Triggering More Ideas More Often

The HWDSB West Cluster Integrative Thinking Initiative has had its second day of training. Educators were introduced to Causal Modeling and the Ladder of Inference as tools for helping students understand the complexity of problems as well as for making thinking explicit. As I listened to discussions, it became apparent that my colleagues were really beginning to grasp the power of Integrative Thinking and visualizing how the tools might be applied in different subjects. More than one person mentioned that these tools are not just classroom thinking tools, but learning about them has been personally transformative.

My grade 7 students launched into Integrative Thinking two weeks ago. This time we began with Creativity and the application of  ideas I had been introduced to during session Spurring Creativity: The 3Cs of Creativity conducted by Josie Fung and Darren Karn at. the Rotman 1 day Integrative Thinking Essentials for Educators on February 1, 

At that session, Josie posed some excellent questions: 

1. How do we develop creative confidence in learners? 

2. What are the connections, constraints and kinds of collaboration necessary for creativity to emerge so that more and better ideas for problem solving emerge more often?

We engaged in a number of activities that are designed to break our go to patterns of thinking, to understand how ideas are triggered and to help us defer judgement so that ideas are not shut down before they are fully explored to see where merit lies. These activities teach learners the process of creativity so that when confronted with problems, they are armed with techniques for generating many solutions. 

The concept my grade 7 students worked on over the past week centered on knowing how to leverage the ideas of others to trigger more ideas individually so that the group has many more ideas to work with.  I have conducted web brainstorming activities in the past. Students have worked in groups to generate ideas. What I was not aware of, however, is that a particular group dynamic needs to be in place for the brainstorming to pull as many ideas as possible from members. Students need to be explicitly taught how to brainstorm so that many, many ideas are generated. When addressing the 6 Cs, I now realize when teaching the skills of collaboration, learners must become aware of and skilled in the process of idea generation. 

http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/document/reports/FullanReport_EN_07.pdf

Uses for a Paperclip

One activity directly from Josie and Mark's session was to list uses for a paperclip. The first time was done silently and individually with pencil and paper. Individually, students came up with between 4 and 10 uses. We did the activity again, but this time out loud in a group where possibilities were listed on chart paper. This time in the same time span 40 possibilities were listed.

During the debrief 3 key observations were made.

1. I saw that any idea was acceptable.

2. I had more ideas.

3. When someone said something, that gave me a new idea.

We conducted a number of similar activities over the week so that by the end, students could explain that to get many ideas, ideas must be said out loud and that you must use your group members to get more ideas.