STEM and Creativity Closing Keynote
In this closing Keynote session, from the 2024 VEX Robotics Educators Conference, Jason McKenna, VP of Global Educational Strategy for VEX Robotics, analyzes our relationship with our own thinking, and lays out strategies on how to foster creativity in students while removing potential mental barriers. This presentation helps educators to reframe their mindset around creative thinking and how they can utilize this new framework to spark creative learning for all students in their classroom.
(inspirational music)
We are going to talk about one of my favorite things to discuss and to learn and to just, you know, talk about. And that is creativity. Creativity is one of those things that all of us try to do in our classrooms. Especially now in the age of artificial intelligence, you hear all the time that AI will never replace creativity. So creativity is something that's always been emphasized in our classrooms, but I would say it's even more important now, again, in the age of artificial intelligence. What is creativity and how can we teach it?
I'm gonna start talking about creativity by telling a story, okay? The story comes from this book right here, "The Brain That Changes Itself." The story revolves around a woman by the name of Cheryl. Cheryl went in and had surgery, routine surgery. After the surgery, unfortunately, she got an infection. She was prescribed an antibiotic to help treat the infection, and she had an allergic reaction to that medicine. So she had an infection, they gave her an antibiotic, and she had a reaction to the antibiotic. What happened due to her reaction to the antibiotic, it actually damaged the function of her inner ear, okay? The vestibular function of her ears was damaged as a result of the medicine she was taking.
This resulted in her losing all of her balance, okay? When I say losing all of her balance, the term she was actually referred to, the medical term for this is gonna sound crazy, but it's true, is a wobbler, okay? 'Cause she literally could not stand. She talked about the fact that it was like... And not only could she not stand, but her vision was constantly blurry, okay? Constantly blurry. It just got worse and worse and worse. She obviously lost her job. She could no longer work on her job. She had to go on disability. But again, she really couldn't stand, she couldn't focus on anything. The doctors had no idea how to treat her. It got to the point where she was suicidal as a result of getting this condition, as you could probably imagine.
So, because her doctors weren't really giving her any type of treatment for this, she went and got an experimental treatment. This treatment involved her being given a hard hat. The hard hat had a level on it, just like a level that you would use if you were a carpenter, if you were doing any type of home maintenance, okay? The level was attached to these sensors, which then all connected to electrodes that were on her tongue. She would sit with this, and they were taped on her tongue. She would sit with this thing on her tongue with the hard hat, and she would sit down and she would move her head. Any time that it would become level, it would send electrical impulses to her tongue.
After the very first treatment, this is what happened to her. She was actually able to stand for the first time without staggering. Like she said, it was like she was touched by the hand of God. She got subsequent more treatments to it to the point that six months later, she was actually not only able to walk, but actually able to dance. She was able to go to a wedding reception, actually able to dance at the wedding reception as a result of this treatment. It was absolutely incredible.
Now, the reason why it was an experimental treatment was because at this time, okay, and this was the late '80s, this was a very controversial concept, neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity means your brain can actually change. That's what happened to Cheryl. She lost a function of her inner ear, but as a result of those electrodes going through her tongue, it actually rewired neural pathways within her brain and it actually changed her brain, hence the tale of the book, okay? It actually changed her brain, and she was able to cure being a wobbler.
Now, why is this so important, and how does this relate to creativity?
Thank you for listening to this story and for joining me in exploring the fascinating world of creativity and neuroplasticity. I hope this inspires you to think differently about the potential of the human brain and the power of creativity in our lives.
Thank you once again, and I look forward to our next discussion.
Because simply, what the research tells us is our ability to teach creativity, the biggest limiting factor in that is our perception of creativity as it relates to our children. When I was a teacher, I thought that certain children were creative and others were not. I thought creativity was something that you were born with, something that you could not actually teach. But now we know that that's not true. Any child can be creative. All of our children have the potential to be creative, and all of our teachers have the potential to be creative, and we know that due to neuroplasticity.
Our children have the ability to grow and develop, and their brains can also grow and develop. So even if a particular student might not be as creative as others, that creativity can be developed within that student. I taught with a lot of teachers, myself included, who thought that certain students were creative, while others just didn't have the "creativity gene." Well, there is no creativity gene. All of our students have the capability to be creative, and all of us have the capability to be creative, regardless of age.
You hear this all the time: "Oh, young children are a sponge when it comes to learning a language," right? Three, four, five, six, seven-year-olds can learn a language and pick it up so quickly and easily. Which they can, but so can you. Something like language learning, something like creativity, there's no age limit on that. There's no bucket of time that you're more predisposed to learn something or another. What neuroplasticity teaches us is that all of us have the ability to learn new things, learn different things, and develop new neural pathways within our brains to be more creative, learn different languages, learn math, whatever it is.
So what are the three most important factors when it comes to teaching creativity? I already talked about number one: you and your students' beliefs in their ability to be creative. That's the most important factor. All of your students have the ability to be creative. Number two, we're going to talk about this next: your understanding of what teaching creativity actually means. If I were to ask all of you in here for a definition of creativity, I'd probably get 35 different definitions. So how can you actually teach something if we're not all on the same page about what it is?
And then the third thing is your belief in your effectiveness in teaching creativity. Just like we're limited sometimes by our belief in our students' ability to be creative, we're also limited in our belief in our ability to teach creativity. We're going to talk about all three of those things here today.
So what is creativity again? How can we actually define creativity? Interestingly, research is fairly clear on this. Of course, there are some outliers here and there, but if you read the research on creativity, there's pretty much a consensus. When you look at it, it actually makes a lot of sense. Intuitively, this makes sense. The first component of creativity is originality, which I think we all know. When we think of creativity, we think of originality. That makes sense—students coming up with new, novel ideas, originality.
The second point is the key point: appropriateness. It is not original and it's not creative unless it's appropriate to the actual task. In order for something to be creative, it has to fulfill the basic requirements of the task. This is something I always struggled with when I taught. I would ask my students to do some type of creative writing assignment, and it would just be all over the place. They would talk about little aliens and then this and that.
Thank you for your attention today. I hope this discussion has inspired you to rethink how we perceive and teach creativity. Remember, creativity is not a gift for the few but a potential in all of us. Let's nurture it together.
There was no coherent structure to it. So the appropriateness, in terms of actually following a formula in terms of what a narrative is, they would never wanna follow that, right? Sometimes we think that creativity is just open-endedness, and it's not, okay? Creativity is originality and appropriateness.
Now, the second part about creativity, what's on the bottom here, is also very important. When we think of creativity, and sometimes the reason why we feel that not all students can be creative is when we think of creative genius, we think of Einstein, the theory of relativity, okay? Or we think of Heisenberg coming up with quantum mechanics. We think of Beethoven composing "Moonlight Sonata."
Music Cue: "Moonlight Sonata" by Beethoven
So these are oftentimes all the things that we think about in terms of creativity. And I can say, "Well, you know, there's no way little Johnny is ever gonna write 'Moonlight Sonata.' Therefore, he's not creative." "There's no way little Susie's able, is she ever gonna be able to write something like 'Hamlet.' Therefore, she's not gonna be creative."
But there are different levels to creativity, and this is important for us to recognize as teachers. So I love this model of creativity. The 4-C model of creativity. So all those things I was just talking about right there, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Einstein, Heisenberg, that's all here. That's what you would call Big C creativity. These are, you know, life-changing ideas, world-changing ideas. That's Big C creativity.
But what we wanna focus on in our classroom is down here: Mini C and Little C creativity. Just like Tim talked about this in his presentation this morning, we talked about, "Well, I teach my students Python. Why?" Because that's, quote-unquote, "real coding." Just like we don't start students in calculus, right, with creativity, we do not wanna start our students here. We don't wanna set this expectation for them, that creativity has to be composing a singular piece of music.
And this is the problem that you see in me all the time, right? You see students at the age of five years old playing the piano, playing an amazing section of piano. They're like, "Oh my god, this child is so creative." He is, or she is, but those aren't the examples that we should really be emphasized in our classroom. Instead, it should be down here for Mini C and Little C, and what we want to do, our job as teachers is to take students from this level to this level, and maybe some of 'em will get to this level. Then, of course, if they ever get to this level, fantastic. That would be awesome, right?
So what do those levels actually mean? So some examples of that. So Mini C creativity. Personal insights and interpretations, right? So if you have a student and you're talking to a student about, and this is something you see all the time, right? I taught... I went into a local school, Woodland Hills, for Read Cross America, and I read to the students, the kindergarten classroom. What happens when you read to kindergarten students, right? You take the book out and you start talking, and the story revolves around a dog. And you say, "How many of you have a dog?" and every hand goes up. Even if they don't. Even if they don't. I was just getting ready to say that, right? They saw a dog on TV or they have their fake dog or everything else like that. Well, guess what? All of those students are creating personal insights and interpretations. That's creativity. That is creativity. That's something that we should definitely be doing, okay?
Hey, this reminds me of that time, right? Think about this in a robotics context, right? I wrote code to have my robot do this. This is similar to this other challenge that we did. I can take those snippets of code that I did previously and apply to this challenge that we have right now. Guess what? That's creativity. That's the type of stuff that we should be fostering and encouraging in our classroom. Again, personal connection.
Thank you for your attention and dedication to fostering creativity in the classroom. Let's continue to inspire and nurture the creative potential in every student.
Like, we talked about connecting new information to previous learning. This year, we just did the game reveal, right, for the new VRC game. Hey, there are three elements to this new game similar to the game from 2015, similar to the game from 2013. Let's see... Let's go back on YouTube and watch the robots in the finals and see how they were able to throw an object or intake an object or something like that. That's connecting new information to previous learning. That's creativity.
