Each year I am invited to spend a Saturday with the principalship class at William and Mary. We talk about the big picture issues related to technology in schools and spend time figuring our the role of the administrator in encouraging teachers to use technology as part of their instruction. The agenda is online if you’re interested.
I change the workshop every year based on new ideas. When I first started doing it some 7 or 8 years ago, we talked a lot about technology itself and I spent a good part of the day demonstrating emerging technologies like student response systems and Alphasmarts. Almost no one in those days knew anything about Inspiration and wikis were really just for geeks. But now, those technologies are well known and most schools are deploying all of them to some extent. So we turn our attention to the larger discussions about what kinds of skills students will need to move forward in our ever-changing world.
Many of you have heard my riff on all the 21st century skills…I like to pile them all together and call them leadership skills. And I also like to suggest that Benjamin Franklin had those kinds of skills within his own century (18th century skills, as it were). But those skills seem more pressing now, maybe because in Ben’s day they were reserved for only a few and now it seems like everyone needs them.
As part of the workshop, we do a dotting activity. After all, it’s not real professional development if you don’t put a dot on something. I use Tony Wagner’s Seven Survival Skills and give the participants four dots (green, red, yellow, and blue). They are told to evaluate their own classroom or school in light of how well they are integrating these skills. The green dot is the one they are doing the best. The red dot, the worst. The yellow dot is the one they would work on after solving the red dot. That leaves blue: I used to give it to them as a gift. But now, I ask them to put it on the skill that they aren’t sure can be taught. And that’s usually where the good discussion comes in.
The dots often play out very similarly: most educators feel as though they are doing a good job with communication skills as well as helping students access and analyze information. They are not doing so well with initiative and entrepreneurship. And, the one that gets the blue dots, the one we can’t teach? Creativity and imagination. We had a lively discussion this past Saturday about what teachers can do to pique student creativity or foster their imagination.
And as they talked, I thought about the video clip I had edited earlier that morning. It features John Rinn who runs The Rinn Lab for Research on Large Interngenic Non-coding RNAs, part of Harvard Medical School. He’s a young guy with lots of enthusiasm for his work who likes to snowboard on the side. He is definitely creative and has some good advice for teachers who are trying to foster such in their students. The clip was a perfect ending to our conversation and the fact that I had just uploaded it at 5 AM that morning made me giddy with serendipity.
I haven’t put the clip on YouTube yet but you can view it, as well as other related clips, at the STEM Education Alliance website.