially, fighting off diseases like Alzheimer’s according to some researchers. Crosswords, memory games, word and number games, exposing yourself to new stimuli, driving to work a different way once a week, brushing your teeth with the other hand on a Tuesday. So it feels like someone else is doing it.

The king of lateral thinking Edward De Bono started professional life as a neurological researcher noting that the brain was what he referred to as a ‘self organising organism’. It would take on board information from the outside world and arrange it in certain patterns to best fit the reality that the perceiver wanted. Many of the strategies the de Bono has subsequently developed for improving our thinking are ways of deliberately shifting us out of our habitual patterns of thinking and into some new ones. To begin with these new ways of working may seem cumbersome and artificial (‘What colour hat am I supposed to be wearing now?”) but you’ve got to start somewhere. It doesn’t take long before we start to assimilate these new thinking patterns into our habitual ways of doing things. Some of the research talks about doing something between 25 and 40 times for it to become a new habit. So for the next two or three weeks fold your arms the new way and see what happens.

In the spirit of creativity here are just a sample of different classroom-based activities you can use that help you develop creative approaches to everyday tasks. To begin with it they may seem a bit cumbersome and ‘unnatural’. Give yourself a month, time for you and the children to start assimilating the strategies into the day-to-day way-to-do things. Also, let the children know what you are doing and why you are doing it. I’m a great believer in doing things with children and not to them. 

Creativity in Thinking I

De Bono’s Six Thinking Hats

Rather than lunging in and thinking through a problem with whatever comes into your mind your thought processes will be a great deal more effective if you systematically think through a problem using a set variety of thinking styles. De Bono, creatively, symbolises six different thinking styles as a hat of a different colour. Then, to work through a thinking challenge, make sure you wear one hat a time, that everyone know what the current hat is and that you all know when you are swapping hats. It may be that you have everybody all wearing the same hat at the same time or you could have six different groups with a different hat each, feeding back to the main group. As with all these strategies, play around with the basic idea and make it your own.

The hats are as follows:

White hat – used when looking at the facts and figures that we have or that we need to think through an issue. Only 15% of parents attended the last year four parents evening.

Red hat – emotions and intuition. Why do we feel so few parents show up? How do we think they feel about coming into school?

Black hat – Cautious examination of the facts. Is it possible to get more parents in? Do we actually want it? What will it achieve? Will the effort outweigh the benefits?

Yellow hat – Benefits and advantages? How will things be better if we do get more parents in?

Green hat – suggestions, ideas and proposals. How might we go about doing it? What might make parents more likely to come to school? How could we get out to meet them? Do we have to actually meet them to achieve the same goals?

Blue hat – Thinking about thinking. What have we achieved so far? Where is this getting us? Are we using the right sort of thinking here?

Creativity in Teaching

I’m a Celebrity, Teach Me Something!

There is a great deal of talk theses days about teaching and learning and effective use of learning strategies in school. One major aspect of this is the use of Multiple Intelligence theory in the classroom. In my experience I find that an increasing number of schools are aware of the idea that we have a range of different sorts of intelligence but few are actually turning the theory into practice and making the move from knowing to doing. Looking at a challenge without acting is just, well, looking. To borrow another idea from Tom Peters, where ‘ready, fire, aim!’ is appropriate we end up with ‘ready, aim, aim, aim, aim…’

One of the most creative and effective ways I have come up with for getting across Multiple Intelligence theory in a way that makes a difference in the classroom is to personify the eight (at the last count) different intelligences as follows:

Carol Vordeman  Logical/mathematical
The AA Man   Body/physical
Princess Di   Interpersonal
Mother Teresa   Intrapersonal
Picasso   Visual/spatial
Mozart    Musical
Charlie Dimmock  Naturalistic
Shakespeare   Verbal/linguistic

Then it is just a question of taking a particular scheme of work and systematically working through the list of people imagining that each one is in your classroom and what activity you would come up with to allow each to play to his or her strengths at last once over the course of that particular project or topic or scheme of work.