So we talked about Mini C. Now, what is Little C creativity? Solving a problem. This is obviously something that we do for STEM all the time, right? Solving a problem. Different application for a tool. Different application for a tool, right? How many of you use text to speech? I know my man, Dan, does. I see you do all the time. Text to speech, right? Guess what? Text to speech was designed for people that don't have the ability to type for whatever reason. But you all, I'm assuming most of you can type just fine with your fingers, but you still use text to speech. What is that? That is a different application for a tool. That's all that is. You find it more convenient for you to do something this way. That's an example of creativity.
Think about in your STEM classrooms, how many times have your students come up with an idea for a robot that you never thought of before, right? Those are examples of creativity, okay? Unique observations. Unique observations. "Oh, I think if we approach the problem this way." Or what if we... So think about game strategy, right? For the new VRC game, "What if we had the robot do this?" "Oh, wow, that's pretty cool. Let's try that." That's a unique observation. And then obviously writing something original, right? Writing an original story, original piece of code, a new algorithm, a new application of an algorithm, a painting, etc. Those are all examples of Little C creativity.
So again, honestly, what we wanna focus on in the classroom is taking our students from here to here. And hopefully this all connects to what I was talking about before about neuroplasticity. This is something that all of our students can do, and this is something that all of our students can get better at, okay?
Now, I can go on my rant. I'm not going to, but I can go on my rant about how in that kindergarten classroom, that enthusiasm that we see, the willingness, right, to make personal connections and personal insights, by the time I'm in a sixth-grade classroom, most of that is gone. Kids aren't raising their hands like that when I tell them a story about my dog, okay? And then think about as a result of that... As a result, and again, I'm not gonna go on the rant as to why that is, but think about as a result of that, all of the examples of creativity we're missing out on. All of the examples of creativity we're missing out on.
Now, let me kind of address the elephant in the room here as it pertains to creativity. So, Ken Robinson, I think to this day, gave the most popular TED Talk ever. More than 70 million... Actually, I didn't look to see how many it is now. I made this slide about a year ago. More than 70 million views on YouTube. Gave a very impassioned speech about creativity and said that our schools are killing creativity. "Our schools," it says here, "stultifying and killing children's creativity." Okay?
Now, Daniel Willingham, who's one of my favorite cognitive scientists, says that this TED Talk by Robinson was very passionate, was very inspiring, but also wrong. So it was very passionate, very inspiring, but also wrong. Because basically what Robinson was saying during the course of this TED Talk is that schools are killing creativity because of their emphasis on factual knowledge. So by teaching your students facts, you are killing creativity. Now, I guess I could be wrong because this does have 70 million views.
Thank you for your attention and for being part of this discussion on creativity in education. I hope this has sparked some ideas and reflections on how we can nurture creativity in our classrooms.
But I don't feel that by telling teachers that everything that you're doing is wrong is a good way to get teachers to change their behavior. Right? So I am here to tell you that none of you, by teaching your students facts or doing direct instruction, are killing creativity in your students. Because if you go back to what we talked about before with the definition of creativity, creativity is originality and appropriateness. So that factual knowledge is needed to determine if something is appropriate or not, okay? So by teaching basic facts, you are not killing your students' creativity.
Now, of course, there's nuance. You can do that too much, okay? But what Robinson was essentially calling for in this TED Talk was the abolishment of all of that, okay? You cannot think creatively in a vacuum. You cannot think creatively about nothing, right? So there's definitely a balance there between teaching your students basic factual knowledge, the, quote-unquote, "fundamentals," and also teaching creativity. And that's what the next part of our discussion is going to focus on, and that is the relationship between creativity and learning.
But before that, just to kind of summarize everything till up to this point, number one, you're not killing creativity. Number two, creativity, just like thinking in general, cannot occur in a vacuum. Creativity and learning work together, and there are different types of creativity. So just keep that in mind as we go through and we talk about this, right?
So now the relationship between creativity and learning. It's very important for us to think about this, and we gotta think about both of these things within this context of creativity and learning. Let me start by asking you all a question. When do you think you are the most creative? Just shout it out. I don't have one of those fancy things like Louis had where you can give me your answer up on the screen. When do you think you're the most creative?
Yes. When I have time to think. You have time to think, that's good. After my Mountain Dews. After your Mountain Dews, yeah. Give me a glass of wine. I'm pretty creative. I get it, yeah. Yes, sir. Hiking. Hiking, excellent. When I'm inspired by something. When you're inspired by something.
Okay, I'm gonna tell you something. You might think it's a little bit controversial. Ready? I think that all of you are the most creative when you are sleeping. Why? 'Cause we all have some crazy dreams. We get some wild, far out dreams, man. Wild and crazy dreams, okay? But hiking, when you're inspired, all the things that you just said have the same characteristic of when you're sleeping. When you are sleeping, you are the most relaxed. Hence, why you're sleeping. When you're hiking, you're relaxed, you're out in nature doing those things. "I finally had my Mountain Dew for the day. Ah, I'm relaxed." Okay? "I'm relaxed."
So I want you to think about two different perspectives on your thinking, okay? And both of them are necessary. So I don't believe in, and I don't wanna talk poorly about Ken Robinson because he is deceased. But I don't want you to think... So this is not an either-or thing. Both are important, okay? But high-focus thinking and low-focus thinking. All of us are familiar with high-focus thinking. When I taught, I demanded my students were always doing high-focus thinking. "Hey, pay attention. Focus. Don't daydream. Hey, I'm right here. Let's go." Right? High-focus thinking. And sometimes you need that. You definitely need that sometimes, no doubt about it.
Low-focus thinking, daydreaming, about ready to nod off asleep, right? But here's the paradox of this, which we're all familiar with if we keep thinking about dreams. How often do we remember our dreams? Rarely, right? Sometimes you wake up like, "Man, I had some crazy dreams last night." "What were they?" "I don't know." Crazy. I just know they were out there. But I woke up like, "Whoo!" like, "Wow." You know what I mean?
Sometimes you do remember your dreams, sometimes you don't. That's because you're at low focus. So creativity happens when you're at low focus because of low focus, but oftentimes we can't remember those things. That's the paradox of our brains. Nobody knows why. Nobody has any idea why that is. Okay? But think about that. Think about that in relation to what we're asking our students to do from a learning perspective. How often do we give students those opportunities to, as someone said, just to think, just to relax in a low-focus environment, okay? Essentially the daydream. And again, I'm guilty of this, right? We joke during opening, I have to do the letter of apology in my second book. But, I mean, if my students were daydreaming, I'll probably gonna be upset at them. But the research is fairly clear. That's what actually fosters creativity. Okay?
So now what is the actual process then? So, think about this in terms of an actual process of creativity. Now, let me be very clear, you can't grit yourself to be creative, right? You can't sit like, "Okay, I'm gonna be creative. Here we go," right? Oftentimes, you just get hit with creative inspiration, right? But think about this for a second. So I got a metaphor up here, or an analogy. Either one works. So, obviously, Shakespeare's famous sonnet,
"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"
"Thou art more lovely and more temperate."
And the rest of the sonnet goes from there, right? So Shakespeare was obviously writing this about a woman and thought that this woman was beautiful. So how am I gonna describe the fact that this woman is beautiful? "Oh, I'll compare her to a summer's day." Now, that's a unique observation going back to our different types of creativity, right? But what actually causes that connection? What actually caused him to compare the beauty of this woman to a summer's day? Okay? Well, what we know from research is we have this thought, and that what allows us to really connect those two things together is emotion. Is emotion.
So what do I mean by emotion? Your emotions and your children's emotions, your students' emotions, are the great summarizers for your learning. Now, what do I mean by that? What do I mean by emotions are the great summarizers for your learning? I want you all to take 30 seconds and I want you to think about a great day that you've had recently. So it could have happened yesterday, could have happened a week ago, could have happened a month ago. But I want you to think about a great day that you recently, and we're gonna do that for 30 seconds, okay? Everybody ready? All right, go.
Okay. All of us thought about a great day recently? Okay. Hopefully that, you know, filled you with some good endorphins as you were thinking about. That's some good dopamine. Now, if you had a perfect memory, which again, I'll be the first to admit, that's what I thought my job of as a teacher was, to try to get my kids to remember everything, right? If you had a perfect memory, how long would it take for you to think about that day? Of the same amount that it happened? Exactly, right, 24 hours. 'Cause you would literally remember everything. So the amount... Let's just say you're awake for 16 hours on that perfect day. To remember that perfect day, it would take you 16 hours to do that. Right? So there's no such thing as a perfect memory. And think about how terrible that would be. Think about how terrible that would be if you were burdened with a perfect memory. So we don't wanna have a perfect memory.
So what our emotions do, what our emotions do is they summarize experiences for us to the essence, and that's what you thought about, was the essence of the experience, and that's what allows us to think about it, and that's what can lead to creative insight. So, "The paradox of a perfect memory haunts every attempt we can make to imagine cognition arising solely from information." So cognition cannot arise solely from information.
This is the difference between knowing and being. If a perfect memory was just being, again, it would take me 24 hours to remember something. To know something, you have to be removed from it. You have to be removed from it, and you could then recollect it. That removal is actually done by your emotions, okay? It's actually done by your emotions. And that's what actually allows us to then be creative.
So a great example of this in action, if I'm getting a little bit too philosophical for you, is think of acting. Actors do a great job of this. I love the movie "Training Day" with Denzel Washington. I've probably seen this movie 15 times. And if you've seen the movie "Training Day" with Denzel Washington, at the very end of this movie when he is right about to get killed at the end of the movie... Sorry, spoiler alert. When he is about to get killed at the end of the movie, he gives this amazing go off, he gives this amazing speech. And the very last line, he says, "King Kong ain't got nothing on me!" It doesn't say nothing. He says, "King Kong ain't got nothing on me!" And that scene essentially won him an Oscar for "Training Day."
