An oldie but a goodie:  Check out the following TED Talk from Sir Ken Robinson about how schools should nurture creativity, but in fact may be doing the opposite.

Robinson raises some interesting points within his talk, most notably that in today’s educational environment, we tend to “stigmatize mistakes,” ultimately discouraging risk-taking and downplaying creativity.

Now, speaking as an educator, I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a teacher who actively says he wants to kill creativity in his students.  However, it may be that the very structural nature of our classrooms and assignments are doing just that.

Our staff development day today, featuring keynote speak Alan November, underscores how we need to rethink our approach to teaching and learning, particularly in this increasingly technological world.  No longer does the teacher need to be the font of all knowledge, imparting his wisdom to a group of passive learners.  Instead, students need to be engaged directly in their learning, with the teacher becoming the facilitator of that exploration, showing them how to appropriately use the technological tools at their disposal.  One of my district colleagues summed up the message of the morning quite nicely:

The knowledge of the teacher is important but getting the student to construct their own learning is real teaching! #teaching #CIA196

— Todd Beach (@todd_beach) April 24, 2015

As a former department chair, I recognize that this sort of large-scale pedagogical shift doesn’t happen overnight, but I appreciate District 196 bringing in a speaker who is advocating for this right kind of teaching.  Now we need to work collectively in our buildings and department to establish collective buy-in for these best practices in teaching, followed by some collaborative elbow grease in redesigning some of our approaches to assessment…