My plan is to have a CORE intervention: 21 day Creativity Challenge.
At the same time I would like to explore other smaller interventions that could help delve deeper into my findings from the 21 day Creativity Challenge. patterns and learning from the 21 day Creativity Challenge will be used in other interventions. Our objective is to help attendees feel more comfortable with making mistakes. We want to liberate creativity from the end result. Don’t think about the end result but enjoy and learn from the process.
21 Day Creativity Challenge. CORE.
Objective: Trust, habit, reflection. Activity: Send simple daily creative tasks based on improv and play (no drawing required). Audience: 20-60 year olds volunteers. (defined as “non-creative’). Targeted to anyone who “teaches”- parents, educators, friends. Measurement: Survey and daily reflections. When: Start on June15. Develop a list of games by the end of May, recruit volunteers by beginning of June.
2. Continuity Creativity Workshop
Objective: Trust, collaboration, Problem Solving, risk taking, making mistakes, reflection. Activity: Practice improv games and Team art projects. Different from 21 day challenge- this intervention will use ART, but will be in person to make people feel more confident. Audience: Group of adults (max 8 people). Ideally also people that consider themselves “non- creatives”. Measurement: Survey at beginning and end of challenge. Reflections. When: Ongoing. Two before June 15 and two during summer. One already done- follow link to see results. Link to Blog Post describing results of intervention.
3. Ask the Experts
Objective: Trust, credibility to project, unlearn the meaning of creativity. Activity: Ask a group of experts two questions and record them. – How do you define creativity? – How can people introduce creativity in their daily life? Can you give us one trick? Audience: Adults that consider themselves “Non Creative” but want to train their creativity muscle. End Result: Create a series of small videos and distribute through social media. When: Ongoing. Have already started contacting experts.
4. “Let’s Create” Social Media Campaign (like Let’s Move MO campaign)
Objective: Awareness of when creativity is limited. Tools of how to overcome that. Empathy. Activity: Social Media Campaign with daily or weekly tips. Audience: Adults that consider themselves “Non Creative” but want to train their creativity muscle. End Result: Post daily or weekly exercises on IG. Include phrases that limit your creativity to create awareness. Interview people that tell the story of when they were limited creatively and what effect it had on them. Create empathy with the public. Measurement: See Engagement from followers When: Launch after other campaigns to use what worked best from other interventions.
Objective: Awareness through illustrations. Activity: Create Illustrations that tell stories of when in life we are limited creatively. Work with storyteller writer Carolina Paoli to develop the story. Audience: Adults that consider themselves non-creative. Measurement: Engagement with the book. When: Finish Illustrations and text by the end of October.
6. Cross Generational workshops. This is just a germ of an idea. Would love to develop workshops with young and elders connecting both generations through creativity. Maybe phase 2 of this project.
Conducted by Carolina Rodriguez Baptista and Herb Singe
My first intervention was conducted on Thursday May 4th at London College of Communications. It was an hour long workshop with 6 students from UAL.
Obective of the Intervention was to test if improv games and artistic games caused an effect on students. Changed their moods, helped them resolve a challenge they had. Our goal was to establish: TRUST, CONNECTION, LOOK AT THINGS FROM A DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE. Did the activities help you resolve issues and use the creativity muscle?
STEP 1
Students were given a two question survey before the workshop started:
Is there a situation that you are trying to improve that you feel stuck with, or that you are having trouble with?
Have you attempted to think “outside the box” with this situation?
Answers:
STEP 2
Students played games based on improvisation and in art during the course of an hour. Games were:
Throw The Sound: Everyone stands in a circle and the first person makes a noise with a gesture and throws it to someone in the circle. A person receives it, repeats it and sends a different noise to someone else in the group. Reflect on the tools learned (Ex: Listening, Recognicing, Relating).
Dear John Letter/ Oracle: Write a letter one word at a time as if we were one person, going around the group. It can be written to anyone. Topic: Things that you are angry at. A thing that you wish would change in London (or CSM). Reflect on the tools learned (Ex: Relating, Trust, New Connections, Empowerment).
Zig Zag Animal: Have a long piece of paper and fold into a zig zag. Have everyone draw a part of a person or animal/ or part of a housebuilding. At the end open paper. Reflect on the tools learned (Ex: Trust, Building on other’s work, Curiosity).