Well, guess what? The entire thing was improvised. So Antoine Fuqua, who directed the movie, when he got done saying that line, he looked at him and he said, "I hope you got it 'cause it ain't happening again," and he walked off the set said. He said, "I hope you got it. It ain't happening again." That's the paradox of low focus we just talked about. He didn't know where it came from, but just like you can't remember a dream, he knew it wasn't gonna happen again.
So in terms of emotion, how did that all come about? When you're a great actor, you become that character. You become that character. Your emotions go into that character, okay? That's what it is. So now you're engulfed by that character. And when he became that character, he was able to deliver that scene, but it couldn't happen again. It cannot happen again. Okay? So when we talk about emotion and the role of emotion in learning, emotion is the great summarizer of learning.
Okay? Now we're gonna talk about what this actually means for our classrooms here in a moment. But real quick, two great resources for everything I'm just talking about right now. So the role of motions and learning, this is a fantastic book. "Emotions, Learning, and the Brain." Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, who's actually a former teacher. She was a former high school... I think she was an algebra teacher. I think she's a math teacher. She went back and she got her PhD and now does a lot of educational research on this right here, emotions, learning. This is an amazing, amazing book. And then high versus low-focused thinking, "The Tides of Mind." David Gelernter, who's a professor of computer science at Yale University, he goes into great detail in that book. So if I've piqued your interest in these topics right here, these are two fantastic books that you can look at.
But what does this all mean in the classroom? "Okay, Jason, you've told me that, you know, creativity can occur in a vacuum. You've told me that emotion plays a great role in creative thinking. You've also told me that we should be in a low focus environment in order to really do creativity well. So what does that all mean?"
So speaking of analogies, I love to compare teaching in classrooms to growing flowers. Why do I love to compare it to growing flowers? Because some of your students are like dandelions. No matter what they'll do, they'll grow. Dandelions come to my driveway, like, through concrete. I pour stuff on them, they'll come back. And that's some of your students. Some of your students, no matter what you do, they will be successful, right? Some students are like orchids or roses. They require so much care. They require so much help. They require so much assistance in order to grow and to be beautiful.
And oftentimes, again, this is why I feel like teaching is the most challenging job. You've got orchids and roses and dandelions all in the same classroom, right? The other reason why I like this analogy so much is that to grow flowers, I need a lot of different things, right? I need dirt and seeds. I need to be able to prepare the ground, right? I need sunlight. I need sunlight. I need stuff like water. So I need all these different things in order to be able to teach creativity well. I need all these different things to be able to teach well. So it's not just one thing, it's everything. And all of these things have to work together.
So, yes, I need to teach things like factual knowledge. Yes, I need to make sure I breed student self-efficacy. I need to make sure that I tell them that they can be creative. So that's like the dirt, right, and the seeds. That's what actually gets me started in the sunlight. These are the things that actually get me started right here. And now I'm just using an example of (indistinct) testing prototype. I'm using a STEM example here, right? So we're making robots. So what do I do now? Well, now I have to give it a little bit of water, I have to prepare, and then I ask questions of my students. Maybe I ask them to reinterpret the rules. I challenge assumptions, right? And I do all of this in an environment that's not necessarily high focus, but is also low focus. I give them time, I give them space. Right? And by doing all of that, now I have an opportunity, maybe I get Mini or Little C creativity as a result of that. But it's this entire process here. It's this entire process here. It's not just one thing. Okay?
So maybe now, again, I have my base here, my student self-efficacy, knowledge, okay? One thing I love about robotics competitions and also doing this in your classroom is looking at the robots. Right? This is a great example of creativity right here. I saw what little John did with his robot. I wanna apply that to my own robot. That's a unique observation. That's a reinterpretation of something. Those are all examples of Mini C creativity that we talked about before. And I can do this in a very low focus way. Now, the easiest way to accomplish that, when I keep saying a low focus way, I'm not saying necessarily kids have to be daydreaming all the time, but it's done in a relaxed way. How is it done in a relaxed way? Take away the pressure of evaluation and assessments. Take it away. Because as soon as you introduce evaluation and assessment, now you're gonna introduce anxiety. And when you introduce anxiety based upon everything I've talked about for the last 40 minutes, creativity goes out the window. Creativity goes out the window.
Now, I'm not saying don't evaluate. I'm not saying don't evaluate, but do you have to evaluate? I get this question all the time. So Dr. (indistinct) is sitting over there. I did an in-service with his teachers over at Wood Hills. The number one question I got from his teachers, and this is the number one question I get from teachers all the time. And I had the same question when I started teaching robotics and stuff because this is how we're all trained. They're like, "Oh, I'm not sure in a 45-minute class my kids are gonna be able to get the robot built and get through all the way through the maze. What do I do?" And I'm like, "Who cares if they don't get through the maze?" I'm like, "Who cares?" She's like, "Well, isn't that the lesson?" I'm like, "No, it's not the lesson." "But your STEM lab here that you're talking about has the kids have the robot go through the maze." "Yes, that's the organizer, but that's not the goal." They're like, "What's the goal?" "Creativity, collaboration," right? Did they reflect upon why they failed in their engineering notebook? Maybe they had a unique observation to that. Maybe they had a personal connection to that. Did they connect their current learning to something done previously?
Thank you for your attention and for being part of this discussion on creativity in education. I hope you found it insightful and inspiring. Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions or need further clarification on any points discussed today.
All of those things could be the goal. If they get their robot to the end of the maze, great. But if they don't, that's okay because that's not the point. So we talk about taking the pressure off testing evaluation. It's not about going from A to B, it's about the process and emphasizing the process. And we talk about the relationship between creativity and learning. That's what we're actually talking about there, okay?
And then again, more things here. So, collaborative decision-making, logging data in an engineering notebook, analyzing the results using the data, these are all wonderful things that you can do to really foster creativity within your classroom. Now, you'll notice throughout this entire example, I've used an example of STEM, and that's because I really believe that the best organizer for creativity is the engineering design process. A hundred percent. Believe this.
Because if you go back to our definition of creativity, it's originality and appropriateness. So what are all these IQ kids doing right now? Anybody know what they're doing literally right now? What's that? Stressing. They are stressing, yeah. They're doing inspection. The robots have to pass inspection. They can't be too big, have to be all VEX parts, right? I can't 3D print a part and stick it on my VEX IQ robot. Okay? So the robot has to pass inspection. That's the appropriateness. Okay? If I'm an engineer and I'm building a bridge, guess what? It better stay up, right? That's the appropriateness. So the engineering design process is a fantastic organizer for creativity.
And in our STEM class, and this is why, again, I fell in love with robotics, okay? You can have your students apply originality. They can come up with different robot designs, they can come up with different code, they can come up with different game strategies. They can do all of these different things for originality. And they can look at here, if you do a class, and we've had workshops on classroom competitions. When they lose, they can go talk to what the other team did and they can make adjustments on that, and then they can go through this entire process again. Okay? There is no done. That's the beautiful part about this. They can always make their robot better. They can always tinker with their code. They can always come up with a new game strategy.
So to go back to the example I did, again, it's not about getting your robot through the maze, it's the actual process. And again, this is a wonderful organizer for STEM learning, especially, and this is something that we often skip through, right here at the beginning. This section right here. I talk to mentors and coaches all the time and they say, "My students don't understand the game rules. They wanna immediately start going to here." They may wanna start building the robot or building their code and testing their code. No, spend some time here.
Because if you go back and you think about those examples of creativity that we talked about, there's a lot of examples there. We actually have an article about this in our Insights in PD+. Amy wrote a fantastic article about what you can do when you define the problem. Just a sheet like this here, and this is in the article here. These are all questions that you can have your students explore when you give them an open-ended challenge, right? What do I already know about this challenge? What am I being asked to do? Is there one way of solving it or are there many ways? How many possible solutions? What's missing from this challenge? How could I find out more? What kind of information would I need to solve this challenge? Where can I find the information? Who can help me solve this? These are all questions that your students can explore here. Right here. And these are all wonderful examples of Mini and Little C creativity that we talked about before.
Thank you for your attention and for fostering creativity in your classrooms. Keep encouraging your students to explore and innovate.
Teaching for Creativity in the Common Core Classroom
Don't get siloed with the whole Common Core thing. What he was trying to say here in this book is this is how you can do creativity and learning at the same time. They don't have to be against one another, right? Creativity is not something you have to do in addition to your regular teaching. Creativity is not something that you have to do after the state assessment test. Creativity is something that can be integrated as you are actually teaching to your standards. Okay? That's what this book is about here. All right? And again, these are all things that we've talked about. These are all things that we've talked about. And especially I spent a lot of time talking about this second bullet right here. Okay?
So this is how I would like to end things today. I talked about that if you were at my welcome at the very beginning of the conference, you heard me say that I am not afraid of constraints. I wanna run to them, not away from them. Okay? And if you were there for my presentation, I talked about inclusion in STEM classrooms. And even here in my talk about creativity, a common theme between both of those sessions was all of our students have the ability to learn. All of our students have the ability to be creative, and it's our job to make sure that all of those students can have those possibilities.
So what I wanna leave you with here today and how I wanna end the presentation portion of our educational conference this year is just this: limitless possibilities. Limitless possibilities, okay? "It's important for children to experience options in terms of who they can be or what they can be, rather than accepting views of their abilities based upon what they look like or one piece of their identity." Let's not allow our students to limit their possibilities based upon where they come from, based upon what they look like, based upon one or two aspects of their identity. Let's open up our students to the fact that they can do anything or be anything that they wanna be.
And let's also recognize that that great teacher down the hall from you, that great teacher that you saw on television, that great teacher that just won an award, you can also be that great teacher. All of us have that potential inside us. Don't compare yourself to that great teacher. Compare yourself to the teacher you were yesterday. Are you better than the teacher that you were yesterday? It's all that matters. It's all that matters. Don't compare yourself to this person down the hall. Don't compare yourself to this person you saw on TV. Are you a better teacher than you were yesterday? I hope you all became better teachers as a result of the VEX Robotics Educators Conference. That's my mission, that's what I work very hard for every single day, and that's what I'll continue to work for.
