Our 3rd session started with some warm up name games. I asked if people had thought about the creativity question from last time and we found that a lot of people had forgotten about it. Someone suggested using email as a reminder so this week I’ve emailed those present with the homework question.
We continued from last week’s creativity theme with a look at conformity. Often conformity is useful (driving on the left), but in solving problems (as one of our participants put it), if you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.
One way of challenging conformity is to turn it on its head. We played a game where everyone wrote down an issue that bothered them, and we put these into a hat. The hat went round and everyone pulled a paper and had to ‘turn it on its head’. So if I had written traffic jams, then the person pulling that out could have said “traffic jams are good because they slow the cars down and there will be less accidents”.
We used a physical feedback method so I could get an understanding of how people found the workshops so far in terms of value (people said medium to high), pace (slow to medium) and fun (medium to fun).
We then moved on to the second part of the workshop: motivation. To start we played a game of paper, scissors, stone to pick who would go first. The 2 teams took a story about motivation and had 5 minutes to prepare a bit of theatre to illustrate the story. This was a lot of fun!
We then split into small groups to discuss how motivation can be increased in schools - an answer a lot of us are interested in! Suggestions from the groups included:
- using praise, allow everyone to solve problems in their own way,
- finding a way to make the learner need the understanding,
- for the learner to know why they are learning,
- find a way for the learner to experience in different ways the material.
The homework question that we finished on was “How can we get motivated to do things we don’t want to do naturally - and is this even possible?”
In this workshop we started off by looking at how beliefs about ourselves (mindset), are formed - especially through the way we communicate.
The group got into groups of 3; a coach, a listener and a talker. The talker told the listener about a challenge they were facing, and the talker tried out different forms of encouragement. The aim was to experience what it is like to give and recieve communication that puts us into the growth mindset (I can do this), as apposed to a fixed mindset (this is too difficult, I’ll give up).
This exercise was inspired by an experiment performed by Carol Dweck, that showed the way we communicate has an important effect on how we perform and behave subsequently.
We then moved on the the second part of the workshop - creativity. We started by solving the problem: how can you build a free standing tower of a certain height that is stable enough to be moved? I supplied each team with a can, 2 peices of cardboard, some string and a length of sticky tape. In fact, no group met the challenge completely, but the exercise showed that there are many ways of solving a problem.
This illustrates one of Roger von Oech’s ideas about creativity - always look for the 2nd right answer. Each team tried to solve the problem in a different way. It’s only by coming up with lots of ideas that we can choose the best. I also raised the point that schools often encourage people to think that there is only 1 right answer; tests, questions etc.
We had a group discussion about creativity and how it is useful. I documented our discussion as a mindmap:
I presented another idea from Roger’s book: a whack on the side of the head; the usefulness of ambiguity. We split into groups and each group came up with an problem that we could solve with some creative ideas. Each group chose a random word and had to use this as a ‘jumping off’ point to solve their challenges.
Finally I asked people to consider the question: “where could you use more creativity in your life right now” as homework for the next session.
Today we ran the first in a 5 workshop series on learning for St. Martin’s secondary school. I’m glad to say it was well received, and I had a lot of fun running it! We had 10 parents and 10 students attending.
I really wanted everyone to feel comfortable asking questions and discussing what we’re covering, so we started by playing a lot of warmup/trust games.
I then asked people to put stickers on 5 scales that represented their capacity to change: intelligence, musicality, creativity, memory and 100 metre race time. We can do this again in a few weeks and see if people’s beliefs have changed.
We then had an open QA on what is learning, how do we learn, what good teachers are like.
I presented some information on Kolb’s learning cycle. I wanted to present some information on the structure of the brain, and how our brain’s structure actually changes as we learn - but we were running tight on time and I wanted to move onto the mindset discussion.
I presented some information on mindset, how this relates to the feedback stickers, and an experiment that Carol Dweck ran on communication in the classroom. We had a brief discussion about what fixed and growth mindset was, and some examples.
We split into groups, with each person coming up with 2 things they see as fixed (trait), and 2 things they see as growth (capable of change). We came together as a large group and people shared some of their fixed and growth beliefs.
We ended with brief feedback and comments for next time. I asked people to think about their fixed beliefs, and what they could do if they wanted to change them.