Games in Things

By Erin Quinn

As mentioned in our Recipe section, creating a safe culture in your classroom is important for future creative work. I teach an option class for grade 7s called Creative Problem Solving. It’s a course that’s locally developed by my school board, and focuses on the creative process as a method of solving real life problems. I’m very excited for the opportunities this course is going to afford my students, but before we could get into really meaty issues, we needed to spend some time developing that collaborative, safe culture.

I started with a great activity I’ve used before from an organization called the Institute of Play, the GameKit. The Institute of Play is a fantastic organization that aims to bring play and games into schools. Being a strong believer that learning should feel like play, I am right on board with their mandate. It doesn’t hurt that they create top quality resources for teachers and school personnel.

I used the first activity in the GameKit called Find Play in Things. On a table, I laid out several supplies: a bunch of red plastic cups, some elastic bands, paper clips, yarn, two-sided math tokens, and twelve sided dice. I asked the students to get into groups of about three or four students. Then I asked them to come up and select three items - they could take as much or as little of the three items as they wanted. Now came the fun part: Invent a game using all three items.

An important thing to note is that these are the only instructions I gave them. I didn’t say, “you must have at least three rules in your game, you HAVE to write them down, and NO MAKING A MESS! AND NO MAKING NOISE! AND NO HAVING FUN!!!!” Okay, I’m being a little facetious right now, but some teachers’ instinct would be to put limitations on the games. Resist this urge and just let the kids go with it.

My students happily set about this task. What happened at that point was something pretty remarkable, and one of the hallmarks of design thinking: the students biased toward action. Instead of spending time discussing what they might do, the students took their materials and started prototyping right away. They lined up cups in rows. They drew game boards on the whiteboard desks. They rigged up slingshots using paper clips and elastic bands. And when the sling shots didn’t work, they tried another approach.

My students spent a good part of an hour prototyping their games, adjusting as things didn’t work, and trying again. Without knowing it, the students experienced the divergent-convergent pulse: when something didn’t work as planned, students had to go back to the drawing table, come up with other possibilities (diverging), and then deciding on another route to try (converging).

Next class, we are going to try playing each others’ games to see how they work and if they’re fun. Feedback from users may cause them to have to go back again to try something new. If a game is too hard, or too easy, their players will tell them this, and the game designers will need to try another approach.

What’s great about this activity is that it is such a simple activity that gives students a taste of the creative process, and many of the seven strands of creativity.

Creativity in a French Immersion Kindergarten Classroom

By Stephanie Bartlett

What?

“What is your plan?”
“Before we build that fort, maybe we should draw a plan.”
“Today I am going to build another prototype of my butterfly house.”
-Conversations from Mme Stephanie’s Kindergarten classroom.

Creativity is a word that we hear so often these days and yet so many of us are intimidated or just don’t know where to start.  Some are interested, but don’t consider themselves creative, therefore they leave it for others to try.  Naively ignorant of the world of creativity, I fell into that camp until everything changed in July 2012 when I began my Masters at The University of Calgary in Creativity in Educational Practice.  Our professor, Robert Kelly, thoughtfully guided us through a personal and professional transformation that catapulted me into the world of teacher as designer.  Together with my partners, we spent all of last year developing our own creativity and figuring out how to make room for something new in our teaching practice.  

We experimented with units of different lengths, and letting the students wonderings guide our explorations. We also played with implementing Genius Hour, something that we will definitely incorporate into our practice this year as well.  And, as we all know, there is no point in teaching anything if you can’t access it, so we created and trialled assessment tools, both teacher and student friendly.  After so much trial and error, we realized that we weren't just adding new concepts on top of traditional ones; we were completely restructuring our classrooms and the way we taught.  Judging by student performance and their high levels of engagement, we were hooked.

So what?

Creativity aligns beautifully with the philosophies of Reggio-inspired learning and inquiry.  My classroom became living proof that when students were taught the process of creative development, when space was treated as a collaborative tool, and when feedback was given often by teacher and students, the evidence of metacognition and student engagement is far-reaching.  Seeing the intrinsic motivation of my students as they headed straight for our classroom garden or their plans and models of the new classroom water table renewed my passion for teaching.

Now What?

I now know that I am creative, that there is a developmental process to creativity and that creativity does indeed enhance both my teaching and the way students learn. Together with my partners, I will continue implement creativity in the classroom.  We have joined the collaborative project on twitter, #LookingClosely.  Exploring nature through the lense of creativity will be an exciting venture.  We are developing a yearlong project that will highlight the uniqueness of each student and incorporate many learning outcomes along the way.  Lastly, we will continue on with Genius Hour on Friday mornings.  We have a busy year ahead and have learned to trust the process of creativity and outcome unknown.

Introducing Genius Hour in Grade 7

By Erin Quinn

Genius Hour is an idea that’s catching like wildfire lately in the field of education. Genius Hour goes by many names - 20% time, Innovation Week, Fed Ex Days, Passion Projects - but all these monikers essentially mean the same thing: passion-based, self-directed learning. Students choose what they want to learn about, investigate, and create something to show for their learning.

My teaching partner Kate Steinfeld and I decided to embark on the journey of Genius Hour together this year. We introduced the concept to our grade 7 students on Friday. Plenty of other educators have gone before us, so we relied on them to show us the way, and borrowed parts of the way other educators have introduced Genius Hour.

We started with this brilliant video, which was thoughtfully shared by Drew Minock here.

Then we showed a modified version of this Prezi, made by Crystal Wilson.

We were inspired by EspoLearn’s brilliant questions from her kickoff slideshow.

We borrowed EspoLearn’s words when she said that Genius Hour projects are about:

• You being in charge of your own learning
• Finding your genius
• Asking questions and working to answer an Ungoogleable question
• Finding a problem and working to solve it
• A little about the product and a lot about the process
• Learning it’s okay to fail

After the Prezi, we posed these questions to our students:

• If you could learn anything in school, what would it be?
• If you could solve any problem in the world, what problem would you solve? What breaks your heart?
• If you could make anything in the world, what would you make?
• What would you do if you weren't afraid?
• What will you create to make the world more awesome?

Finally, we watched this short TED Talk of Jack Andraka, a 15 year old who invented a promising, cheap, and shockingly effective test for pancreatic cancer in his spare time.

We asked our students to ponder these questions over the course of the week, and come back next Friday with as many answers to the questions as they could. I could already see the students were intrigued by these questions. One girl said, “Ms. Quinn. If I’ve already filled up my page, what do I do?” I answered, “Go on to the next page!”

The best, most hopeful comment I overheard was,

“I can’t WAIT until next Friday!”

Genius Hour will allow the students to fully experience all seven strands of creative development in context. With their answers to the five questions, the students began to experience the phase of Self-Instigation. What's great about Genius Hour is it's one of the only experiences in a classroom where students will be able to truly self-instigage without curricular content interfering. Students get to pick a topic about whatever they want.

Next Friday, we are planning to have the students share their ideas with their classmates. We hope that by sharing, students will continue to add to their own list of ideas. Only after they’ve spent a good chunk of time on self-instigation can they move on to narrowing down their ideas to something good.

I will continue to write about our journey through Genius Hour as we go!

For more educators’ great ideas about Genius Hour, please check our Joy Kirr’s comprehensive Livebinder on the topic.