Curiosity and Creativity

One of the things that really surprised me when I began seriously researching the subject of teaching critical thinking skills was the importance of curiosity. Curiosity: the simple desire to know or learn about something. In hindsight, it now seems so obviously important, but when I first began looking into this it wasn't. 

Children are naturally curious. They want to know about things. What makes things work? Why are things they way they are? Why? Why? Why? 

This natural inquisitiveness helps young minds develop their thinking skills as they ask questions and get answers--even when they get wrong answers or ones that don't make sense. Why is that? Because things that don't make sense to our minds cause us to ask even more questions and so the process continues. This is a good thing.

Bruce Duncan Perry, Ph.D. is a clinician and a researcher into children’s mental health issues. As he explain: "If a child stays curious, he will continue to explore and discover.”

The problem is, many children do not stay curious. Their natural curiosity fades or worse, it is crushed. They are no longer inquisitive or feel free to ask questions. And then they grow up to be adults that are not curious. How does this happen? 

CURIOSITY CRUSHED

There are many reasons that natural curiosity can be crushed or fade. Some of the main causes are: fear, disapproval and absence. 

Fear and Disapproval: Many children have become afraid to ask questions for fear of making a mistake or giving the "wrong" answer. The sad reality is that it is usually the child's own parents and teachers that are to blame for this. When children hear negative or disparaging remarks as they struggle to learn, they tend to shut down. 

Neil deGrasse Tyson famously quipped that “we spend the first years of our children’s lives teaching them how to walk and talk, and the rest of their lives telling them to shut up and sit down.” These are lessons that are learned early and repeated often to the detriment of our children. 

Too often, our educational system focuses on teaching children that they need to find the "right" answer or get the highest possible grade; it does not equally support the process of learning as a worthy goal in and of itself. 

For many students, education means memorizing facts or learning a bunch of methods to do a problem over and over again using a collection of algorithms. They aren’t taught how to see the world differently or how to be a critical thinker.

Children learn early on that mistakes are to be avoided and all that counts is the end result. Sadly, but predictably, this stifles a child's natural curiosity, and unnecessarily so. Lacking is the encouragement to discover, create and to invent.

A major factor in this systemic failure is well-intentioned but misguided parents that swoop in and "rescue" their children at even the hint of failure. They:

• Deliver forgotten assignments
• Interfere on the playing field
• Challenge report cards

By "helicoptering" over their children they deprive them of the valuable lessons that can only come when kids persevere through mistakes and overcome difficulties. Brain research shows that more growth occurs when we are struggling to understand something than when it come easily (Moser et al., 2011). Children need to struggle, they need to make mistakes.

Educator Jessica Lahey has written extensively on the importance of allowing children to make mistakes and learn from them. These lessons are not just academically important, they are life lessons. As she explains in her book, The Gift of Failure:  

It is the setbacks, mistakes, miscalculations and failures children experience that teach them how to be resourceful, persistent, innovative and resilient citizens of the world (2015).

Clearly, these are the kinds of adults that we want our young people to grow up to be, so it is vitally important that we don't circumvent our long-term goals with short-sighted and counterproductive parenting.

Absence: The other side of the helicopter parenting coin is the absent or disengaged parent. Parents don't have to be physically absent to be uninvolved. When parents are too wrapped up in their own lives to the point that they don't know what's going on in their childrens' lives, they are stunting their children's mental and emotional growth.

There needs to be a balance then between the overly-involved and the uninvolved parent.

CULTIVATING CURIOSITY

It is vitally important then that we create an environment where children feel safe to ask questions, to explore different means to solve problems, to make mistakes and even to fail. The classroom should be a place where students feel safe to experiment and try out new ideas no matter what the subject under consideration. This idea of being allowed to make mistakes creates an environment that nurtures creativity and original thought (Chu, 2016). Parents can do much both at home and by cooperating with dedicated, caring teachers to support their children.

We all should encourage a sense of wonder and discovery, modeling this ourselves. Let everyone see that we too are curious, we are creative, we are life-long learners. Create environments where children can be creative both in the classroom and at home. Give them opportunities to explore different ideas and to be inventive in their solutions. Foster and nurture curiosity and creativity. 

And find ways to make learning fun again! 