Sit down with your teaching team and a particular subject you will be covering and go through the list, ‘brainstorming’ one of two ideas for each person from the All Star Class. There may be ideas you come up with that you couldn’t do yourself but that doesn’t matter. If we never give children things to do that we could do not do ourselves then we are limiting them by our own limitations. Is it our goal not to have children cleverer than we are? That things cannot be thought other than those that we think ourselves? Remember what we said earlier about ‘mutation’ and the need for our thinking to evolve.

One primary teacher explained how she would get around her own limitations in this way by using the teacher next door to fill in her gaps when it comes to art whilst she filled in her neighbour’s gaps when it came to music.

Creativity in Remembering

Peg words, Memory Palaces and Bizarre Stories

Memory strategies are another opportunity for creative thinking that to begin with may feel a little odd or cumbersome but actually, once your brain gets used to using them, save you a great deal of time and effort.

What’s more, in the classroom, there is another hugely important benefit from helping children tap into the fantastic memories they have. It helps improve their self-esteem. I have seen so many young people, and adults for that matter, who when realising that they had just achieved ten out of ten on a memory test say words to the effect of ‘I just scored ten out of ten! I’ve never had ten out of ten in anything before. I feel great!’

The important thing for us to remember is that whenever children forget the wonderful words of wisdom we have shared with them it is not because their memories are deficient. Far from it. Some researchers argue that we hold within our heads the memories of everything that has ever happened to us, even being in our mother’s womb. The problem is that we have trouble accessing those memories at a time that suits us. This explains why, for example, that sudden waft of flowers or perfume or baking may take us back to our grandmother’s kitchen and to a memory we didn’t even think we still had. Yet we can’t recall the very things we want when we want them. And some of them only happened yesterday.

Memory can be boiled down to four ‘Rs’:

• Registration - Taking information into our head
• Retention - Hanging on to it
• Recall  - Bringing out when we need it
• Review - If we don’t systematically review what we have learned we will forget 80% within 24 hours.

R number two is not the problem. It’s the third R that causes us grief. Yet the better we make the registration the better the recall.

It is through the systematic application of creative memory strategies in the ‘registration’ process that we can achieve what seem like superhuman feats of memory but that are in reality nothing more than an individual learning how to tap into the ability for remembering things that we all have. And more often than not it all boils down to strange pictures in our heads.

One of my favourites is a process called the Peg Word system. The starting to point is to commit to memory the ten pegs and this process is easy because they rhyme with the number one to ten.

Bun, shoe, tree, door, hive, sticks, heaven, gate, wine, hen.

Then we number off the things we want to remember which is a useful strategy for improving memory anyway – ‘Here are five things that the Victorians have done for us’; ‘Six things to remember about electricity’; ‘Ten ways not to kill a houseplant’ – and, once we have done this, we then ‘hang’ each item to be remembered on the corresponding peg.

For example, in a particularly lesson I was observing in an agricultural college on houseplant care, what was a fairly mundane lesson could have been given the creative makeover by using the Peg Word system (and also by changing the title of the lesson. ‘Ten ways not kill a houseplant’ immediately gets your curiosity going compared to ‘houseplant care’, and once you get them curious the battle for motivation is almost won. Consider the difference between ‘today we’re going to learn the structure of a sonnet’ and ‘today we’re going to learn how to win the man or woman of you dreams in 14 lines’).

