Open Monologue
Just because I'm making it up as I go along doesn't mean I don't know what I'm doing

I’ve been thinking more about creativity and learning. As so often happens, a couple of things came to my attention that are related to my ideas from yesterday. First was this TED talk video that came into my iTunes podcast list just today. It is entitled Why play is vital — no matter your age. In it, Stuart Brown talks about the necessity of play, including why it is necessary for learning.

As I was starting to write this post, I learned via Twitter that Raj Boora wrote this regarding the video:

if we allow ourselves to be creative as we are in early childhood and to play as we ought to, we can achieve great things. Perhaps those people who are very successful – those who never “work” but rather play and are creative with their entire body (the thinking bat returns) – are the ones we should be looking to when we are considering how to teach the contemporary student

I have no idea what he is referring to as “the thinking bat” by the way. If you know, I beg to be enlightened.

Here’s what I think is a strange thing. As students get older, we remove elements of play from our classrooms in order to make room for hard facts and memorizing stuff. I’ll be the first to admit that I am often guilty of that in my classes as well. By removing playfulness as an explicit consideration when we teach, we diminish students ability to learn. There are teachers in the secondary and post-secondary levels who facilitate student playfulness and creativity as part of their teaching. I know first hand that Rick Schwier does this, and from what I’ve read of their classes I think that Darren Kuropatwa and Clarence Fisher do as well. If we want to emphasize the creative aspect of our students, we need to develop that kind of pedagogy of playfulness and teach that to teachers – veteran, novice and up-and-coming.