Discovery through Stains: Have everyone draw a stain on a small piece of paper, once it is dry have people pass paper to person to their left. Have people discover what they see on paper, what they discover. They can use a pencil and draw one line on the paper to make it into an object/animal. Reflect on the tools learned (Ex: Curiosity, Trust).
Reflection: How do you think this game could be used in your daily life? in your current project? What did you learn from this game? What is the learning outcome you feel you achieved from this game?
STEP 3
After the hour was finished students were asked to fill out second survey.
All participants shared their email and will be surveyed after two weeks. Results will be posted here.
Other findings
After the workshop we also had a reflection conversation where we asked participants to state if a particular game resonated with them and asked how they could use it in their current problem or daily life. All responded that the games made them happy and lighter. The concept of levity was discussed and welcomed. Some wanted to keep their art pieces. We asked wether the improv games were harder to do, if they felt more uncomfortable. . In other circumstances they would have not liked it, but because of the small group they felt at ease.
ONE Month Later Responses
We sent a survey to the 6 participants, 4 responded the survey. Their responses:
Facts have been key in education. Flexibility and problem solving have been assigned to
Creativity.
Is it painting or sculpting? Simply using your imagination to create something new.
It includes works of artists but also analytical types like CEOs or data analysts.
We are all born to be creative. As we grow, many of us stop acting out our creativity. Creativity is a muscle, we just need to put it back to work.
Creativity is becoming a highly desired quality. Creativity is for the artsy type. LIE. Traditional work environment often is limited by creativity. Creativity is smothered by rationality. Paul Mc Cartney was recommended to not pursue a music career.
Anti creativity mindset is changing. Companies have discovered the importance. Most important leadership skill to innovate in the future.
Discover your own creativity.
Develop the courage to explore your creativity. Confront your fear of being creative.
Strategies:
Give up the notion that you cannot be creative. We can all be creative. Adapt a growth mindset. Create a roadmap on how to get there. Identify human needs and find a different solution. This is now called Design Thinking.
Allow yourself to fail. Don’t give up. Mistakes are a gift. Everyone fails. Creative geniuses fail more than usual but they build resilience. “A failure is only a failure if nothing was learned from it.” Tomas Edison.
New Experiences will help you get there quicker. They allow us to see the world in a different light. Think like a traveler. See mundane things with new eyes. Ask why at every opportunity. Show curiosity.
Work with people that share your passions. Collaboration. Innovation is the product of teamwork. Be part of a team. Find your own team. Talk to others about your ideas.
Do something with your mindset. Just do it. Just try. Go for it. Don’t think about it. Change from I should to I will. Better to try than to not do.
Creativity makes you happier. At work and in your personal life.
These are highlights and annotations from:
Kelley, T., & Kelley, D. (2015). Creative Confidence: Unleashing the creative potential within us all. W. Collins.
The truth is, human beings are all improvisers by nature. Everybody, unless performing a scripted play, makes up his life as he goes along. We are all improvisation.Improvisation is a metaphor, a path, and a system. The world of improv is a portal into mindfulness and magic.
Improv provides a workout that helps to shake loose rigid patterns of thinking and doing. For many of us, age produces a tendency to rely on known patterns. AS we grow it becomes harder to take risks. We rely on what we know to be secure. It becomes more natural to say NO. We criticize and complain. We are all artist, we just need to show up and get started.
Improvisation helps us connect with others, to lighten up and look around, it offers an alternative to control. It offers us a chance to do things differently.
We plan, make lists, worry, theorize, choose safety. We seem to have lost the knack to look at things differently every day, with fresh eyes or doing anything out of our comfort zone.
Taking an improvised step always leads you somewhere.
Notice where you are going.
Principles of Improv:
Say YES. Humans long to connect.Yes glues us together. Yes, the juices rolling. Yes might get us into trouble, but trouble is not bad when we are in it together. To say Yes is to make a leap of faith, to risk oneself in a new and often scary relationship. Exercise 1: Choose a person close to you: and for one week agree with all of her ideas. Find something right about everything they say. Look for every opportunity to offer support. Give him the spotlight. Notice the results. Exercise 2: For one day say yes to everything. Set your own preferences aside. Notice the results. See how often it may not be convenient or easy to do. Obviously use common sense!! Exercise 3: Group Game – INVENTING PROVERBS. One word at a time and at the end of sentence put your hands together in prayer and say YES, YES, YES. Exercise 4: Cultivate Yes Phrases: you bet, you are right, I’m with you, Good idea, etc.