One  Bun  Humidity Imagine spraying a bun you are holding with your plant spray until it glistens then having a bite

Two Shoe Water Imagine watering your plants using your shoe for a watering can

Three Tree Light Imagine a tree with bulbs for leaves, all lit up

Four Door Ventilation Imagine opening a door and the wind comes in, blowing all the plants to the far end of the room 

Five Hive Food Imagine feeding a plant with a spoonful of honey

Six Sticks Warmth Imagine setting fire to a stick and holding it near a plant to keep it warm

Seven Heaven Position Imagine heaven with a loads of plants carefully positioned in strategic places

Eight Gate Picking off the dead bits  Imagine an old rustic-looking garden gate and picking off all the dead and rotten bits of bark and wood

Nine Wine Drainage Imagine pouring a bottle of wine down the drain

Ten Hen Pest and Diseases Imagine picking up a hen and then going through it with your nit comb to get rid of all the unwanted visitors

To remember what you want to remember it’s just a question of going back to your pegs and working through them systematically, making sure you ‘see’ the images as you do it. In my experience some children (and adults) get the hang of this instantly. Others take a little more practice. Some children claim to have trouble visualising but it can take a little practice. One girl came up to me in a lesson for help as she had to draw a lump of clay and didn’t know what it looked like. I asked her to visualise a table and on it a lump of clay and a banana. Once she had that in her mind’s eye and I just suggested she should draw the thing that wasn’t a banana. Seemed to do the trick.

Another effective creative memory strategy is based on an idea that has been around for thousands of years going all the way back to the Ancient Greeks. ‘Memory Palaces’ work by placing the things you want to remember in specific rooms in a specific order. It is easiest to use your own house for this.

Using the example above it could be that as you walk in to your entrance hall you are sprayed in a very fine mist, then you open the living room door and a great wave of water hits you. You go into the dining room and are almost blinded by huge spotlights and as you stumble into the kitchen a hurricane-force wind blows you back out again. You get the idea…

I was speaking to an IT tutor in a college recently who was bemoaning the fact that students always forgot certain aspects of processing databases. Namely that there should be ‘no repetition of groups’, that you should ‘always use the full primary key’ and that ‘data is atomic’. By turning each of these notions into parts of a single story again I can memorise them instantly. (I imagine walking past my old primary school and seeing two groups of people outside but both groups are the same so I get rid of one of them as there should be no repetition. Then I find two separate halves to the key to the primary school and have to put them both together as we should always use the full primary key. Finally as I open up the school door I see a large number on the foyer that explodes proving that data is atomic. It also worth noting that I’ve got no idea what any of those three notions means. All I’ve done is remembered them. I missed out on the part of the process that actually involved learning them.  We should not confuse learning for memory or vice versa.)

Creativity in Marking

Beyond the Black Box with the Red Pen

One teacher I met a while back was telling me how in their school they no longer do that marking till two o’clock in the morning thing. He says that they made a conscious and specific effort to come up with ways of marking that were more effective and involved them working less. They do a great deal more self marking, peer marking and group marking. ‘I go around with my pen every now and gain to get an overview’ he told me. If there’s anyone else in the room who can mark that piece of work or tick that box or whatever it may be then let them do it as they will benefit and so will you.

In how many ways can the work of you children be assessed without your having to do it all the time? (Notice, by the way, the structure of the question. There is a simple maxim from the world of creativity which is ‘Nothing is more dangerous than an idea when it’s the only idea you have’. We do a great deal of ‘convergent thinking’ in schools where we play the game of guess what’s in the teacher’s head, where there is only one answer and the cleverest child will be the one who gets that answer most fully and most quickly. Divergent thinking allows us to first consider how many right answers there may be before we settle on the best one. It may well be, after all, that the best right answer is answer number 17 but we never reached it because we stopped after the first one. The moral of the story is if you want lots of good ideas have lots of ideas.)

It’s worth checking out the work of Dylan Wiliam here. In his report Inside the Black Box - Raising Standards Through Classroom Assessment (Black and Wiliam, King's College London, School of Education) he suggests that ‘Many of the successful innovations have developed self- and peer-assessment by pupils as ways of enhancing formative assessment, and such work has achieved some success with pupils from age five upwards. This link of formative assessment to self-assessment is not an accident – it is indeed inevitable.’