Thank you very much.
(audience applauding)
Appreciate you. I guess we have time for questions, Nicole? There's a question back there, Nicole.
Thank you very much for your presentation. Thank you. I had a great mentor when I was a high school teacher, just like you, amazing professor. And he took this and he's reading his PhD thesis, and in his class, he would attach the emotion in a way where it was a storytelling. Yeah. He would make, you know, let's say movie. Yeah. And prepare all his lessons, projects, according to this movie, just like you mentioned. And it grasp. Like, the kids grasp the concepts really well. To give you a quick example, let's say you make it out of "Fast and the Furious." Last project is to create a ramp, or a car to go over a ramp. They take this and just fly. Yeah. Thank you very much. That's a great... So the example... You're a hundred percent right. The example I give all the time is like Beowulf. 10,000 line poem, which was memorized for hundreds of years. Like, how? Because it was a story. The story is a very, very powerful example. Thank you for sharing that.
I'm intrigued with this being relaxed for creativity. What I find with the kids is they're so competitive, so that even to finish something, they're in a race to see who'll get first. And I think that adds stress. You can tell them it's not a race, but how do you get them out of that mindset to really focus on what they're doing and do a good job?
Great, great question. I'll answer your question with a story. I took a tour of the Entertainment Technology Center when I was still teaching at CMU. The Entertainment Technology Center is a graduate school. It was the dream of Randy Pausch, the former dean of Computer Science at CMU. He wrote about it in his book, "The Last Lecture."
To create this school, they only take in about 20 students every year—10 that graduate from the computer science department, 10 that graduate from the school of fine arts. They put them together to 20 students, and their first and only assignment first semester is to create a virtual project. That's all they have to do. So they're telling me this story, I'm taking my kids on a tour. I look on this wall and I see all of these plaques on the wall. Now, all over the place, they have games that have been developed from graduates from there. They have Pixar movies that have been made from graduates of ETC, all this amazing stuff.
But then I see these plaques on the wall and they're all penguins. And I'm like, "What the hell is this?" I get these plaques with penguins. So I asked the question, I'm like, "What are these plaques of penguin?" They're like, "Oh, this is the most prestigious reward given to our freshman class. It's the First Penguin Award." I'm like, "What's the First Penguin Award?" They're like, "It's the reward given to the team that fails the most spectacularly."
"So who had the boldest, most bodacious idea for their virtual world and failed the most spectacularly? They're the ones that get the award. And the reason why it's called the First Penguin, 'cause if you watch penguins, they all come up the edge of the cliff and they all stand there because they're worried about an orca in the water to eat them. One jumps in, and then everybody else jumps in afterwards. So somebody has to jump in first. Who is gonna be the first one to jump in? Who's willing to take the risk? And the genius of that is I am incentivizing them to be able to take that risk."
So to answer your question, how do you get them out of that? Incentivize not who gets done, but something else. Create your own First Penguin Award, create your award for something else, but create a different incentive for them and really make that the main incentive. Not just a like, like, I used to do my class, (indistinct), yeah, you, "Hey, great job, nice try." Actually make that the most important thing in your classroom, and then you'll get the different results.
You're welcome.
Right here. Oh, right here, I'm sorry. I wasn't skipping you, I promise. Mine is more of a story connecting to. So I have taught math for many years. And last year, I inherited the robotics team. I had done FIRST LEGO-
Did you inherit it or were you voluntold?
I inherited it.
Oh, okay, good. Good for you, yeah. I love robotics, but I started at a school who had an established program with a great coach and he wanted to move up to high school. And, you know, they asked me and I said, "Absolutely, I'll take it."
And one of the things I noticed last year, it was kind of like, you know, survival mode. One day ahead, yeah. Yeah. One of the things I noticed is the kids were working harder, not smarter. It just kind of like-
Harder not what? I'm sorry.
Harder, not smarter.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. There was no strategy. There was just kind of putting stuff together. You know, there was some strategy, but, you know, it was... They showed up. They didn't really know the game rules that well. They just knew the basics. And I really wanted to change-
(indistinct) strong and wrong.
Yeah, I really wanted to change that. You know, every time they had to sign the little iPad with the referee, they just kind of shrugged and were like, "Okay." And I said, "Well, they should know this better than the volunteers that are refereeing and, you know, running the show there."
And so this year, they all kind of dragged in. I had said, "We're gonna take a certification exam on the game," and they all moaned and groaned. And they did it. They had to study for it 'cause I did make it a grade. But they knew it very well. They were given a month or so to study, and it was specifically on full volume. And their first tournament came, and they knew it so well. They were able to turn around several scores. Because as I tell them, you know, these people that come to the tournament, "They're volunteers and you should know better than (indistinct) what the game rules are."
And you can go and we talked about how to, you know, diplomatically express your difference of opinion. And, you know, it's opened a lot. And having those first two teams... I have six. Having those first two teams come back to the classroom and share inspired the rest of the teams and my up-and-coming intermediate class to say, "Uh-oh, this is the way to go. We really need to know our stuff so that we can..."
And then the talk that I heard as I walked around, the different teams were, that work smarter, not harder, you know? They're like, "Okay, wait, if we build this this way, are you gonna be able to code it properly? Are we gonna be able to meet our original strategy of going this way first and that." So there was a lot of great talk there. So definitely making those connections and seeing how valuable it is. And now the intermediate class doesn't even care if they're gonna get a grade or not. They know they need to know their stuff.
Yes. That's terrific. Thank you for sharing that. And to that end, what I tell teachers all the time is if I can't give them a certification exam, just require them to do something like this before they move on to the next step, right? Give them the game rules, make them fill out four or five. You have them actually log their engineering notebook and then give that to you. But, yeah, you're a hundred percent right. Thank you for sharing that.
I just think there's one here, and then one behind. Thank you so much for your presentation. Thank you.
Just more of a general question. I'm not sure if you can answer, but one of the challenges that I'm facing at my school is that we have a lot of curriculum to deliver that's knowledge-based. And as much as we would like to focus less on the evaluation, there's an expectation that, as a teacher, you need to deliver the content. And I feel like giving a mark is aligned to what society demands you in order for you to get into a good college and you need like a mark in order for you to just get through life. And there are standardized testings and a lot of challenges that students go through. So I just wanted to know, like, what your thoughts are on how we can, as an educator in a classroom, be responsible for teaching the curriculum and also foster creativity.
And, yeah. That's a great question. So, teaching creativity and teaching your curriculum should not be, it should not be an antagonistic goal. Those goals should work together for you, okay? I talked about that, but this book, that's really the main crust of this book right here. So I think step one, to answer your question, I would encourage you to take a look at this book because this really shows you in great detail how teaching the standards and teaching creativity, again, are not antagonistic to one another. Most of the standards that exist... I'm not sure where you are, but most of the state standards that exist do not just offer for rote memorization. They ask your students to apply, they ask your students to do high-level thinking things.
So the standards that we're actually being required to teach as a teacher are not just rote memorization standards, but they do actually require us to think originally and apply creativity to some of these different things as you go through them. To your point about testing and evaluation and your expectation as a teacher, I would encourage you to really have some open and honest and frank conversations with your administration at your school.
"So when we say I have to cover this content, what does that actually mean?" Right? Because if I'm a doctor and someone comes to me and they're sick, and I give them medicine, and they're still sick, did I do my job? Like, you would probably stop going to that doctor if that doctor continued to give you medicine, but you never got better. So when I hear covering content, it's like, "I cover the content, I'm done." I'm not saying that's what you're saying, but have that conversation with your administration. Say like, "When we say covering content, what does that actually mean?" Because our job is not to teach. It's not. Our job is for our students to learn.
So if you're telling me, Mr. and Mrs. Administrator, that I'm just supposed to discover content, you're telling me my job is just to teach. Is that true? Or is my job for my students to learn? Because those are two different things. So first of all, before we leave this meeting, let's make sure we're on the same page. What is my job? My job is for my students to learn. Okay, great. Now, let's work backwards from that and figure out what's the best way to make that happen.
So all of us have been at faculty meetings, all of us have heard administrators say things like, "Okay, we have to cover all these things here, da, da, da," don't walk outta that meeting. "Wait a second, what is my job? Is my job to teach or is my job to learn?" And have that conversation and just go through it, and get on the same page with your administrator. Is that helpful?
Okay, thank you. Got one right behind you. Jason (indistinct), I really enjoyed your presentation. Thank you. Could you, off the top of your head, could you name like two or three of your top books? Oh, gosh. Two or three of my top books. Off the top of my head, no. So... What's the best way to answer this question for you? If it's not possible, that's okay. No, no. There's... I will tell you, if this speech really resonated with you, this book right here is a fantastic book. It's a series of articles that Mary Helen wrote.
This... When I hear people say that nothing new has really come up in education in terms of research for the last 20... You'll hear veteran teachers say this all the time, right, where it's like, "Ah, we're just reinventing the wheel." "I remember doing this before, blah, blah, blah, blah." This book really changed a lot of my perception on teaching and learning the role that emotions play in it, and how to really foster emotion and bring emotion to the forefront, and how emotions really affect the brain.
I'll be honest with you, you know, I thought, like, smart people were like, you know, Spock from "Star Trek." Cold, rational, logical. Like, Spock literally had no emotions. That was the character. And I thought that was what a really smart person was, and this book really just changed my entire view on all of that. So I would highly recommend that book for you. Yeah. Anything else? We'll start a Jason McKenna Book Club. PD+ feature, Nicole. There you go. (indistinct) dashboard. (Jason laughs)
Anything else?
