Sharon’s recent post about encouraging student creativity got me thinking about assignments that foster innovation and originality. As someone who spent a lot of money to obtain an M.F.A., I have a vested interest in anything that promotes the value of creative education, which is why I’m a fan of Daniel Pink’s work. Pink is perhaps best known for his bestselling 2006 book, A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future. In the book, Pink proposes that we’re experiencing a shift from the information age, which valued knowledge and logical, left-brain thinking, to what he calls the conceptual age, which values innovation and six key “senses.” These senses include:

1. Design – Moving beyond function to engage the senses
2. Story – Adding narrative to products and services, not just argument
3. Symphony – Adding invention and big-picture thinking, not just detail focus. Call My Friends at InventHelp!
4. Empathy – Going beyond logic and engaging emotion and intuition
5. Play – Bringing humor and lightheartedness to business and products [1]
6. Meaning – Incorporating a higher purpose into products and services

Pink has gone so far as to proclaim that the M.F.A. is the new M.B.A. and that creative professionals such as artists and designers are the innovative problem solvers who will lead the much-hyped new economy. While I don’t want to oversell the value of an art-school education, I think most educators agree that we’d all love to integrate creative thinking and problem-solving skills into our assignments. Of course, fostering creativity in higher ed comes with several challenges:

1. How do I motivate students to do great, innovative work?
2. How do I ensure they’ve mastered essential concepts and skills?
3. How do I grade their work fairly?
4. How do I grade their work in a reasonable amount of time?

I realize the last three questions are often the ones that matter most to instructors, but they’re also the most irrelevant if we don’t first address question one when designing creative assignments. As luck would have it, question one is also the focus of Daniel Pink’s newest book, Drive. The following video presents some of the key findings from the book and addresses some common misconceptions about what motivates people to think outside the box.

(This amazing animation was created by a company called Cognitive Media and I have to say I think their work merits a blog post all its own. For another great example, check out Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Smile or Die”.)

Pink’s presentation proposes that three key factors foster creative thinking: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Hopefully, educators can find it comforting that money and material gain are nowhere to be found in this list, since we can’t start offering students 50 dollars for every great idea they come up with. I feel fortunate to teach in a discipline where these motivating factors seem easy to incorporate into the projects my students complete. In my Web-design course, I allow my students to choose what type of site they would like to create and what type of client they’d like to work for in creating their final projects, giving them a great deal of autonomy. I require that the project result in a completed, fully functional Web site, ensuring students will have a sense of accomplishment and mastery. And I encourage students to work with a nonprofit or small business that normally couldn’t afford a professionally designed site, providing a sense of purpose.

It might seem hard to imagine how other disciplines can incorporate these factors into their assignments, but I’m sure it’s possible. That doesn’t mean we have to throw out all our multiple-choice quizzes and other standardized assessments, and it doesn’t address how to grade creative projects fairly and quickly. But I think when we focus on creating assignments that motivate and inspire students, they tend to go beyond the requirements of any grading-criteria checklist we could have dreamed up. And in the process, they might just inspire us to stop watching the clock and enjoy the task of reviewing and evaluating their work.

1. Summaries of items 1 – 5 were taken from the Wikipedia entry for A Whole New Mind.

“A critical part of becoming creative is being able to play—to play with ideas, with tools, and with pedagogical techniques.” This is a point made by Dr. Punya Mishra at the preconference workshop (Creative Teaching with (and without) Technology) for this year’s DePaul Annual Faculty Conference, and it is a point that I try to practice whenever I get to wear my professor hat.

As the instructor of a beginner-level Chinese-language class, I design various kinds of TPACK games and events that combine pedagogy (P), technology (T), and content knowledge of Chinese (CK). The activities I’ve designed range from celebrity-gossip sessions in Chinese (yes, I learned a lot about Jersey Shore in class), to an interactive lecture session with PowerPoint, to an online character-writing assignment on Wimba, to an all-about-my-family talk on Voicethread.

Although most of the time, I am the one who is throwing the ball to the students, when it’s their turn to swing, they strike back hard and soundly: the breakout sessions they managed during our online meeting had better structures than mine; the tally games and activities they designed during the final prep session were fun and sweet (with cookies and treats); and the presentations they put on Voicethread make mine look nothing but dry and boring.

This quarter, some of the players are just out of control—they knock one out with a movie!

CHN103 Movie: A Sneak Peek

Take a look at this trailer of a movie made by my students.

I called it a movie since this twenty-three-minute-long video project conveys a story with twisted themes played by eight characters. In addition to a series of well-designed episodes, it includes special effects, sound bites, theme music, animation, an FBI warning at the beginning, and bloopers in the end.