Simple things like marking each other’s work such as spelling tests. I’m still amazed how children sometimes have to wait several days for such feedback and by the time they receive it they have lost all interest in what it was all about in the first place. Another example is, before a child hands in a piece of work, to swap work with a neighbour for a few minutes so they can check it over first.  That way you should only have to mark the areas that only you can cover.

Something else that Messrs Wiliam and Black identify is the negative effect of comparing one child against another in our assessment.

‘Feedback to any pupil should be about the particular qualities of his or her work, with advice on what he or she can do to improve, and should avoid comparisons with other pupils.’

After all we are never comparing like with like. (It’s worth remembering that there is a two to three year spread in terms of the neurological maturation between a group of children who may have the same age. And boys and girls have different parts of the brain maturing at different times too. Where is it written that every child will be ready to sit that SAT at exactly the same time on exactly the same day? What’s written is that there is this huge spread but we do such damage to the child’s self esteem by forcing them through an inappropriate process that they never fully mature in an effective way and start to close down at the very time in their life when they should be opening up.)

There is a process called ‘ipsative assessment’ which is best summed up in an idea from sport known as the PB or Personal Best. In other words, am I better now than I was then? So, what’s that child’s PB for spelling, or for times tables or behaviour? In the words of one of one great Russian ballet dancer:

‘I never try to dance better than anyone else. But I always try to dance better than myself’.

Creativity in Learning

Fighting the Tyranny of Syntax

I am currently fighting a crusade against what I call the ‘tyranny of syntax’. Who says that learning can only happen through words in written sentences? We are capable of so much learning that is more than written words. Yet in school we tend to work on the premise that if they haven’t written it down then they can’t have learned it despite the fact that research shows, for example, we have a better memory for pictures than we do for words and how closely related smell is to remembering.

To what extent are you using pictures, symbols, and colour to reinforce their learning in your classroom? I don’t see much use of highlighter pens in primary schools around the country (I see a bit more at secondary level but even then it’s not that effective and often used simply to make work ‘look nice’ rather than for any great strategic intent).

What’s more, according to the research about the differences between male and female brains and their preferences for processing information, it seems to be the male-type brain on average that works better when allowed to use right-hemisphere processes such as pictures, colour, movement. One bit of research identifies that when processing quite tricky maths questions girls were using their right brains and also their left brains, processing the problem by turning it into language whereas the boys were only using their right brains, leaving the problem in its abstract form, not bothering with language, using less of their brain but actually answering the problems quicker than the girls.)

Is our lack of creativity in overcoming our reliance on words, especially written words, a factor contributing to the underachievement of our boys? I know we are expected to get them through ‘hoops’ such as SATS but we need to remember they are hoops and that is all. So, let’s teach them hoop-jumping strategies but let’s not allow the hoop to take over.

The most comprehensive strategy for drawing together many aspects of effective brain-based learning is through the use of techniques such as Mind Maps™. For more information about specifically how to work in this way see the bibliography at the end or else pick up a book by Mind Map™ inventor Tony Buzan who has written a book regularly on this subject.

I always ask teachers if a) they have heard of such techniques and b) if they are using them? I’m still amazed how little is either known or, if it is known, practiced when it comes to moving away from the tyranny of syntax. Sometimes teachers will say that they do use these learning maps but when you look at what they’ve got they are actually using spider diagrams. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a place for those too, but they aren’t the same. There is so much more information and creativity that can go in to a learning map compared to a spider diagram. The latter, if it was on say characters in Macbeth, would have Macbeth written in a bubble with legs coming out of it with words on the ends of the legs. The former would have a picture of a crown in the centre with the name Duncan on it but crossed out in red with Macbeth scrawled on it instead. Each of the branches would be made up of a character’s name with colours and images to represent that character (a crown on Duncan’s name, spots around Lady Macbeth, Banquo where the ‘o’ in his name is a ghost). Coming off each of the main branches you could have a number of sub-topic branches with key words, pictures and symbols to represent elements of the character’s character… and so on. Much, much more than a spider diagram.