All right, thank you very much. Appreciate you. Thank you.
(audience applauding)
(bright music)
We are going to talk about one of my favorite things to discuss and to learn and to just, you know, talk about. And that is creativity. Creativity is one of those things that all of us try to do in our classrooms. Especially now in the age of artificial intelligence, you hear all the time that AI will never replace creativity. So creativity is something that's always been emphasized in our classrooms, but I would say it's even more important now, again, in the age of artificial intelligence. What is creativity and how can we teach it?
I'm gonna start talking about creativity by telling a story, okay? The story comes from this book right here, "The Brain That Changes Itself." The story revolves around a woman by the name of Cheryl. Cheryl went in and had surgery, routine surgery. After the surgery, unfortunately, she got an infection. She was prescribed an antibiotic to help treat the infection, and she had an allergic reaction to that medicine. So she had an infection, they gave her an antibiotic, and she had a reaction to the antibiotic. What happened due to her reaction to the antibiotic, it actually damaged the function of her inner ear, okay? The vestibular function of her ears was damaged as a result of the medicine she was taking.
This resulted in her losing all of her balance, okay? When I say losing all of her balance, the term she was actually referred to, the medical term for this is gonna sound crazy, but it's true, is a wobbler, okay? 'Cause she literally could not stand. She talked about the fact that it was like... And not only could she not stand, but her vision was constantly blurry, okay? Constantly blurry. It just got worse and worse and worse. She obviously lost her job. She could no longer work on her job. She had to go on disability. But again, she really couldn't stand, she couldn't focus on anything. The doctors had no idea how to treat her. It got to the point where she was suicidal as a result of getting this condition, as you could probably imagine.
So, because her doctors weren't really giving her any type of treatment for this, she went and got an experimental treatment. This treatment involved her being given a hard hat. The hard hat had a level on it, just like a level that you would use if you were a carpenter, if you were doing any type of home maintenance, okay? The level was attached to these sensors, which then all connected to electrodes that were on her tongue. She would sit with this, and they were taped on her tongue. She would sit with this thing on her tongue with the hard hat, and she would sit down and she would move her head. Any time that it would become level, it would send electrical impulses to her tongue.
After the very first treatment, this is what happened to her. She was actually able to stand for the first time without staggering. Like she said, it was like she was touched by the hand of God. She got subsequent more treatments to it to the point that six months later, she was actually not only able to walk, but actually able to dance. She was able to go to a wedding reception, actually able to dance at the wedding reception as a result of this treatment. It was absolutely incredible.
Now, the reason why it was an experimental treatment was because at this time, okay, and this was the late '80s, this was a very controversial concept, neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity means your brain can actually change. That's what happened to Cheryl. She lost a function of her inner ear, but as a result of those electrodes going through her tongue, it actually rewired neural pathways within her brain and it actually changed her brain, hence the tale of the book, okay? It actually changed her brain, and she was able to cure being a wobbler.
Now, why is this so important, and how does this relate to creativity?
Thank you for listening to this story and for joining me in exploring the fascinating world of creativity and neuroplasticity. I hope this inspires you to think differently about the potential of the human brain and the power of creativity in our lives.
Thank you once again, and I look forward to our next discussion.
Because simply, what the research tells us is our ability to teach creativity, the biggest limiting factor in that is our perception of creativity as it relates to our children. When I was a teacher, I thought that certain children were creative and others were not. I thought creativity was something that you were born with, something that you could not actually teach. But now we know that that's not true. Any child can be creative. All of our children have the potential to be creative, and all of our teachers have the potential to be creative, and we know that due to neuroplasticity.
Our children have the ability to grow and develop, and their brains can also grow and develop. So even if a particular student might not be as creative as others, that creativity can be developed within that student. I taught with a lot of teachers, myself included, who thought that certain students were creative, while others just didn't have the "creativity gene." Well, there is no creativity gene. All of our students have the capability to be creative, and all of us have the capability to be creative, regardless of age.
You hear this all the time: "Oh, young children are a sponge when it comes to learning a language," right? Three, four, five, six, seven-year-olds can learn a language and pick it up so quickly and easily. Which they can, but so can you. Something like language learning, something like creativity, there's no age limit on that. There's no bucket of time that you're more predisposed to learn something or another. What neuroplasticity teaches us is that all of us have the ability to learn new things, learn different things, and develop new neural pathways within our brains to be more creative, learn different languages, learn math, whatever it is.
So what are the three most important factors when it comes to teaching creativity? I already talked about number one: you and your students' beliefs in their ability to be creative. That's the most important factor. All of your students have the ability to be creative. Number two, we're going to talk about this next: your understanding of what teaching creativity actually means. If I were to ask all of you in here for a definition of creativity, I'd probably get 35 different definitions. So how can you actually teach something if we're not all on the same page about what it is?
And then the third thing is your belief in your effectiveness in teaching creativity. Just like we're limited sometimes by our belief in our students' ability to be creative, we're also limited in our belief in our ability to teach creativity. We're going to talk about all three of those things here today.
So what is creativity again? How can we actually define creativity? Interestingly, research is fairly clear on this. Of course, there are some outliers here and there, but if you read the research on creativity, there's pretty much a consensus. When you look at it, it actually makes a lot of sense. Intuitively, this makes sense. The first component of creativity is originality, which I think we all know. When we think of creativity, we think of originality. That makes sense—students coming up with new, novel ideas, originality.
The second point is the key point: appropriateness. It is not original and it's not creative unless it's appropriate to the actual task. In order for something to be creative, it has to fulfill the basic requirements of the task. This is something I always struggled with when I taught. I would ask my students to do some type of creative writing assignment, and it would just be all over the place. They would talk about little aliens and then this and that.
Thank you for your attention today. I hope this discussion has inspired you to rethink how we perceive and teach creativity. Remember, creativity is not a gift for the few but a potential in all of us. Let's nurture it together.
There was no coherent structure to it. So the appropriateness, in terms of actually following a formula in terms of what a narrative is, they would never wanna follow that, right? Sometimes we think that creativity is just open-endedness, and it's not, okay? Creativity is originality and appropriateness.
Now, the second part about creativity, what's on the bottom here, is also very important. When we think of creativity, and sometimes the reason why we feel that not all students can be creative is when we think of creative genius, we think of Einstein, the theory of relativity, okay? Or we think of Heisenberg coming up with quantum mechanics. We think of Beethoven composing "Moonlight Sonata."
Music Cue: "Moonlight Sonata" by Beethoven
So these are oftentimes all the things that we think about in terms of creativity. And I can say, "Well, you know, there's no way little Johnny is ever gonna write 'Moonlight Sonata.' Therefore, he's not creative." "There's no way little Susie's able, is she ever gonna be able to write something like 'Hamlet.' Therefore, she's not gonna be creative."
But there are different levels to creativity, and this is important for us to recognize as teachers. So I love this model of creativity. The 4-C model of creativity. So all those things I was just talking about right there, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Einstein, Heisenberg, that's all here. That's what you would call Big C creativity. These are, you know, life-changing ideas, world-changing ideas. That's Big C creativity.
But what we wanna focus on in our classroom is down here: Mini C and Little C creativity. Just like Tim talked about this in his presentation this morning, we talked about, "Well, I teach my students Python. Why?" Because that's, quote-unquote, "real coding." Just like we don't start students in calculus, right, with creativity, we do not wanna start our students here. We don't wanna set this expectation for them, that creativity has to be composing a singular piece of music.
And this is the problem that you see in me all the time, right? You see students at the age of five years old playing the piano, playing an amazing section of piano. They're like, "Oh my god, this child is so creative." He is, or she is, but those aren't the examples that we should really be emphasized in our classroom. Instead, it should be down here for Mini C and Little C, and what we want to do, our job as teachers is to take students from this level to this level, and maybe some of 'em will get to this level. Then, of course, if they ever get to this level, fantastic. That would be awesome, right?
So what do those levels actually mean? So some examples of that. So Mini C creativity. Personal insights and interpretations, right? So if you have a student and you're talking to a student about, and this is something you see all the time, right? I taught... I went into a local school, Woodland Hills, for Read Cross America, and I read to the students, the kindergarten classroom. What happens when you read to kindergarten students, right? You take the book out and you start talking, and the story revolves around a dog. And you say, "How many of you have a dog?" and every hand goes up. Even if they don't. Even if they don't. I was just getting ready to say that, right? They saw a dog on TV or they have their fake dog or everything else like that. Well, guess what? All of those students are creating personal insights and interpretations. That's creativity. That is creativity. That's something that we should definitely be doing, okay?
Hey, this reminds me of that time, right? Think about this in a robotics context, right? I wrote code to have my robot do this. This is similar to this other challenge that we did. I can take those snippets of code that I did previously and apply to this challenge that we have right now. Guess what? That's creativity. That's the type of stuff that we should be fostering and encouraging in our classroom. Again, personal connection.
Thank you for your attention and dedication to fostering creativity in the classroom. Let's continue to inspire and nurture the creative potential in every student.
Like, we talked about connecting new information to previous learning. This year, we just did the game reveal, right, for the new VRC game. Hey, there are three elements to this new game similar to the game from 2015, similar to the game from 2013. Let's see... Let's go back on YouTube and watch the robots in the finals and see how they were able to throw an object or intake an object or something like that. That's connecting new information to previous learning. That's creativity.
So we talked about Mini C. Now, what is Little C creativity? Solving a problem. This is obviously something that we do for STEM all the time, right? Solving a problem. Different application for a tool. Different application for a tool, right? How many of you use text to speech? I know my man, Dan, does. I see you do all the time. Text to speech, right? Guess what? Text to speech was designed for people that don't have the ability to type for whatever reason. But you all, I'm assuming most of you can type just fine with your fingers, but you still use text to speech. What is that? That is a different application for a tool. That's all that is. You find it more convenient for you to do something this way. That's an example of creativity.