Don’t PREPARE. Change the habit of getting ready for life in favor of getting on with it now. Excessive planning impedes our ability to see what is actually in front of us. Let go of your ego’s involvement in the process.When we give up the struggle to show off our talent, a natural wisdom can emerge. Exercise: Spend a day without a plan. Instead of following your ordinary routine, open your eyes and move with curiosity and attention. Don’t look at your To Do list. When you notice your mind is planning, make a conscious shift of attention to the present moment. Notice everything that is going on now. Look at everything as if you were going to describe it to the police. Exercise 2: Imagine a box beautifully wrapped in front of you. Take a moment to “see” the box. Touch the box, what color is the box, how does the box feel? Open the box, what is inside? Notice a detail about the gift and examine it. Thank the giver. Trust your imagination – there is always something in the box.
Remember: Fear is not a problem; allowing yourself to be consumed by it is.
JUST SHOW UP. Stop talking, Start walking – L.M. Heroux Procrastination, laziness, fears – it’s easy to find a reason for not going. Remember Time lost is never found again. Exercise 1: Create a ritual. Identify a habit you wish you had. (going for a walk, exercising, paying bills). Think of what will make this habit easy or more attractive to do. Set a time to do a preparatory ritual each day. Focus on doing it faithfully. Exercise 2: Make a list of 5 places that are your “hot spot” places where important things happen in your life. Go there right now. Exercise 3: Change the location of a familiar activity. Move a meeting elsewhere, meet at a new place with your friends, take your lung to a new place. Move your reading time to a park. Tips: motivation is not a prerequisite for showing up. Use rituals to get going. Change Location.
START ANYWHERE. This rule is liberating. Once a project is under way it does not matter where you started. Start from the middle, the end or the beginning. Exercise 1: Identify a project that you need to get done. Follow your first thought and begin the job. Do the very first thing that comes to your mind. When you choose your first though you focus on making your first thought a good thought instead of searching the the good thought to start, Exercise 2: Instead of writing your notes in precise language, try writing questions to yourself. Then answer the question. This is useful when speaking in public. Write down questions than answer them. Exercise 3: Start a monologue. Ask yourself a question and create a monologue. Prompts: If there were four more hours in the day how would you spend them? Talk about something beautiful you saw recently.
BE AVERAGE. Close enough is perfect. Dare to be Dull- Ketih Johnstone. Be nothing special- David K Reynolds, Cultivate the ordinary mind – zen saying. Changing expectations can take the pressure off and may even cheer you up. Step 1 is giving up on perfection. Step 2 is stop trying to come up with something different. This can actually block the creative process. “The real voyage of discovery lies not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes”. Marcel Proust. Try thinking inside the box, just look more carefully. Exercise 1: Look for a gift for a loved one and consider an ordinary gift of everyday use. A towel, a pillow, a pen, a clock,a blanket. Keep a list of useful everyday objects.
PAY ATTENTION. The detail of each day takes place right in front of us. How much are we missing? Exercise 1: Keep reading until I instruct you to: Close your eyes. Once your eyes are shut, describe in as much detail as you can the immediate environment. Don’t cheat by glancing now or studying the room beforehand. With your eyes closed point at specific objects in the room. Describe colors, shapes and the layout of the space. Include as many details as you can remember. When you finish remembering, open your eyes, see what you got right, what obvious items did you overlook? What surprised you? It is important to take time to reflect. Close your eyes again, try to remember three new things you noticed the second time you opened them. Exercise 2: Try to attend to one thing at a time. Choose an ordinary activity like brushing your teeth: pay attention only to what you are doing while doing this activity. Avoid multitasking. Look at the steps you take, what comes first, second and third. Reflect on the task and the objects involved in the task, who made them, where did they come from. Reflect on the order you do things. Reflect on how it feels. If you wander off, bring it back to what you are doing. Exercise 3: In a familiar environment like your living room or your office or your walk to work, try to notice something new. A noise, an object that changed places. When you notice it try to examine it carefully. Repeat this exercise throughout your day. Exercise 4: Listen completely. Once a day devote your attention to someone who is speaking to you. Focus completely on what is being said. Try to repeat what the other person said. Exercise 5: Become an anthropologist. Notice what people are wearing, what type of noses they have, how they wear their hair. Discern their manner or their mood. Learn something new every day about those closest to you.