I have met so many young people whose lives have been changed because they were able to use these sorts of strategies for learning and that changed everything. Children who felt they weren’t very clever who suddenly realised that they were, students who weren’t going to make it into the VIth Form but got in with flying colours once they started working in this way, children with dyslexia who felt they had no chance suddenly realising that what they had was trouble processing, not thinking, and that if they were able to get around the problem of so many words, they were suddenly able to show just how clever they really were.

One of the biggest blocks to using such strategies in classrooms is the fact that the teacher doesn’t get on working in this way. They tell me “I have tried it once but I didn’t like it’. Firstly, doing it once is not enough. Like any new way of doing things it takes a while for the brain to feel comfortable with it and until then it treats it as ‘wrong’. But it is neither right nor wrong, just new. Remember, you can’t fold your arms the ‘wrong’ way, no matter how wrong it feels. Buzan himself suggest you should do about a hundred or so before you start to feel comfortable with them. Secondly, just because it’s not ‘your’ thing doesn’t mean to say it’s not theirs. We have a moral, ethical and professional responsibility to offer our children everything that is at our disposal including the strategies that may not fit in with our own learning preferences. We do tend to inflict our learning styles and preferences upon the children the unwritten message being ‘it works for me so what’s wrong with you, you’ve got the problem not me’. But remember, the logical conclusions of working in this way is that we limit children by our own limitations, that no child will ever prove themselves to be cleverer than the teacher and that only the children like us will do well at school. Are you happy to agree with that? I didn’t think so.

Creativity in Questioning

Better Q and A

How much time do we spend in the classroom asking children questions? And how much of that time is a complete waste for so many of the children? As someone who is fortunate enough to observe many lessons I see time and time again the celebrated 80:20 rule kicking in during the whole class plenary Q and A time – 80% of the answers coming from 20% of the children. If I was a child in your classroom while that was going on I know I could sit there for long periods of time and neither think nor do anything at all. And if you did pick on me for an answer, if I looked dumb enough for long enough you would have to move on. Being in the same room as someone answering a question neither guarantees nor necessarily constitutes learning.

However there are more creative strategies you can experiment with to help more children learn more, more of the time.

For example, rather than asking a closed, convergent, yes-no, hands up sort of questions  - ‘Who can remember the first thing Jack saw when he got to the top of the beanstalk?’ Hands up please. No shouting out. What did I say Nathan…!’ - what about the more open, divergent sorts - ‘In pairs, you have 50 seconds, see how many elements of the Jack and Beanstalk story you can remember from yesterday’s lesson?’

In this second version of exactly the same question you are engaging the whole class all of the time, you are allowing them to show themselves, each other and you (in that order) what they know and not just what they don’t know, the fact that they can all answer the questions makes them feel good and helps with confidence and self esteem, you have channelled and not suppressed their enthusiasm (they can shout out but to each other, sort of shouting ‘in’) and by then choosing which three groups you want feedback from at the end of the 50 seconds you have retained complete control over the situation, something I know is important to you!

Think about the number of times you say ‘Don’t shout out!’ each week. Maybe there are creative ways around that too. After all, when we tell children off for shouting out in class what we are really saying is ‘Will you stop being so keen and enthusiastic with your right answers – your learning is getting in the way of my teaching so stop it!’ There are times for hands up questions of course, just not all the time. And certainly not at the expense of their enthusiasm for learning, something I see regularly, enthusiastic and excited children who are punished for being enthusiastic and excited.

And once you have asked a question, shut up! Count to ten. Look away. Leave the question hanging in the air for longer than you normally would do. You will be amazed how powerful that silence is and how different children will start to answer question in lessons. If not, if we dive in as soon as there is a hiatus, we teach the children not to think for themselves, that if they sit and look stupid for long enough they can get away without thinking at all while the teacher does all the work. “What did you do at school today dear?’, ‘I just sat around and watched the adults work hard’.

