Designer Tim Brown makes the point that 3 important components of creative design are:
1. Playful Exploration (go for quantity),
2. Playful Building (think with hands), and
3. Role Play (act it out).
Play is not anarchy, it has rules, especially if it is group play. When kids play they’re following a script that they’ve agreed to. And it’s this code negotiation that leads to productive play. Kids know how to play, but as they grow-up they forget. This be because as they grow-up the stimulus to play keeps getting reduced and/or societal norms no longer find play acceptable behaviour.
To be creative, some of what we knew as kids has to be re-learnt.
At the 2008 Serious Play conference, designer Tim Brown talks about the powerful relationship between creative thinking and play — with many examples you can try at home (and one that maybe you shouldn’t).
Children of all ages develop cognitively, socially, emotionally and physically through play. Play provides them with an opportunity to create, invent, reason and problem solve – key skills for the 21st century learner.
Every important concept can be taught through organised play. Children’s play, whether functional, constructive or socio-dramatic opens up a new dimension of exploration, discovery and enjoyment for children and learning happens in a natural and intuitive environment.
Most children learn the difficult of skills before the age of five, be it crawling, walking, speaking or riding a bicycle. Most, if not all, of this is done through play and intrinsic motivation. And when a child begins formal schooling at the age of five, he/she is expected to learn without play. Play becomes a reward, to be doled out after the child has learnt/accomplished a chunk of curriculum/work. As a result, slowly the child starts disassociating play from formal learning, which not only puts them in an unnatural environment but also squeezes out the joy that creation, invention, reasoning and problem-solving brings. In some cases, learning and playing, transform from being synonymous to antonyms.
The adult – teacher or parent – has a crucial role in planning, monitoring and assessing the learning outcomes of play; who should ensure that learning while playing is organised and explicit and not incidental to the learning activity.
Yet, today, there is very little use of play in teaching children. Schools are hesitant, if not phobic to the idea of play as a tool for learning. This is primarily because, as adults, we have successfully unlearnt how to play and associate play with fun alone. The use of term “fun” in the context of play has done much disservice to the application of play in learning. Play like learning, need not necessarily be fun, but to be a successful tool it does need to be engaging, at all times.
Curriculum is the driving force of a school and can be loosely defined as the framework within which the teaching learning in a school is designed. In that sense, it is the most crucial operational document and yet the schools have the least say in its creation. This document which, in sanctity, is treated next only to the country’s constitution and holy text, is designed by Curriculum Committees largely composed of bureaucrats, scholars and academicians, with few, if any representing the schools. Most of these people have a very sound understanding of the theoretical underpinnings of learning and pedagogy but are clueless about the dynamics of a classroom. A few are also politically motivated with no interest in education and learning but see curriculum as means for scoring political mileage.
Curriculum committees have served their purpose in the past but today its confining, cumbersome and insular style of working is hindering and retarding the process of curriculum design. Yet they have the mandate of creating information that inform school/classroom decisions. Curriculum committees in their current form are redundant and are on the verge of extinction unless they refocus their purpose and modus operandi.
At a time when elementary curriculum is becoming more and more transdisciplinary, Indian curriculum creators in their bid to pay obeisance to the sanctity of disciplines with utter disregard to principles of understanding and working of the brain, like it compartmentalised and departmentalised. Although a beginning has been made in the form of National Curriculum Framework (NCF)-2005, we are yet to make our elementary curriculum interdisciplinary! In some cases the curriculum fails to align vertically and horizontally making it imbalanced, repetitive or incomplete, a problem acknowledged by the makers of the NCF-2005. Most of these committees base their work on national calendar and not on school calendar that actually determines the goings on in a school.
In many countries curriculum committees are, slowly but surely, being replaced by curriculum mapping, a concept that owes its origin to work undertaken by Fenwick English is rooted in commonsense practices. Curriculum mapping provides for increasing inclusion of teachers in decision-making roles making the exercise more meaningful and data more accessible for the purpose of analysis, sorting and communicating; and also been acknowledged in the NCF-2005. This ensures better articulation of the curriculum to all stakeholders and its integration by making natural intersecting points more visible; ensuring realistic and meaningful understanding by the learners. Curriculum mapping provides for best developmental placement of concept and skills within and across the grades, especially in the elementary grades.
