Shifting the Paradigm: Creating Innovators

By Cole Murphy-Hockett, Teacher

“You cannot discover new oceans unless you have the courage to lose sight of the shore.”–Andre Gide, French author and recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature

On Friday, Oct. 18, 2013, Bing Nursery School teachers and staff joined over a thousand other educators and parents at The Nueva School in Hillsborough for a staff development day at the biennial Innovative Learning Conference. Featuring presentations and workshops from approximately 75 leaders in fields ranging from neuroscience to education policy, the theme of this year’s conference was “Shifting the Paradigm.” Over the course of the two-day conference, expert speakers addressed how education has grappled with the changes brought on by an increasingly technological and competitive world.

In today’s world, an Internet connection puts the vast majority of humanity’s cumulative knowledge at your fingertips. The landscape of education has thus changed considerably in the last few decades. It’s no longer how many facts you can memorize or how quickly you can rattle off the capitals of all 50 states. Instead, schools must teach students the skills necessary to tap these vast stores of information efficiently and creatively. As conference presenter Liz Wiseman, author of The Multiplier Effect: Tapping the Genius Inside Our Schools, said: “The critical skill of the next century is not what you know, it’s how fast you access what other people know.”

The ability to learn and recite has become so widespread that many no longer consider it the crux of higher education. According to the undergraduate admissions office at Stanford, students are admitted based on their “intellectual vitality” in addition to academic excellence. Applicants who “seek out knowledge” with “curiosity and enthusiasm” are prized over simple academic perfection. For example, in the last admissions cycle, the freshman class could have been filled with students who had achieved a perfect high-school GPA nearly 13 times over. However, less than three-quarters of the matriculating class had actually achieved this. Instead, the school looks for students who will actively “participate in creating new knowledge.” How do we teach innovation and creativity to prepare students for a globally competitive world?

For presenter Tony Wagner, EdD, author of Creating Innovators, a central problem in education right now is the use of 20th century solutions to solve 21st century problems. He asks, for example, “How many of our children know how to do a really great Internet search?” Wagner contends that in order to foster innovation and thus prepare students to succeed in and out of the classroom, we must teach in a fundamentally different way than we’ve been teaching for decades. He believes that contemporary educational models tend to compartmentalize disciplines because that was what was effective 30 or 40 years ago. “This is what math is. This is what science is. This is what history is.” However, innovation usually happens at the margins between different fields; truly game-changing and revolutionary ideas are born from the merging of previously disparate disciplines.

To truly innovate, however, Wagner says that students must take risks. The problem is that in such a competitive atmosphere, few are willing to do so. Conference presenter Tina Seelig, PhD, the executive director of Stanford Technology Ventures Program and author of inGenius: A Crash Course on Creativity, encourages students to take these risks and thus seeks to promote innovation in classrooms around the world. Seelig considers creativity to be a teachable skill that can be brought out with the correct guidance. For her, creativity is everywhere. Even in more traditionally mechanical subjects like math, students can learn to be creative if teachers ask the right questions. For example, instead of asking a question that has only one correct answer, such as the solution to five plus five, Seelig asks her students questions that have many correct answers. Which two numbers will add up to 10? By teaching this way, students are learning the same material, but are less afraid of arriving at a different answer than their peers. The benefit of this method is that students are encouraged to be more imaginative and willing to take risks—fear of failure is less of a concern.

Perhaps one of the most important reasons for empowering students to take risks and foster creativity is for their own mental health and well-being. Fear of failure is so widespread among today’s students that academic burn out, depression and anxiety are major concerns for high school and college-aged students. At Harvard University, where Wagner teaches, nearly 40 percent of students are being treated for some mental health issue. The pressure to succeed is omnipresent, which is especially unfortunate, Wagner contends, because “people tend to learn so much more from the failures than from their successes.”

According to conference presenter Robert Sapolsky, PhD, a professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine and author of Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, the stresses and pressures of today’s world have fundamentally altered the way humans get diseases. Unlike 100 years ago, people in westernized societies are no longer succumbing to malaria or malnutrition. Instead, people are becoming ill because of the slow accumulation of stresses inherent in everyday life. Nearly all chronic diseases that plague our industrialized society, such as diabetes, heart conditions or obesity, can be tied back to the kind of lives that we live. Biologically, stress is something that is supposed to help us survive. For example, thousands of years ago, a caveman encountering a lion would survive because of the cascade of biological processes that were activated upon witnessing the stressor. The caveman’s heart rate would increase, and energy would be funneled to muscles and critical systems that enable the caveman to either fight or flee. However, because most people in today’s world aren’t running from lions, this biological stress response is maladaptive to the daily problems we encounter. When these stress responses are turned on for months or years in reaction to school or work, our health severely suffers.

One benefit of teaching creativity in the classroom is thus empowering students with the mindset that failure is okay and that there is no one “correct” answer to any problem. In doing so, we are not only teaching creativity, but also flexibility and resourcefulness. The earlier we can begin doing this in a student’s career, the better. Children are born naturally creative and innovative, as Wagner says, “it’s in our DNA.” A great deal of our philosophy at Bing has always centered on encouraging creativity and empowering children to experiment and use materials in different ways. We believe that it is our role as teachers to guide children as they discover and make sense of the world. We always provide open-ended materials that have infinite potential such as blocks, clay, paint, sand and water. Every classroom has design tables where children are encouraged to re-purpose and innovate with “found materials,” objects such as bottle caps, paper tubes and old CDs. Moreover, children have the opportunity to choose their own activities throughout much of the day. Seelig contends that creativity can be found in many different mediums, and thus a child who is not drawn to creative expression in art or block-building can innovate elsewhere in the classroom. Finally, teachers ask open-ended questions that are designed to promote critical thinking and problem solving.

This year’s conference allowed leaders in the field to enter a conversation with teachers and individuals who care passionately about the future of education. Bing head teacher Parul Chandra sums up the conference as “being able to connect with other educators on a high level, allowing us to really be thoughtful about what we do in the classroom, and really being able to take action and see the bigger picture.” The Nueva School will host the next Innovative Learning Conference on October 15 and 16, 2015.