Creativity in Thinking II

Philosophy in the Classroom

Philosophy for Children (P4C) is a powerful tool for helping children develop deep, critical, philosophical thinking skills in a way that is a great deal of fun, that doesn’t involve teaching in its traditional sense, that children of all academic abilities seem to love and that, almost as a side benefit, helps develop speaking and listening skills, team work, citizenship, confidence and self esteem.

For more detailed information about the process check out SAPERE (the Society for the Advancement of Philosophical Enquiry and Reflection in Education) but as a quick overview to the process the following should help.

Step one

Ensure that the children know that they are going into P4C mode. Rearrange the seating. It cannot be done in a traditional didactic classroom layout. It needs to be a closed arena so that there is no one in charge (think King Arthur). The tighter the circle the greater the tension.

Step Two

Identify the material to be given the P4C treatment. Could be a passage, a story, a question, a statement, a picture, an artefact, an equation. With a text read around the group a sentence at a time with children 'passing' if they do not want to read.

Then, in silence, give them a minute to come up with at least one question. The questions are then collected on the board upon which the Community of Enquiry has to decide which one to go with first. How they choose is for them to choose! Once chosen the question is passed back to whoever came up with it to clarify what they meant.

Let the philosophy begin...

Step Three

One person at a time, no interrupting, listen to others, respond to others' point of view, no put downs. See where you get. Give it a deadline. Teacher' role is not too teach, not even to steer it down any one path, never to moralise. You are the throttle, ensuring that there is enough pace and direction so that it does not stall. You will find yourself desperate to 'teach', to amaze them with your own wisdom and sagacity. Save it for the staffroom. In the Socratic Dialogue it is the questions that count most, not the answers. Expect periods of silence, let them crack under the pressure first. Choose a number (higher than ten) and count to it in your head. If you are confident that you are going to get nowhere try reframing, rephrasing or attacking the question from a different point of view completely.

Encourage them to address the CoE with their comments and questions, rather than you as the adult/teacher. Communication lines should criss-cross not all point to you ideally. One teacher had a ball of string that was passed to whoever was speaking to see where the lines of communication went.

Step Four

A good way to finish is to give them 30 seconds to come up with one statement to sum up what is going through their head as a result of the P4C session and the must quickly go round the group. This can be done in pairs to save time.

And that’s all there is to it!

One of the secondary schools where we have been developing cutting edge P4C approaches across the entire school recently took a group of Philosophy Club students to work with children in year six from the feeder primary schools, a great experience for everyone involved.

Here is the process written up by one of the secondary school students:

It’s quite a daunting prospect; a room full of little people waiting for you on the other side of the door. Your palms are sweaty. You draw your breath. The door slowly opens and they’re there. Little face after little face staring up at you waiting for you to speak. You cannot believe that you too were once that small, that naive. This is the feeling my friends and I felt when we went into our local primary schools. We were there to be seen. We were there to talk. We were there to do Philosophy!

Fortunately, I can assure you that it did get a lot easier; maybe I was over exaggerating, just a little . . . 

I go to Kingsbrook School, near Milton Keynes and last year helped to set up a Philosophy for Children Committee. After a year of successful sessions during a lunchtime philosophy club, we were eager to expand elsewhere. We’d already pushed the idea on our teachers, with the help of several members of the staff and wanted to promote P4C in the wider community. The answer was simple; why not lead some P4C sessions in our local, feeder schools? So letters were sent off, times and dates arranged and recruits‚ organised. In no time, we had a list of primary schools who were expectantly waiting for us to come in to their year six classes and teach them the basics of a philosophical discussion. The response we got to our original letter was astounding; we had head teachers calling us all times of the day in an attempt to get an appointment.