Think about in your STEM classrooms, how many times have your students come up with an idea for a robot that you never thought of before, right? Those are examples of creativity, okay? Unique observations. Unique observations. "Oh, I think if we approach the problem this way." Or what if we... So think about game strategy, right? For the new VRC game, "What if we had the robot do this?" "Oh, wow, that's pretty cool. Let's try that." That's a unique observation. And then obviously writing something original, right? Writing an original story, original piece of code, a new algorithm, a new application of an algorithm, a painting, etc. Those are all examples of Little C creativity.
So again, honestly, what we wanna focus on in the classroom is taking our students from here to here. And hopefully this all connects to what I was talking about before about neuroplasticity. This is something that all of our students can do, and this is something that all of our students can get better at, okay?
Now, I can go on my rant. I'm not going to, but I can go on my rant about how in that kindergarten classroom, that enthusiasm that we see, the willingness, right, to make personal connections and personal insights, by the time I'm in a sixth-grade classroom, most of that is gone. Kids aren't raising their hands like that when I tell them a story about my dog, okay? And then think about as a result of that... As a result, and again, I'm not gonna go on the rant as to why that is, but think about as a result of that, all of the examples of creativity we're missing out on. All of the examples of creativity we're missing out on.
Now, let me kind of address the elephant in the room here as it pertains to creativity. So, Ken Robinson, I think to this day, gave the most popular TED Talk ever. More than 70 million... Actually, I didn't look to see how many it is now. I made this slide about a year ago. More than 70 million views on YouTube. Gave a very impassioned speech about creativity and said that our schools are killing creativity. "Our schools," it says here, "stultifying and killing children's creativity." Okay?
Now, Daniel Willingham, who's one of my favorite cognitive scientists, says that this TED Talk by Robinson was very passionate, was very inspiring, but also wrong. So it was very passionate, very inspiring, but also wrong. Because basically what Robinson was saying during the course of this TED Talk is that schools are killing creativity because of their emphasis on factual knowledge. So by teaching your students facts, you are killing creativity. Now, I guess I could be wrong because this does have 70 million views.
Thank you for your attention and for being part of this discussion on creativity in education. I hope this has sparked some ideas and reflections on how we can nurture creativity in our classrooms.
But I don't feel that by telling teachers that everything that you're doing is wrong is a good way to get teachers to change their behavior. Right? So I am here to tell you that none of you, by teaching your students facts or doing direct instruction, are killing creativity in your students. Because if you go back to what we talked about before with the definition of creativity, creativity is originality and appropriateness. So that factual knowledge is needed to determine if something is appropriate or not, okay? So by teaching basic facts, you are not killing your students' creativity.
Now, of course, there's nuance. You can do that too much, okay? But what Robinson was essentially calling for in this TED Talk was the abolishment of all of that, okay? You cannot think creatively in a vacuum. You cannot think creatively about nothing, right? So there's definitely a balance there between teaching your students basic factual knowledge, the, quote-unquote, "fundamentals," and also teaching creativity. And that's what the next part of our discussion is going to focus on, and that is the relationship between creativity and learning.
But before that, just to kind of summarize everything till up to this point, number one, you're not killing creativity. Number two, creativity, just like thinking in general, cannot occur in a vacuum. Creativity and learning work together, and there are different types of creativity. So just keep that in mind as we go through and we talk about this, right?
So now the relationship between creativity and learning. It's very important for us to think about this, and we gotta think about both of these things within this context of creativity and learning. Let me start by asking you all a question. When do you think you are the most creative? Just shout it out. I don't have one of those fancy things like Louis had where you can give me your answer up on the screen. When do you think you're the most creative?
Yes. When I have time to think. You have time to think, that's good. After my Mountain Dews. After your Mountain Dews, yeah. Give me a glass of wine. I'm pretty creative. I get it, yeah. Yes, sir. Hiking. Hiking, excellent. When I'm inspired by something. When you're inspired by something.
Okay, I'm gonna tell you something. You might think it's a little bit controversial. Ready? I think that all of you are the most creative when you are sleeping. Why? 'Cause we all have some crazy dreams. We get some wild, far out dreams, man. Wild and crazy dreams, okay? But hiking, when you're inspired, all the things that you just said have the same characteristic of when you're sleeping. When you are sleeping, you are the most relaxed. Hence, why you're sleeping. When you're hiking, you're relaxed, you're out in nature doing those things. "I finally had my Mountain Dew for the day. Ah, I'm relaxed." Okay? "I'm relaxed."
So I want you to think about two different perspectives on your thinking, okay? And both of them are necessary. So I don't believe in, and I don't wanna talk poorly about Ken Robinson because he is deceased. But I don't want you to think... So this is not an either-or thing. Both are important, okay? But high-focus thinking and low-focus thinking. All of us are familiar with high-focus thinking. When I taught, I demanded my students were always doing high-focus thinking. "Hey, pay attention. Focus. Don't daydream. Hey, I'm right here. Let's go." Right? High-focus thinking. And sometimes you need that. You definitely need that sometimes, no doubt about it.
Low-focus thinking, daydreaming, about ready to nod off asleep, right? But here's the paradox of this, which we're all familiar with if we keep thinking about dreams. How often do we remember our dreams? Rarely, right? Sometimes you wake up like, "Man, I had some crazy dreams last night." "What were they?" "I don't know." Crazy. I just know they were out there. But I woke up like, "Whoo!" like, "Wow." You know what I mean?
Sometimes you do remember your dreams, sometimes you don't. That's because you're at low focus. So creativity happens when you're at low focus because of low focus, but oftentimes we can't remember those things. That's the paradox of our brains. Nobody knows why. Nobody has any idea why that is. Okay? But think about that. Think about that in relation to what we're asking our students to do from a learning perspective. How often do we give students those opportunities to, as someone said, just to think, just to relax in a low-focus environment, okay? Essentially the daydream. And again, I'm guilty of this, right? We joke during opening, I have to do the letter of apology in my second book. But, I mean, if my students were daydreaming, I'll probably gonna be upset at them. But the research is fairly clear. That's what actually fosters creativity. Okay?
So now what is the actual process then? So, think about this in terms of an actual process of creativity. Now, let me be very clear, you can't grit yourself to be creative, right? You can't sit like, "Okay, I'm gonna be creative. Here we go," right? Oftentimes, you just get hit with creative inspiration, right? But think about this for a second. So I got a metaphor up here, or an analogy. Either one works. So, obviously, Shakespeare's famous sonnet,
"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"
"Thou art more lovely and more temperate."
And the rest of the sonnet goes from there, right? So Shakespeare was obviously writing this about a woman and thought that this woman was beautiful. So how am I gonna describe the fact that this woman is beautiful? "Oh, I'll compare her to a summer's day." Now, that's a unique observation going back to our different types of creativity, right? But what actually causes that connection? What actually caused him to compare the beauty of this woman to a summer's day? Okay? Well, what we know from research is we have this thought, and that what allows us to really connect those two things together is emotion. Is emotion.
So what do I mean by emotion? Your emotions and your children's emotions, your students' emotions, are the great summarizers for your learning. Now, what do I mean by that? What do I mean by emotions are the great summarizers for your learning? I want you all to take 30 seconds and I want you to think about a great day that you've had recently. So it could have happened yesterday, could have happened a week ago, could have happened a month ago. But I want you to think about a great day that you recently, and we're gonna do that for 30 seconds, okay? Everybody ready? All right, go.
Okay. All of us thought about a great day recently? Okay. Hopefully that, you know, filled you with some good endorphins as you were thinking about. That's some good dopamine. Now, if you had a perfect memory, which again, I'll be the first to admit, that's what I thought my job of as a teacher was, to try to get my kids to remember everything, right? If you had a perfect memory, how long would it take for you to think about that day? Of the same amount that it happened? Exactly, right, 24 hours. 'Cause you would literally remember everything. So the amount... Let's just say you're awake for 16 hours on that perfect day. To remember that perfect day, it would take you 16 hours to do that. Right? So there's no such thing as a perfect memory. And think about how terrible that would be. Think about how terrible that would be if you were burdened with a perfect memory. So we don't wanna have a perfect memory.
So what our emotions do, what our emotions do is they summarize experiences for us to the essence, and that's what you thought about, was the essence of the experience, and that's what allows us to think about it, and that's what can lead to creative insight. So, "The paradox of a perfect memory haunts every attempt we can make to imagine cognition arising solely from information." So cognition cannot arise solely from information.
This is the difference between knowing and being. If a perfect memory was just being, again, it would take me 24 hours to remember something. To know something, you have to be removed from it. You have to be removed from it, and you could then recollect it. That removal is actually done by your emotions, okay? It's actually done by your emotions. And that's what actually allows us to then be creative.
So a great example of this in action, if I'm getting a little bit too philosophical for you, is think of acting. Actors do a great job of this. I love the movie "Training Day" with Denzel Washington. I've probably seen this movie 15 times. And if you've seen the movie "Training Day" with Denzel Washington, at the very end of this movie when he is right about to get killed at the end of the movie... Sorry, spoiler alert. When he is about to get killed at the end of the movie, he gives this amazing go off, he gives this amazing speech. And the very last line, he says, "King Kong ain't got nothing on me!" It doesn't say nothing. He says, "King Kong ain't got nothing on me!" And that scene essentially won him an Oscar for "Training Day."
Well, guess what? The entire thing was improvised. So Antoine Fuqua, who directed the movie, when he got done saying that line, he looked at him and he said, "I hope you got it 'cause it ain't happening again," and he walked off the set said. He said, "I hope you got it. It ain't happening again." That's the paradox of low focus we just talked about. He didn't know where it came from, but just like you can't remember a dream, he knew it wasn't gonna happen again.
