Professional Learning for Busy Educators

By: John Hardison. ‘The Blender’ interactive learning structure is designed to foster engaged learning, by adding the main ingredient needed for students to express their creativity—opportunity.

Since its humble beginnings as a crank newspaper put out by college students in 1988, satirical news source The Onion has been cracking Americans up with headlines like "Kitten Thinks of Nothing but Murder All Day" and "Black Man Given Nation's Worst Job" (to mark the inauguration of President Obama).

How has it managed to come up with so many hilarious headlines for so many years? According to fascinating recent TED Ideas post by ex-Onion staffer Brian Janosch, the answer is a really, really good brainstorming technique -- one you can totally steal.

Machines are already superintelligent on many axes, including memory and processing speed. Unfortunately, those are the attributes our education system currently rewards, with an emphasis on learning by rote.

It doesn’t make sense to me. Part of my job as an investor is to attempt to predict the future – I need to make bets on the way we’ll be behaving in the next two, five, ten and 20 years. Computers already store facts faster and better than we do, but struggle to perfect things we learn as toddlers, such as dexterity and walking.

We need to rethink the way we teach our children and the things we teach them. Creativity will be increasingly be the defining human talent. Our education system should emphasise the use of human imagination to spark original ideas and create new meaning. It’s the one thing machines won’t be able to do.

There’s an aching difference between an adult and the child the adult once was. When I was a small child I wanted to be a…

"Shouldn't teaching be a creative profession? In my mind, most every profession should have opportunities for creativity. I think humans are made to be creative. And if we don't have the chance to use those abilities, we are mostly going through the motions. We're merely "doing" or "implementing" without much opportunity to use our unique gifts or strengths.

I'm referring to creativity here in the broadest sense. It's not just artistic creativity, although that's an important kind for sure. I'm talking about the ability to have ideas, initiate plans, and solve complex problems. Much creativity is needed for these types of activities."

As always, participating in IMMOOC Season 4 has been a very valuable experience. This week’s prompt of; How are you working to make the world a better place by creating more thoughtful, compassionate, creative, and skilled individuals? really spoke to me. This question in many ways captures what I see as our end goal and ultimate mandate as educators; helping to support our students in becoming the most compassionate, creative and skilled individuals they can be to prepare them for their future.

To get your creative juices flowing, here are 15 of the best TED Talks for sparking creativity, according to online auction site Invaluable.