The idea is that Papershow substitutes for a whiteboard or flip chart, making it easy to share results after the event. This functionality will be familiar to those who have electronic whiteboards, but this new technology is much cheaper and can be used wherever you can take a laptop.

I found Papershow easy to set up and use, and the pen and paper were as responsive as any graphics tablet. If you want freeform, handwritten notes and graphics that you can share electronically it’s a good choice. Want something neater, then why not just type into a text editor such as Word? Want something you can stick on the wall, stick to flip charts.

Below I cite an article drawn from a relatively old book giving ten key criteria of creative people. I don’t know much about this area. I thought it might be interesting to talk about. Some of the statements in the article seem insightful, others make me cringe (e.g., the reference to the completely discredited “g” IQ), and I’m not sure exactly what counts as the “population” for this analysis (and the reference to “g” makes me worried about how this population might have been defined).

This links to another research study that I do find convincing–that it is useful to place most creative people into one of two categories. Galenson argues

that creative people fall into two camps: the conceptual artists who come up with new visions for their fields and blossom early, and the experimental artists who spend long careers polishing approaches to their work and often achieve their most important success later in life.

Of course:

Galenson recognizes the limits of dogmatic duality. In his later papers, as well as in the book he published this year, he has refined his theory to make it less binary. He now talks of a continuum – with extreme conceptual innovators at one end, extreme experimental innovators at the other, and moderates in the middle. He allows that people can change camps over the course of a career, but he thinks it’s difficult. And he acknowledges that he’s charting tendencies, not fixed laws.

[Interestingly, Galenson is an economist, believe it or not, and a version of his newest book is available on the website of the National Bureau of Economic Research.]

Clearly Dewey was in the second category. I’d like to think I’m in the second category–although I’m not the one to say how creative I am.

Another interesting set of categories is between those who have a single idea and keep spinning it out, and those who keep moving along into new arenas as they learn more. There is a lot of evidence that people in the first category (e.g., Bandura and self-efficacy theory) are the ones who end up being famous. Those in the second category generally don’t become famous because they are talking to too many different audiences and can’t be easily pigeonholed. E.g., I’ll never be famous. But isn’t it boring at some point to keep pounding the “same” post into the “same” hole, no matter how subtle the specifications might get. (There was a fascinating chapter about this, among other issues, in an old AERA anthology whose name I now forget).

The ten characteristics of creativity listed, minus the additional explanatory paragraphs, from Psychology Today, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, are:

1. Creative people have a great deal of physical energy, but they’re also often quiet and at rest. They work long hours, with great concentration, while projecting an aura of freshness and enthusiasm. This suggests a superior physical endowment, a genetic advantage. Yet it is surprising how often individuals who in their seventies and eighties exude energy and health remember childhoods plagued by illness. It seems that their energy is internally generated, due more to their focused minds than to the superiority of their genes.2. Creative people tend to be smart yet naive at the same time. How smart they actually are is open to question. It is probably true that what psychologists call the “g factor,” meaning a core of general intelligence, is high among people who make important creative contributions.

3. Creative people combine playfulness and discipline, or responsibility and irresponsibility. There is no question that a playfully light attitude is typical of creative individuals. But this playfulness doesn’t go very far without its antithesis, a quality of doggedness, endurance, perseverance.

4. Creative people alternate between imagination and fantasy, and a rooted sense of reality. Great art and great science involve a leap of imagination into a world that is different from the present. The rest of society often views these new ideas. as fantasies without relevance to current reality. And they are right. But the whole point of art and science is to go beyond what we now consider real and create a new reality At the same time, this “escape” is not into a never-never land. What makes a novel idea creative is that once we see it, sooner or later we recognize that, strange as it is, it is true.

5. Creative people trend to be both extroverted and introverted. We’re usually one or the other, either preferring to be in the thick of crowds or sitting on the sidelines and observing the passing show. In fact, in current psychological research, extroversion and introversion are considered the most stable personality traits that differentiate people from each other and that can be reliably measured. Creative individuals, on the other hand, seem to exhibit both traits simultaneously.