So in terms of emotion, how did that all come about? When you're a great actor, you become that character. You become that character. Your emotions go into that character, okay? That's what it is. So now you're engulfed by that character. And when he became that character, he was able to deliver that scene, but it couldn't happen again. It cannot happen again. Okay? So when we talk about emotion and the role of emotion in learning, emotion is the great summarizer of learning.
Okay? Now we're gonna talk about what this actually means for our classrooms here in a moment. But real quick, two great resources for everything I'm just talking about right now. So the role of motions and learning, this is a fantastic book. "Emotions, Learning, and the Brain." Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, who's actually a former teacher. She was a former high school... I think she was an algebra teacher. I think she's a math teacher. She went back and she got her PhD and now does a lot of educational research on this right here, emotions, learning. This is an amazing, amazing book. And then high versus low-focused thinking, "The Tides of Mind." David Gelernter, who's a professor of computer science at Yale University, he goes into great detail in that book. So if I've piqued your interest in these topics right here, these are two fantastic books that you can look at.
But what does this all mean in the classroom? "Okay, Jason, you've told me that, you know, creativity can occur in a vacuum. You've told me that emotion plays a great role in creative thinking. You've also told me that we should be in a low focus environment in order to really do creativity well. So what does that all mean?"
So speaking of analogies, I love to compare teaching in classrooms to growing flowers. Why do I love to compare it to growing flowers? Because some of your students are like dandelions. No matter what they'll do, they'll grow. Dandelions come to my driveway, like, through concrete. I pour stuff on them, they'll come back. And that's some of your students. Some of your students, no matter what you do, they will be successful, right? Some students are like orchids or roses. They require so much care. They require so much help. They require so much assistance in order to grow and to be beautiful.
And oftentimes, again, this is why I feel like teaching is the most challenging job. You've got orchids and roses and dandelions all in the same classroom, right? The other reason why I like this analogy so much is that to grow flowers, I need a lot of different things, right? I need dirt and seeds. I need to be able to prepare the ground, right? I need sunlight. I need sunlight. I need stuff like water. So I need all these different things in order to be able to teach creativity well. I need all these different things to be able to teach well. So it's not just one thing, it's everything. And all of these things have to work together.
So, yes, I need to teach things like factual knowledge. Yes, I need to make sure I breed student self-efficacy. I need to make sure that I tell them that they can be creative. So that's like the dirt, right, and the seeds. That's what actually gets me started in the sunlight. These are the things that actually get me started right here. And now I'm just using an example of (indistinct) testing prototype. I'm using a STEM example here, right? So we're making robots. So what do I do now? Well, now I have to give it a little bit of water, I have to prepare, and then I ask questions of my students. Maybe I ask them to reinterpret the rules. I challenge assumptions, right? And I do all of this in an environment that's not necessarily high focus, but is also low focus. I give them time, I give them space. Right? And by doing all of that, now I have an opportunity, maybe I get Mini or Little C creativity as a result of that. But it's this entire process here. It's this entire process here. It's not just one thing. Okay?
So maybe now, again, I have my base here, my student self-efficacy, knowledge, okay? One thing I love about robotics competitions and also doing this in your classroom is looking at the robots. Right? This is a great example of creativity right here. I saw what little John did with his robot. I wanna apply that to my own robot. That's a unique observation. That's a reinterpretation of something. Those are all examples of Mini C creativity that we talked about before. And I can do this in a very low focus way. Now, the easiest way to accomplish that, when I keep saying a low focus way, I'm not saying necessarily kids have to be daydreaming all the time, but it's done in a relaxed way. How is it done in a relaxed way? Take away the pressure of evaluation and assessments. Take it away. Because as soon as you introduce evaluation and assessment, now you're gonna introduce anxiety. And when you introduce anxiety based upon everything I've talked about for the last 40 minutes, creativity goes out the window. Creativity goes out the window.
Now, I'm not saying don't evaluate. I'm not saying don't evaluate, but do you have to evaluate? I get this question all the time. So Dr. (indistinct) is sitting over there. I did an in-service with his teachers over at Wood Hills. The number one question I got from his teachers, and this is the number one question I get from teachers all the time. And I had the same question when I started teaching robotics and stuff because this is how we're all trained. They're like, "Oh, I'm not sure in a 45-minute class my kids are gonna be able to get the robot built and get through all the way through the maze. What do I do?" And I'm like, "Who cares if they don't get through the maze?" I'm like, "Who cares?" She's like, "Well, isn't that the lesson?" I'm like, "No, it's not the lesson." "But your STEM lab here that you're talking about has the kids have the robot go through the maze." "Yes, that's the organizer, but that's not the goal." They're like, "What's the goal?" "Creativity, collaboration," right? Did they reflect upon why they failed in their engineering notebook? Maybe they had a unique observation to that. Maybe they had a personal connection to that. Did they connect their current learning to something done previously?
Thank you for your attention and for being part of this discussion on creativity in education. I hope you found it insightful and inspiring. Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions or need further clarification on any points discussed today.
All of those things could be the goal. If they get their robot to the end of the maze, great. But if they don't, that's okay because that's not the point. So we talk about taking the pressure off testing evaluation. It's not about going from A to B, it's about the process and emphasizing the process. And we talk about the relationship between creativity and learning. That's what we're actually talking about there, okay?
And then again, more things here. So, collaborative decision-making, logging data in an engineering notebook, analyzing the results using the data, these are all wonderful things that you can do to really foster creativity within your classroom. Now, you'll notice throughout this entire example, I've used an example of STEM, and that's because I really believe that the best organizer for creativity is the engineering design process. A hundred percent. Believe this.
Because if you go back to our definition of creativity, it's originality and appropriateness. So what are all these IQ kids doing right now? Anybody know what they're doing literally right now? What's that? Stressing. They are stressing, yeah. They're doing inspection. The robots have to pass inspection. They can't be too big, have to be all VEX parts, right? I can't 3D print a part and stick it on my VEX IQ robot. Okay? So the robot has to pass inspection. That's the appropriateness. Okay? If I'm an engineer and I'm building a bridge, guess what? It better stay up, right? That's the appropriateness. So the engineering design process is a fantastic organizer for creativity.
And in our STEM class, and this is why, again, I fell in love with robotics, okay? You can have your students apply originality. They can come up with different robot designs, they can come up with different code, they can come up with different game strategies. They can do all of these different things for originality. And they can look at here, if you do a class, and we've had workshops on classroom competitions. When they lose, they can go talk to what the other team did and they can make adjustments on that, and then they can go through this entire process again. Okay? There is no done. That's the beautiful part about this. They can always make their robot better. They can always tinker with their code. They can always come up with a new game strategy.
So to go back to the example I did, again, it's not about getting your robot through the maze, it's the actual process. And again, this is a wonderful organizer for STEM learning, especially, and this is something that we often skip through, right here at the beginning. This section right here. I talk to mentors and coaches all the time and they say, "My students don't understand the game rules. They wanna immediately start going to here." They may wanna start building the robot or building their code and testing their code. No, spend some time here.
Because if you go back and you think about those examples of creativity that we talked about, there's a lot of examples there. We actually have an article about this in our Insights in PD+. Amy wrote a fantastic article about what you can do when you define the problem. Just a sheet like this here, and this is in the article here. These are all questions that you can have your students explore when you give them an open-ended challenge, right? What do I already know about this challenge? What am I being asked to do? Is there one way of solving it or are there many ways? How many possible solutions? What's missing from this challenge? How could I find out more? What kind of information would I need to solve this challenge? Where can I find the information? Who can help me solve this? These are all questions that your students can explore here. Right here. And these are all wonderful examples of Mini and Little C creativity that we talked about before.
Thank you for your attention and for fostering creativity in your classrooms. Keep encouraging your students to explore and innovate.
Teaching for Creativity in the Common Core Classroom
Don't get siloed with the whole Common Core thing. What he was trying to say here in this book is this is how you can do creativity and learning at the same time. They don't have to be against one another, right? Creativity is not something you have to do in addition to your regular teaching. Creativity is not something that you have to do after the state assessment test. Creativity is something that can be integrated as you are actually teaching to your standards. Okay? That's what this book is about here. All right? And again, these are all things that we've talked about. These are all things that we've talked about. And especially I spent a lot of time talking about this second bullet right here. Okay?
So this is how I would like to end things today. I talked about that if you were at my welcome at the very beginning of the conference, you heard me say that I am not afraid of constraints. I wanna run to them, not away from them. Okay? And if you were there for my presentation, I talked about inclusion in STEM classrooms. And even here in my talk about creativity, a common theme between both of those sessions was all of our students have the ability to learn. All of our students have the ability to be creative, and it's our job to make sure that all of those students can have those possibilities.
So what I wanna leave you with here today and how I wanna end the presentation portion of our educational conference this year is just this: limitless possibilities. Limitless possibilities, okay? "It's important for children to experience options in terms of who they can be or what they can be, rather than accepting views of their abilities based upon what they look like or one piece of their identity." Let's not allow our students to limit their possibilities based upon where they come from, based upon what they look like, based upon one or two aspects of their identity. Let's open up our students to the fact that they can do anything or be anything that they wanna be.
And let's also recognize that that great teacher down the hall from you, that great teacher that you saw on television, that great teacher that just won an award, you can also be that great teacher. All of us have that potential inside us. Don't compare yourself to that great teacher. Compare yourself to the teacher you were yesterday. Are you better than the teacher that you were yesterday? It's all that matters. It's all that matters. Don't compare yourself to this person down the hall. Don't compare yourself to this person you saw on TV. Are you a better teacher than you were yesterday? I hope you all became better teachers as a result of the VEX Robotics Educators Conference. That's my mission, that's what I work very hard for every single day, and that's what I'll continue to work for.
Thank you very much.