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Sources:  Boaler, J., PhD. (2016). How to learn math: for teachers and parents. Session 1, Part 1. [YouTube video]. Retrieved from https://lagunita.stanford.edu/courses/Education/HTLMath/

Chu, Jason. (2016, June 6). Teaching originality and creativity to students [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://turnitin.com/en_us/resources/blog/2543-teaching-originality-and-creativity

Lahey, J. (2015). The gift of failure: how the best parents learn to let go so their children can succeed. New York, NY

Perry, Bruce D., M.D., Ph.D. Curiosity: the fuel of development. Scholastic, Inc., n.d. Web. 07 Nov. 2016.

CCIS Conference Presentation - November 7th, 2016

This last Monday, I presented on the subject of teaching critical thinking skills at the fall conference for the California Consortium of Independent Schools in San Diego, California.

Both the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) focus on the importance of teaching students critical thinking skills and stress the importance of college and career readiness, but they don’t tell us how to do that.

In this seminar we focused on just a few ways that we can guide and support our students to develop their independent learning and problem solving skills, including: fostering curiosity and creativity, overcoming obstacles such as students’ fear of failure and making mistakes, and the role of understanding emotions in thinking clearly.

Participants also discussed the importance of our relationships with our students and its connection to their academic success. Additionally, we considered what current research has shown can help us promote student engagement and the willingness to take appropriate risks as they prepare for college and/or entrance into the workforce.

Conference notes and resources are available here:

• Thinking Clearly: CCIS Presentation Fall 2016
• Slide Presentation

Look for a post-conference update soon!

Exercise: Developing Self-Awareness

In our last post, we looked at various ways to make our habits of mind more effective.

I encouraged you to take some time to become more aware of your thoughts, including both what you think about as well as how you think about whatever it is that you are thinking.

This self-awareness is an important step in our development towards thinking more clearly. It can help use recognize both positive and negative thought patterns and habits of mind, both of which can help improve our ability to make good decisions (Nyugen).

To that end, here are a few exercises to help you become more aware of your own thoughts and ways of thinking:

What do you think about? And how do you think about it?   

Over the course of the next few days, take some time occasionally to notice your thoughts:

• What things are you thinking about? 
• Is there a pattern or a recurring theme to your thoughts?
• Do your thoughts randomly jump from this to that, or do you generally have a flow of ideas that naturally connect? 
• Are you frequently distracted, or can you easily maintain your focus and concentration? 
• How would you characterize the content of your inner dialogue, that "voice in your head"?
• What sorts of things do you find easy to think about? 
• Which are difficult? Enjoyable? Unpleasant?  
• Do you notice a connection between your thoughts and emotions? 

At this point, it isn't necessary--or even beneficial--to become overly analytical or critical of your thinking; we simply want to develop a better awareness of it.

Building self-awareness this way prepares our minds for learning the various cognitive skills and techniques which we will be considering later.

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Sources:  Nguyen, Thai. "12 Self-Awareness Exercises That Fuel Success." Entrepreneur. Entrepreneur Media, Inc., 11 Jan. 2016. Web. 19 Apr. 2016.

Thinking is Hard!

Thinking IS hard. Yes it is.

Thinking clearly is even harder!

It's more than a little ironic that something that all of us do all of the time is so difficult. Clearly, most of us just aren't that good at it, at least not naturally.

Think for a moment about the natural, continuously on-going inner dialogue which comprises the majority of our inner life. What is that like? What would it read like if we could somehow capture it on paper?

If you're anything like me, my mind is always going. But where it's going is completely unpredictable from moment to moment. My thoughts often flit from here to there in seemingly incoherent ways, jumping from one random thought to another completely unrelated one. If I could somehow download the ongoing stream of consciousness of my never-ending thoughts it would be one uninterrupted flow of a mish-mash of whatever ranging from the sublime to the mundane to the downright kooky. Truth be told: there is a whole lot more of the mundane than the sublime or the profound.

There is no organization, no punctuation, no "spell-check," or even any content check for that matter.  It just is: a big, jumbled mess. Probably I wouldn't want you to know most of it and I'm sure it's the same for you.

So maybe I should revise my opening comments. Thinking is actually pretty easy, that is if we define "thinking" as the endless flow of random thoughts that seemingly come and go without any conscious effort on our part. That's easy.

But thinking clearly, now that's another story. That is hard, really hard.
 