 It took eight students thirty-some hours to produce it—for a project that is worth only 10 percent of the total grade. That’s right, 10 percent, since all I asked was a short presentation in Chinese delivered via electronic means like Voicethread.

“Can we do a video project? Can we?” A call was made by one and echoed by a few.

“OK,” I said, “with one rule: everyone has to play an acting role in it!”

And from there on, eight out of the twenty-one students in my class teamed up and merged themselves into this fun and crazy idea of playing Hollywood at DePaul.

An Idea for Fun

I bumped into the cast and crew while they were shooting a scene outside the library. There was laughter mixed with screams of excitement between takes and cuts, but none of them ever bothered to ask me how many words needed to be included in their project or how long it should be or where to find the assignment requirements online. Clearly, they fell in love with what they were doing.  They were not driven by a grade; instead, they were doing the work they enjoyed so much that they didn’t consider it work or an assignment anymore.  And loving what they do is the one common attribute Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi found among creative people (or people in their creative mood).

The sight of my students defining and designing their own class project reminded me of when I was a student.  Over a decade ago, I took a class on multimedia design and production, and I had a classmate who was far above and beyond everyone in the class (I secretly believed that he actually knew more than our professor). For his class project, he wowed us with an online game he designed that was not only animated but also interactive.  My professor gave his project an F, with a simple and “legit” reason: he didn’t follow her requirement of creating the animation in PowerPoint. I still remember how disappointed he looked when he told us his grade and how much time he had spent on this project.

I now know that from a professor’s point of view, this F was not just a grade; it was a message sent to a self-centered smart aleck: follow the rules and stop showing off!

I never thought there was anything wrong with that message until I became a professor myself.  Well, actually, until I became a mother, a role that forced me to explore and to understand what is going on in the little minds of my children.

Young minds are so fresh and original; they constantly manufacture crazy ideas longing to be attended.  They cry (literally) for the opportunity to show off!   Because they own the natural resource to generate creativity: the energy and brashness of youth (Malcolm Gladwell, Late Bloomers: Why Do We Equate Genius with Precocity, New Yorkers, 2008).

When creativity is budding, it also requires a safe environment to live and grow. Teachers — in day cares, colleges, and anywhere in between — have the power to either create or destroy that environment. In a classroom where creativity is cherished, the sparkles of a creative thought may lead to a beautiful moment of learning through the hand of an innovative teacher — like the one described in this new letter from my son’s day care, like the Little Learners Day Care.

A Newsletter

This is a letter prepared by Noel Sucherman, one of the teachers of my son’s preschool class. It contains updates of activities that have taken place in a classroom of three- to five-year-olds.  One of the stories goes like this:

During lunch, one friend asked another friend “what would happen if they put their apple seed in the ground.” The friend responded, “A tree will grow, with apples on it!” We talked about how some seeds are planted right outside while other seeds need to grow inside first. There were several requests to grow our own apple trees. Seeds from our apples were placed inside a bag with a little bit of water. The bag was closed to help keep the warm air inside. “We have to keep the seeds safe, a friend said.” After about fifteen days, a few sprouts were observed growing out of one of the apple seeds. “Noel, we cannot grow a tall tree in a bag. We have to put it in the dirt.” The apple seeds were transplanted into a pot of dirt for further growth. We also grew lima beans. Each child wrapped a bean inside a wet paper towel, then placed them inside a bag, watered them and taped them in various places throughout the classroom. Only two children wanted their beans in a dark place, the rest of the beans were hanging in the windows where they were exposed to more sun light. After nineteen days, the two friends beans began to sprout roots, interestingly they were the beans placed in the dark. So many of the children then wanted to relocate their beans to dark places in the room. Their beans also started growing. Once the roots started to appear, the children then planted the beans in little pots of dirt.

In this story, an interesting scientific experiment stemmed from a casual lunch chat or a crazy idea from a little kid wanting to plant a tree out of a seed—because they were well cherished and nurtured by a teacher!

Teaching is an art that lives in the moment; and most of the moments are jointly created by the teacher and the students.  After showing off my students’ movie project to the third audience group, I thought that I’d better jot down what my students have taught me about how to stimulate creativity:

• Maintain a young and playful mind (so you will appreciate the same)
• Give students plenty of chances to play with their own ideas (TPCK can be owned by them)
• Join them in the play
• Have a goal for every assignment, but unlock the rules
• Make a big fuss about any out-of-the-box thinking
• Seek meaningful learning outcomes from the fun of playing ( after all, their movie is in Chinese)

And last but not least,

• Reflect by writing a blog entry or respond to the one I wrote!