As the day drew nearer, we began to think about what stimuli we might use. In our lunchtime sessions we used controversial, teenage issues to spark a good debate, but were these suitable to show primary school children? In the end we decided to use two pieces of music from Holst’s The Planets; Mars and Venus. The logic behind this was that music could evoke all sorts of feelings and emotions. By using two such contrasting pieces of music, we hoped to get a wide variety of questions and thoughts.

Finally, our first visit was upon us, to a smallish school in which we were leading a discussion for a class of about thirty year sixes. The reaction we got to our stimulus was overwhelming. Who knew such small people had such large thoughts? The children were coming out with questions and statements I myself would have been proud of thinking up. The queries and thoughts ranged from the roots of fear and evil to the existence and explanation of magic.

Over the next few weeks, we and our other committee members travelled around the Primary Schools delivering P4C sessions to children as young as nine! I found the diversity and range of discussion, which developed from the two pieces of music astonishing and as I left each school it was difficult not to feel a sense of pride, as you had given these children the chance the open their minds and express themselves. What on earth is there to be prouder of than that?

Tom Middlehurst
Kingsbrook School

This is the same experience written up by one of the small people with the large thoughts, now a student at Kingsbrook School and a fully paid up member of Philosophy Club.

When P4C came to my school last year I didn’t think I would enjoy but I did.

The stimulus was a piece of music about the war planet Mars and another on peace.
We chose peace. We had then to think up some questions. We wrote them on the whiteboard.

Some of them were:"Is war necessary to achieve peace?”, “How long will it take to achieve peace?” and “What is peace?” The winning one was "How long will it take to achieve peace?"

We talked about it for half an hour. Some of the things that were brought up were, peace will never be achieved as long as there is any form of life and peace may eventually kill us because of over-population.

Once the discussion was over, we played a game where you all had to sit down without sitting down at the same time.

At the end we filled in a "blob" sheet to show how we felt about the lesson.

I think everyone enjoyed it as much as I did. I think it made me open up my mind a bit more and it made me think about certain subjects a bit more in depth.

It helped me in writing stories as well because it got me to think about more than one issue and one point of view.

Mitchell Bluck
Kingsbrook School

Not Side to Side but Round and Round

You are, by definition, among some of the most creative people in the world. You have to be to survive on a daily basis in one of the most volatile, challenging and unpredictable working environments on the planet – a classroom of children.

Many primary teachers I meet complain of how they have had their creativity taken away from them over recent years in the drive to raise standards (whatever that means) and with the focus on literacy and numeracy (at the expense, it would appear, of other subject areas. And who said algebra is more important than music anyway? If I had spent more time learning to play the piano and less time learning algebra as a child I would be spending more time playing the piano than I do using algebra as an adult!) However I do sense things are changing. Primary schools were the first to have the shackles put on but now seem to be the first to be shaking the shackles off. I met one primary head who told me that in her school they didn’t do the Literacy Hour. When I suggested that perhaps  they were supposed to the reply was, ‘Well, who checks?’ And this was a Beacon School in inner-city London. Another head told me how in her school they suspend the National Curriculum every Friday. Sitting next to her was another primary head who told me that they do Literacy house four days a week but on the fifth day they do Thinking Skills hour. Both of them when asked about what the inspectors might make of their creative approach to the curriculum gave the same reply – ‘Tough!’ In other words, we know what we’re doing and why we’re doing it, we’re professional and accountable and we will justify our actions and intentions to anyone who comes along.

So, don’t think pendulums, think upward spirals instead. Quite often teachers talk to me about the pendulum swinging back again to the way things used to be. However the best way to think about it is as a spiral where it does feel a little as if we are going around in circles but actually each time we go around we are raising our game, not just moving back to where we were but taking with us all the benefits of where we’ve been and becoming closer and closer to the ideal of the perfect teacher.

It is this process of moving forward, onwards and upwards, that is needed to ensure that teaching does not fossilise in all the excitement and change going on beyond the school walls in the 21st century. And it is your spirit of creativity, to do old things in new ways, that will guarantee this momentum. The future of the world is depending on you.

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