6. Creative people are humble and proud at the same time. It is remarkable to meet a famous person who you expect to be arrogant or supercilious, only to encounter self-deprecation and shyness instead. Yet there are good reasons why this should be so. These individuals are well aware that they stand, in Newton’s words, “on the shoulders of giants.” Their respect for the area in which they work makes them aware of the long line of previous contributions to it, putting their own in perspective. They’re also aware of the role that luck played in their own achievements. And they’re usually so focused on future projects and current challenges that past accomplishments, no matter how outstanding, are no longer very interesting to them. At the same time, they know that in comparison with others, they have accomplished a great deal. And this knowledge provides a sense of security, even pride.

7. Creative people, to an extent, escape rigid gender role stereotyping. When tests of masculinity/femininity are given to young people, over and over one finds that creative and talented girls are more dominant and tough than other girls, and creative boys are more sensitive and less aggressive than their male peers.

8. Creative people are both rebellious and conservative. It is impossible to be creative without having first internalized an area of culture. So it’s difficult to see how a person can be creative without being both traditional and conservative and at the same time rebellious and iconoclastic. Being only traditional leaves an area unchanged; constantly taking chances without regard to what has been valued in the past rarely leads to novelty that is accepted as an improvement. The artist Eva Zeisel, who says that the folk tradition in which she works is “her home,” nevertheless produces ceramics that were recognized by the Museum of Modern Art as masterpieces of contemporary design.

9. Most creative people are very passionate about their work, yet they can be extremely objective about it as well. Without the passion, we soon lose interest in a difficult task. Yet without being objective about it, our work is not very good and lacks credibility.

10. Creative people’s openness and sensitivity often exposes them to suffering and pain, yet also to a great deal of enjoyment. Most would agree with Rabinow’s words: “Inventors have a low threshold of pain. Things bother them.” A badly designed machine causes pain to an inventive engineer, just as the creative writer is hurt when reading bad prose.

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Dear Diane,

A lot of questions. I’d love to know more about your answers, too. But part of the problem is that there are lots of different things called charters—even the charter laws differ dramatically in different states and the schools even more so. Not all are small, and many are no more, and sometimes maybe less, self-governing than the average regular public school. Vouchers are, of course, a straightforward proposal to get out of the public school business—except maybe for the left-overs.

The Edison schools (now moving into online learning) have been as large as any public school. In fact, most charter school students in Massachusetts attend large schools, although the average charter is modest in size. Many of the “chains” are even more “standardized” than KIPP. You sent me a piece, recently Diane, about IKEA schools—in of all places, Sweden!—whose leader boasts: “We do not mind being compared to McDonald’s. If we’re religious about anything, it’s standardization. We tell our teachers it is more important to do things the same way than to do them well.” A colleague and pro-KIPP’er friend acknowledged that their kids sometimes have difficulty in high schools that expect kids to be more independent, speak up, write well, and be intellectual explorers. He hoped they’d learn from this. But deciding to go into the high school business may just be postponing the bad news. (See Mike Rose’s brilliant “Lives On the Boundary” about just this subject.)

A side note on test scores: dramatic system-wide improvements in test scores, like New York state’s and D.C.’s, would have sent up a red flag in the days of psychometric standards when such results were a sign of poor tests or cheating. One of the odd qualities of the current mania for testing is that we have no standards for standardized tests.

But back to small schools. The purpose of smallness—that kids and faculty and families are better known to each other—is generally irrelevant in many of the new “small learning communities” and in most of the chains that profess smallness. Irrelevant, that is, for the purposes we had in mind. The reason for the large “dinner table” conversation that small schools (and smaller classes) allow for is precisely in order to make difficult decisions together, to weigh trade-offs, to look across age spans at unexpected side effects (or no effects at all, e.g. “successfully teaching fractions” starting at scratch year after year). Kids have always created their own form of smallness (cliques, gangs, groupings), so have adults! What we wanted was smallness on behalf of educational decision-making close to the ground.