FACE THE FACTS
These are notes and key highlights from the book.
Patricia Ryan Madson. Improv Wisdom : Don’t Prepare, Just Show Up. New York, Bell Tower, Cop, 2005.
Director of teaching and learning American School of Madrid 2015 – present
April Stout is responsible for teaching and learning practices from k-12 at the American School of Madrid. She is responsible of making sure the school is practicing the most relevant and research based education. Her goal is to align ASM’s practices.
How has education changed over the years? As a teacher you must stay current on what’s going on in education and while thinking there’s always the best that we know works with kids and just gets packaged in a new way there’s also a lot of different things that we need to be up on because the world is changing. Education should change with the world, that’s my job, to keep us research based and in a forward motion.
What does your day look like? I work with consultants and design professionals learning and researching what I feel teachers need and what they don’t know yet they need. It is my responsibility to make sure that people are learning from each other, coaching teachers and making sure most importantly that our teams are strong. The cornerstone of creativity and Innovation for me is not the individual person as a loan creator and a loan innovator, it is that individual person working alongside the teams and usually nested teams. I work on 20 different teams in a month. The most important part of innovation and creativity is it’s done in concert and with feedback, with multiply ideas from others
What do you think is the biggest challenge as a teacher? I worked for an NGO called the New Teacher Center and our job was to work all over the United States to train new teachers, particularly those working in the toughest areas. Our goal was to get teachers to be good fast. Teaching is one of the only professions where they expect you to come in, recently graduated, and be a veteran on day one. You really need to, and it’s nearly impossible to do so.
Young inexperienced teachers are sent in with 6 weeks to two years training that includes no practicality. They’re supposed to know what to do with 38-40 Xth graders who have reading gaps and all kinds of difficulties. For these people to stay in the profession is not enough to keep someone in their workplace, they have to have a passion for it and part of that is showing them the agency they have over creativity, innovation and growth. When you get people in the profession who see learning and growth as their core skill you develop incredible educators.
And this is when you succeed. Creativity and Innovation is knowing how to learn so that you generate your own learning. You don’t necessarily always need this expert because you know how to learn from the world and from other people.
What are you creating at ASM? I’ll tell you what I’m most excited about, as far as the changes. I’ve tried to change things and part of creativity and innovation is that I take risks, sometimes those risks don’t work out and sometimes something I really believe in fails. I’m willing to learn from those failures and teach others how to learn and sometimes let it go and know that it isn’t the right time and it can always come back on the table later. There’s a lot of things I would like to do that I haven’t, but the biggest change is the level of access to professional learning for teachers. I think that every professional on this site, whether or not they will tell you, has access to both an expert person in the field, awesome colleagues to collaborate with, professional books and people who can support them. When I came here eight years ago that was not in place, basically we shut down ASM and we started over. ASM was part of MAIS (Middle Association of International Schools), which in my opinion was atrocious. I felt we were back in 1990.
How was MAIS different from what you were implementing? What do you use to make it different? MAIS was lectures and conferences. Teachers were being taught at. Not to say conferences aren’t great but in order for learning and creativity to stick it has to be job embedded. There has to be a relation to the students and be easy to apply tomorrow or else teachers are not able to introduce it into their day to day. I think one of the key aspects of professional learning is to seek tangible aspects teachers walk away with. Something that will affect their students immediately.
Another technique we use includes watching each other teach, and watching other people teach our kids. This is purely observational, and after we discuss what we thought was good and what could be better and we deconstruct the class together. We just did a Japanese lesson study that brought structures for collaboration that are beyond sitting in a room in a meeting and are actually experiential.
How do you measure your success? My objective is always for the teachers to take one single thing away. For instance, we went to a workshop yesterday where we used poetry written by other students. Initially teachers don’t see a connection to their classes but by the end of the workshop through reflection we are able to find a connection together.