Be we can become better at it with training and practice.

PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT

Probably all of us have heard the oft repeated axiom: "Practice makes perfect!"

Oh, if only that were so!

It is vitally important at this point that I disabuse you of this completely wrong-headed notion. Sadly, it is one of those nice sounding, but unfortunately incorrect, ideas that no doubt originated with and has been perpetuated by unclear thinking. Are you surprised?

You see, "practice," which in its most basic sense is defined as doing "something again and again in order to become better at it," does not in fact necessarily make you better at anything. It might improve your facility, but not necessarily your skill. What do I mean?

Mindlessly repeating something will only make you better at mindlessly repeating something. If we want to get good at anything--really good at it--then we not only need a lot of "practice," but we also need to be sure that our practice is beneficial. It needs to be meaningful, thoughtful, problem solving and goal oriented.

Imagine a piano student that faithfully practices their scales every day for years and years. After a few years they should be fairly proficient at playing those scales, right? You might think so, but not if they've been playing them incorrectly, with: wrong notes, poor rhythm, inaccurate timing and bad technique. Now all those years of practice have simply fossilized those bad habits and turned this poor unfortunate music student into an unmusical block of stone.

The same is true of our thinking. How we think from day-to-day establishes patterns of thinking. These become habitual to us. Most of us are pretty much unaware of not only what we think, but more importantly how we think. This needs to change.

HABITS OF MIND

“Habit is a cable; we weave a thread of it each day, and at last we cannot break it.” - Horace Mann, American Educator (1796-1859)

Research in the areas of effecting thinking and intelligent behavior reveals that there are definite "identifiable characteristics of effective thinkers" (Costa). Educational researchers Bena Kallick and Arthur Costa refer to these as "Habits of Mind," of which they have identified 16 different ones, (although they acknowledge that their list is by no means exhaustive).

Midway down their list of habits is the curious entry: Thinking about thinking. 

This seems like a good place to begin our discussion about thinking clearly. If are to indeed develop good habits of thinking, ones which will hone our critical thinking and problem solving skills, then it is important that we begin to learn to pay attention to both how we think as well as develop an awareness regarding what it is we think about. When this becomes our practice, then our thinking will definitely improve over time. Such thoughtful, mindful and goal-directed practice will not make our thinking perfect, but it will certainly make it better. And that's a good thing.

Thinking about thinking, or metacognition as educators like to describe it, involves several things. It should be obvious that it means being aware of our own thoughts, but it also includes more. It involves our problem-solving skills and also our ability to evaluate the effectiveness of those skills both in real-time and retrospectively.

Costa explains the major components of metacognition are: 

1. Developing a plan of action, 
2. Maintaining that plan in mind over a period of time, 
3. Then reflecting back on and evaluating the plan upon its completion

Seems fairly straightforward, no? In fact, these skills begin to naturally develop in the average child around age five and can come to full flower by the tender age of eleven (Costa). And yet, as the Russian psychologist, Alexander Luria found: not all adults metacogitate (Whimbey, 1976). Why not? Where did they go wrong?

As it turns out, it's because of the way that most people "practiced" thinking throughout their teen and early adult years. All too often people do not take the time to reflect on their learning. They don’t take the time to wonder and question. They don’t question the reasons why they are doing what they are doing or the effectiveness of any of it. It becomes routine, mindless, boring. So guess what happens.

Aristotle said, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” That of course will only be true if we make it our habit to always do things in an excellent way. For those that simply repeat something over and over again mindlessly, they will become mindless.

If you want to think well and to think clearly, then you will have to repeatedly make sure that your thoughts are coherent and clear. This is not easy to do, in fact it is very, very hard. But it can become easier with practice, as long as it is the right kind of practice.

In our next installment we will discuss various ways to make our habits of mind more effective. In the meantime, take the time to become more aware of your thoughts, including both what you think as well as how you think about it. This will become an important step in our development towards thinking clearly.



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Sources:  

"Practice." Merriam-Webster. Merriam-Webster, n.d. Web. 17 Apr. 2016.

Costa, Art. "The Art Costa Centre For Thinking." The Art Costa Centre For Thinking. N.p., n.d. Web. 17 Apr. 2016. 

Whimbey, A. and Whimbey L. S. (1975) Intelligence Can Be Taught. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.