Knowing kids better is not simply to help kids “feel good” (which is definitely a positive), but so that we can over time better understand their interests, styles, passions, “ways of thinking”—and our own. It matters only if we—school and family—are in control of how we can respond to what we learn. It’s a laboratory, in effect, for democracy. It’s not intended to turn teachers into social workers (although hopefully there are social workers that the kids can see) but into wiser intellectual leaders. Fewer and fewer kids take for granted any more that they live within something they can call “a community”—a living culture held together by common bonds as well as common norms for dealing with differences. Democracy is one kind of community, and a very complex kind. When our lives depend on democracy many of its citizens have only the faintest notion about how to think, much less operate, within it. Often enough, they abandon it at precisely such moments as a frill we cannot afford.

When we tease local school boards, or local decision-making in general, for stupidity, we are acknowledging that we have created a society in which very few people “think like” democrats, seeing the importance of connecting their knowledge to their arguments, taking the opinions of others into account, and on and on and on. Once every four years we deride “elitism” but in between we operate with elitist assumptions about the way “ordinary people” think. That’s the most telling indictment of our schools, not their scores on tests.

Yes, representative democracy is essential when the numbers prevent direct democracy, so we must learn equally how to operate within such a system. But each school needs to develop its own set of trade-offs between the two, which was a central argument of the NYC Network project. I think the Boston pilots come close to representing a helpful model that has captured the strengths of charters, but has remained true to our commitment to public’ness. I’m hoping the L.A. model follows in that path.

But, remember, what you and I have hoped for in public schooling has always been aspirational. As you have noted in your books, it has had a rocky and uneven history. Many were excluded. Nor have we ever depended on them as much as we do today given all the other publics kids were once exposed to in their growing years. Today, the young experience the adult world, if at all, through a variety of media, via pre-programmed, often solo games. They require very little negotiation amongst peers, and the ends are pure amusement—to induce the state of wanting “more, more”. (I’m sure there are some skills that are honed, some knowledge taken in—I’m an acknowledged novice at kids’ electronic games.)

Small schools are an attempt to re-create, intentionally, the best of the family dinner table, the town meeting, the public square, the legislative process, the team, and the academy of thinkers—with as much of the diversity of the larger community as we can corral all in one manageable place.

You asked many other questions; particularly about the reason so many hedge fund managers (etc.) want to start schools. Money and the pleasure of control is my short answer. The longer answer is that they really are “believers”. Note the rest of that piece, where IKEA’s spokesman broadens his McDonald’s analogy. What works for hotels and airlines, he says, is what’s best for schools.

But this is more than enough for starters.

Deb

Source: teacherken

Elementary Education Professors:
PC--24.4%
Kinda PC--40%
Anti-PC--24.4%
Couldn't give a crap--6.7%

Other interesting stuff.

Source: Aaron Schutz

What one book on education do you think Obama should read?

Kozol’s Savage Inequalities is an easy out, but probably doesn’t get at what I’d really like him to know that he doesn’t already know.

Consider readability, clarity of the argument made, etc. He’s not a scholar, he’s a busy candidate (or, likely, president). Please explain why you arrived at this choice. Entries will be judged by the coherence of their justifications .

I have to think about this myself.

Source: Aaron Schutz

How is it that Freud is not taught in psychology departments, Marx is not taught in economics, and Hegel is hardly taught in philosophy? Instead these masters of Western thought are taught in fields far from their own. Nowadays Freud is found in literature departments, Marx in film studies, and Hegel in German. But have they migrated, or have they been expelled? Perhaps the home fields of Freud, Marx, and Hegel have turned arid. Perhaps those disciplines have come to prize a scientistic ethos that drives away unruly thinkers. Or maybe they simply progress by sloughing off the past.

Can people think of examples of this in education? It’s a more complicated issue, since education is an interdisciplinary “field,” if it counts as a field at all in the same way as these others.

I would point to an entire group of educators that I’m calling the “personalists” from the 1920s and the 1960s with a vision of psychoanalytically and aesthetically based efforts to release the unique creativity of individuals in communal settings. Essentially the “romantics” of education, like Margaret Naumburg, Caroline Pratt, Paul Goodman, A.S. Neill, and the like. But they certainly aren’t on the same level as a Hegel. (Philosophers have forgotten Hegel? Bizarre!)

Others?

Source: Aaron Schutz