We also expect the learnings to be woven into teachers setting goals for themselves in the beginning of the year that aren’t just supervisory, but are learning. This has to be included into the system of supervising and it has to include action research and inquiry as an actual goal. No one who writes a statement like: I’m gonna do X Y or Z is passionate about that, but if we could switch to doing action research and starting to see it as part of our professional growth as far as supervising professional goals I think the teachers could then anchor some of what they were learning and try things out.
I see teachers trying things out all the time that they learn in very small ways, but oftentimes those small ways aren’t seen as actually applying because they want to do exactly like the workshop.
How do you help teachers have continuity? Conversations, coaching, asking teachers about having them identify one thing they’re going to take away, then following up. Encouraging that to be part of meetings.
We are going to do a learning day for the first time in June. We’re gonna do a big share of things that we have learned.
Continuously sharing with other people
Articulating for ourselves
Working in teams, collaborating.
Getting more access to strategy and coaching is a big goal. I think that people need their colleagues and other people to come and talk to them about what they’re doing and see how it’s going in the classroom.
Who do you get resistance from? I get resistance every time I walk out of my office. I know that resistance isn’t actually resistance, there’s an emotion of fear to change behind it. It comes across as: get away from me ,don’t ask me one more thing. But that’s not really what it is, it’s just an emotion and it’s a reaction so I don’t really worry much about resistance. I don’t let it stop me. It most often shows up in complaining and gossip, it shows up in human Dynamics. There is a sense of this is being done to me, instead of this is being done for me. Eventually they realise: I could do something different or I could have agency and I would like to be part of the solution. I deal with resistance with compassion while still holding firm. I try to get people to imagine a possibility other than what they are thinking and doing right now. They think it will not work in their classroom, my kids will never change. I ask them, do you think it will help with one child? Let’s try and go from there.
Who have you been inspired by, your mentors? My biggest Mentor is Elena Aguilar. She runs an organization called Bright Morning in Oakland California. I’ve also worked with Diane Sweeney I’ve worked with Jim Knight.
I’ve been so lucky to work with many people. I am a cherry picker, I will never follow one person, I don’t ever fall for one religion, I will never follow one program. I like to take it and pick and then create something that’s very bespoke for the people and myself or the situation. I think that’s also part of creativity, reflecting, processing and applying what you’re learning in different configurations to a context that is unique. I have to have a toolkit that I use flexibly.
You have implemented many things at ASM, what would you say have been the most effective? You can implement change on a human level and it goes from the Big Wide thing like how our students are learning according to all different measures of standardized tests and data. But I think hearing people’s stories and having conversations with them and actually pulling out patterns and trends around focus groups and things is what has been most helpful to them.
Every conversation I have with a teacher I have a log ,and I keep patterns in terms of what people are saying to me. I know I am succeeding the less a teacher needs me, the less I am pulled into meetings, when a team starts functioning more and needing me less and less.
I think the thing that has worked the best is the work that I’ve done to train teams to function how to learn together. Also the work I’ve done around emotional intelligence with the teacher leaders, team Dynamics, boundaries and about effective conflict resolution.
I have a rubric for professional learning and a rubric that I use for myself and I self-reflect and ask two or three teammates who were closest with me to give me feedback.
How do you see the future of education? I see the focus being high level towards how to navigate life and towards helping adults who work with high schoolers to navigate this ever changing world. There’s some skills that are future proof skills: Habit, Grit, Resilience, Relatedness, Self-efficacy, Motivation, Goal setting and Trust.
It’s the most comprehensive and best articulated list of the type of skills that we should be teaching kids. I think we have to teach what’s worth learning and we have to honor contents, role and education and we have to move away from straight up teaching content into teaching these skills.
I think we have some learning gaps across the world and if we know what skills we’re teaching kids we can fill those because, for instance walking is a skill and crawling is a skill within walking and it is not the absence of walking it’s the step to walking. This is why I think we need to be able to go skill-based so that we can be helping kids with all different types of content and we can test some differently and the skills that are so multi really academic and skills that are social emotional like collaboration and perseverance and what about your opinion on terms of
How do you replace the visual arts after 5th grade? Where are kids learning problem solving, collaboration, creativity, innovation? I mean the Arts are essential. Anything humans ever left behind is art, that’s all we have left.
I would love to redo our CAS Program to be a truly service learning project because I think that’s where you start creativity. Then you can solve problems from all different lenses and also in looking at the social sciences in discipline collaboration and units.
Could you share a list or of people that have inspired you?