Most of our classrooms adopt one-size-fits-all delivery system which breeds disengagement and detachment from learning and is detrimental to learning.
Nowadays, the students profile in the schools is more diverse in terms of background and needs than ever before. Most come to school both impoverished and enriched by their environment. They span a wide spectrum in readiness, interests and experiences. Ensuring optimization of learning of each one is a challenge for any teacher. But the challenge is not a new one – teachers grappled with it one hundred years ago and they continue to grapple with it today. What is new is the preparedness of the teachers to respond to different learning needs armed with the developments made in the field of education and resources available for differentiating teaching and learning. Not taking into account these developments while designing our classroom practices would be unfair to the children whose learning we are entrusted with.
In this writing I would like to dwell a little longer on how a differentiated classroom works vis-à-vis a traditional classroom.
1. In the traditional classroom, student differences are acknowledged when problematic; whereas a differentiated classroom has individual students’ learning profile drawn upfront which drives classroom instruction and assessment plan.
2. A traditional classroom is curriculum driven. In a differentiated classroom, modifications and accommodations are made for student individualism keeping in mind the learning needs of the students.
3. In a tradinional classroom, all students are assessed on a common task which is very rigid in terms of time and “right responses”; whereas variety of tasks and flexibility of time is the norm in a differentiated classroom.
4. Finally, a traditional classroom prepares children more for tests than for life and teachers are more loyal to the curriculum than to students’ learning. The differentiated classroom prepares children for lifelong learning and the teacher understands the needs of the curriculum as well as the needs of her learners. A differentiated classroom is based on respect for all students and equity of learning.
As Howard Gardner (1997) suggests, it is no point trying to make everyone into a brilliant violinist, an orchestra needs top-quality musicians who play woodwinds, brass, percussion and strings. The aim of education is achieving excellence in diversity that we are presented with in the classroom and not homogenization of that diversity.
One challenge for the teachers who dabble in the inquiry-approach is how to assess something that looks so very diverse, open-ended and fluid, in some ways. How does a teacher align the inquiry with standards and expectations, school-wide, provincial or national?
Although student-initiated and teacher-facilitated inquiry process seems to be a highly personalised experience, the teacher can build structure and measurable elements into it. This can be in the form of provocation that the teacher provides during the inquiry or the choice of resources. For instance while doing a unit on accessibility of water; the teacher can bring in resources, human or material, about the journey of water to our homes or those about the accessibility of water to different people in the world, depending on how narrow or broad a focus she wants in the unit. This focus in terms of content can be determined by the standards and expectations while the construction of meaning and understanding for that content can be harnessed by the inquiry approach.
The fair, valid and reliable assessment for inquiries or any aspect of student learning has to be both formative and summative. This ongoing nature of the assessment affords the teacher the opportunity to assess the process as well as the product. The inquiry cycle, for those who use it during the inquiry process, provides ample scope for assessment at almost every step. The feedback provided to the student to shape his learning, the students’ response to that feedback, the teacher using the feedback to inform teaching-learning in the classroom – all this forms crucial and realistic modes of learning.
Unlike a standardised test, inquiries can be best assessed by self, peer or teacher. This makes assessment a holistic and learning experience in itself. Teachers often build reflective tools into the inquiry cycle where the student reflects on the findings so far and next steps. This makes scaffolding not just a teacher regulated process but a deliberate exercise on part of the student. I cannot think of any traditional assessment strategy that, in itself, is so rich and reliable.
The product of inquiries, itself is very varied and complex to merit a simple letter grade or a mark. What helps in that case are descriptors in the form of rubric providing concrete and meaningful insights, to both the teacher and the student, as to what the student has understood and can do and what student hasn’t demonstrated in terms of understanding and skills. Although it sounds rather simplistic, making rubric to assess the outcome of inquiries can be a complex and interactive process. A letter grade or a mark pales in comparison to the complexity of the learning and is ambiguous, incomprehensible and therefore seems arbitrary.
The adult – teacher or parent – has a crucial role in planning, monitoring and assessing the learning outcomes of play; who should ensure that learning while playing is organised and explicit and not incidental to the learning activity.