(audience applauding)
Appreciate you. I guess we have time for questions, Nicole? There's a question back there, Nicole.
Thank you very much for your presentation. Thank you. I had a great mentor when I was a high school teacher, just like you, amazing professor. And he took this and he's reading his PhD thesis, and in his class, he would attach the emotion in a way where it was a storytelling. Yeah. He would make, you know, let's say movie. Yeah. And prepare all his lessons, projects, according to this movie, just like you mentioned. And it grasp. Like, the kids grasp the concepts really well. To give you a quick example, let's say you make it out of "Fast and the Furious." Last project is to create a ramp, or a car to go over a ramp. They take this and just fly. Yeah. Thank you very much. That's a great... So the example... You're a hundred percent right. The example I give all the time is like Beowulf. 10,000 line poem, which was memorized for hundreds of years. Like, how? Because it was a story. The story is a very, very powerful example. Thank you for sharing that.
I'm intrigued with this being relaxed for creativity. What I find with the kids is they're so competitive, so that even to finish something, they're in a race to see who'll get first. And I think that adds stress. You can tell them it's not a race, but how do you get them out of that mindset to really focus on what they're doing and do a good job?
Great, great question. I'll answer your question with a story. I took a tour of the Entertainment Technology Center when I was still teaching at CMU. The Entertainment Technology Center is a graduate school. It was the dream of Randy Pausch, the former dean of Computer Science at CMU. He wrote about it in his book, "The Last Lecture."
To create this school, they only take in about 20 students every year—10 that graduate from the computer science department, 10 that graduate from the school of fine arts. They put them together to 20 students, and their first and only assignment first semester is to create a virtual project. That's all they have to do. So they're telling me this story, I'm taking my kids on a tour. I look on this wall and I see all of these plaques on the wall. Now, all over the place, they have games that have been developed from graduates from there. They have Pixar movies that have been made from graduates of ETC, all this amazing stuff.
But then I see these plaques on the wall and they're all penguins. And I'm like, "What the hell is this?" I get these plaques with penguins. So I asked the question, I'm like, "What are these plaques of penguin?" They're like, "Oh, this is the most prestigious reward given to our freshman class. It's the First Penguin Award." I'm like, "What's the First Penguin Award?" They're like, "It's the reward given to the team that fails the most spectacularly."
"So who had the boldest, most bodacious idea for their virtual world and failed the most spectacularly? They're the ones that get the award. And the reason why it's called the First Penguin, 'cause if you watch penguins, they all come up the edge of the cliff and they all stand there because they're worried about an orca in the water to eat them. One jumps in, and then everybody else jumps in afterwards. So somebody has to jump in first. Who is gonna be the first one to jump in? Who's willing to take the risk? And the genius of that is I am incentivizing them to be able to take that risk."
So to answer your question, how do you get them out of that? Incentivize not who gets done, but something else. Create your own First Penguin Award, create your award for something else, but create a different incentive for them and really make that the main incentive. Not just a like, like, I used to do my class, (indistinct), yeah, you, "Hey, great job, nice try." Actually make that the most important thing in your classroom, and then you'll get the different results.
You're welcome.
Right here. Oh, right here, I'm sorry. I wasn't skipping you, I promise. Mine is more of a story connecting to. So I have taught math for many years. And last year, I inherited the robotics team. I had done FIRST LEGO-
Did you inherit it or were you voluntold?
I inherited it.
Oh, okay, good. Good for you, yeah. I love robotics, but I started at a school who had an established program with a great coach and he wanted to move up to high school. And, you know, they asked me and I said, "Absolutely, I'll take it."
And one of the things I noticed last year, it was kind of like, you know, survival mode. One day ahead, yeah. Yeah. One of the things I noticed is the kids were working harder, not smarter. It just kind of like-
Harder not what? I'm sorry.
Harder, not smarter.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. There was no strategy. There was just kind of putting stuff together. You know, there was some strategy, but, you know, it was... They showed up. They didn't really know the game rules that well. They just knew the basics. And I really wanted to change-
(indistinct) strong and wrong.
Yeah, I really wanted to change that. You know, every time they had to sign the little iPad with the referee, they just kind of shrugged and were like, "Okay." And I said, "Well, they should know this better than the volunteers that are refereeing and, you know, running the show there."
And so this year, they all kind of dragged in. I had said, "We're gonna take a certification exam on the game," and they all moaned and groaned. And they did it. They had to study for it 'cause I did make it a grade. But they knew it very well. They were given a month or so to study, and it was specifically on full volume. And their first tournament came, and they knew it so well. They were able to turn around several scores. Because as I tell them, you know, these people that come to the tournament, "They're volunteers and you should know better than (indistinct) what the game rules are."
And you can go and we talked about how to, you know, diplomatically express your difference of opinion. And, you know, it's opened a lot. And having those first two teams... I have six. Having those first two teams come back to the classroom and share inspired the rest of the teams and my up-and-coming intermediate class to say, "Uh-oh, this is the way to go. We really need to know our stuff so that we can..."
And then the talk that I heard as I walked around, the different teams were, that work smarter, not harder, you know? They're like, "Okay, wait, if we build this this way, are you gonna be able to code it properly? Are we gonna be able to meet our original strategy of going this way first and that." So there was a lot of great talk there. So definitely making those connections and seeing how valuable it is. And now the intermediate class doesn't even care if they're gonna get a grade or not. They know they need to know their stuff.
Yes. That's terrific. Thank you for sharing that. And to that end, what I tell teachers all the time is if I can't give them a certification exam, just require them to do something like this before they move on to the next step, right? Give them the game rules, make them fill out four or five. You have them actually log their engineering notebook and then give that to you. But, yeah, you're a hundred percent right. Thank you for sharing that.
I just think there's one here, and then one behind. Thank you so much for your presentation. Thank you.
Just more of a general question. I'm not sure if you can answer, but one of the challenges that I'm facing at my school is that we have a lot of curriculum to deliver that's knowledge-based. And as much as we would like to focus less on the evaluation, there's an expectation that, as a teacher, you need to deliver the content. And I feel like giving a mark is aligned to what society demands you in order for you to get into a good college and you need like a mark in order for you to just get through life. And there are standardized testings and a lot of challenges that students go through. So I just wanted to know, like, what your thoughts are on how we can, as an educator in a classroom, be responsible for teaching the curriculum and also foster creativity.
And, yeah. That's a great question. So, teaching creativity and teaching your curriculum should not be, it should not be an antagonistic goal. Those goals should work together for you, okay? I talked about that, but this book, that's really the main crust of this book right here. So I think step one, to answer your question, I would encourage you to take a look at this book because this really shows you in great detail how teaching the standards and teaching creativity, again, are not antagonistic to one another. Most of the standards that exist... I'm not sure where you are, but most of the state standards that exist do not just offer for rote memorization. They ask your students to apply, they ask your students to do high-level thinking things.
So the standards that we're actually being required to teach as a teacher are not just rote memorization standards, but they do actually require us to think originally and apply creativity to some of these different things as you go through them. To your point about testing and evaluation and your expectation as a teacher, I would encourage you to really have some open and honest and frank conversations with your administration at your school.
"So when we say I have to cover this content, what does that actually mean?" Right? Because if I'm a doctor and someone comes to me and they're sick, and I give them medicine, and they're still sick, did I do my job? Like, you would probably stop going to that doctor if that doctor continued to give you medicine, but you never got better. So when I hear covering content, it's like, "I cover the content, I'm done." I'm not saying that's what you're saying, but have that conversation with your administration. Say like, "When we say covering content, what does that actually mean?" Because our job is not to teach. It's not. Our job is for our students to learn.
So if you're telling me, Mr. and Mrs. Administrator, that I'm just supposed to discover content, you're telling me my job is just to teach. Is that true? Or is my job for my students to learn? Because those are two different things. So first of all, before we leave this meeting, let's make sure we're on the same page. What is my job? My job is for my students to learn. Okay, great. Now, let's work backwards from that and figure out what's the best way to make that happen.
So all of us have been at faculty meetings, all of us have heard administrators say things like, "Okay, we have to cover all these things here, da, da, da," don't walk outta that meeting. "Wait a second, what is my job? Is my job to teach or is my job to learn?" And have that conversation and just go through it, and get on the same page with your administrator. Is that helpful?
Okay, thank you. Got one right behind you. Jason (indistinct), I really enjoyed your presentation. Thank you. Could you, off the top of your head, could you name like two or three of your top books? Oh, gosh. Two or three of my top books. Off the top of my head, no. So... What's the best way to answer this question for you? If it's not possible, that's okay. No, no. There's... I will tell you, if this speech really resonated with you, this book right here is a fantastic book. It's a series of articles that Mary Helen wrote.
This... When I hear people say that nothing new has really come up in education in terms of research for the last 20... You'll hear veteran teachers say this all the time, right, where it's like, "Ah, we're just reinventing the wheel." "I remember doing this before, blah, blah, blah, blah." This book really changed a lot of my perception on teaching and learning the role that emotions play in it, and how to really foster emotion and bring emotion to the forefront, and how emotions really affect the brain.
I'll be honest with you, you know, I thought, like, smart people were like, you know, Spock from "Star Trek." Cold, rational, logical. Like, Spock literally had no emotions. That was the character. And I thought that was what a really smart person was, and this book really just changed my entire view on all of that. So I would highly recommend that book for you. Yeah. Anything else? We'll start a Jason McKenna Book Club. PD+ feature, Nicole. There you go. (indistinct) dashboard. (Jason laughs)
Anything else?
All right, thank you very much. Appreciate you. Thank you.
(audience applauding)
(bright music)
Share
Like this video? Share it with others!
Additional Resources
Like this video? Discuss it in the VEX Professional Learning Community.
Learn more about the VEX Robotics Educators Conference at conference.vex.com.