For years I have been telling teachers and writing books espousing the idea that if you make your learning engaging enough through student choice and authentic learning, they will be motivated to learn. This was a strategy I had done for many years in the classroom, I’d like to think to pretty good success. Students with a history of not seeming to care about school seemed to do well in my class which was mostly project-based learning.

And yet here I was, standing in front of the classroom of nine students, none of them looking like they were happy to be here or caring what I had to say. This was the last stop for these high school students before dropping out. Pretty much everyone had given up on their learning whether it be their teachers, their parents, or themselves. But not Mr. Spickler. Mr. Spickler was supposed to be their science and math teacher, being assigned these kids with humongous learning gaps and trying to get them at least to a point where they can limp across the finish line of school. It may not be in first place, it might not be to the roar of the crowd, but best case scenario they would at least get a participation trophy. No, Mr. Spickler was more of their life coach. It was his job to get them across this finish line, even if he had to carry them. He clearly cared for these kids who didn’t seem to care about anything. He texted or called kids when they didn’t come to school (which was often). He encouraged them to want better for themselves than they wanted. He knew much about their lives and not just their academic potential.

“I just want them to learn something,” he said when I came to his classroom, responding to an email he had sent me about doing some project-based learning. “It doesn’t have to be science or math. I simply want them to care about learning anything.”

“Challenge accepted,” I said to myself, wanting to put my skills to this ultimate test.

Mr. Spickler and I devised a high interest project; teach someone about anything you want to, your final product being a YouTube video that people could watch to learn what you were teaching. After all, these students all watched YouTube, some of them for hours, learning how to do something like play Minecraft or put on makeup. We gave them the choice of teaching anything; how to cook something, how to skateboard, how to drive a car, how to skip school without getting caught. We put no limit on their ideas.

When I began teaching, I had lots of great role models: teachers who had been in the classroom for 30 years and still loved it and teachers who were taking on new challenges even late into their careers.

Unfortunately, I also witnessed teachers who were the opposite. These teachers were so burnt out in the profession that most things they did served as a reminder of the kind of teacher I did not want to be. This was the teacher who used the old text even when the department bought a new one because he didn’t want to change, or the teacher who lacked any flexibility, even in the seating, having students lined up in perfect rows sitting in alphabetical order, or the one who practically had laminated her lesson plans. One of the teachers I had the good fortune to work with once said to me, “you can either teach one year thirty times, or you can teach for thirty years. Which one do you want to do?”

How to Find Rejuvenation

Now going into my 25th year in education, I like to think that I still care deeply about my students, that I enjoy going to work every day, and that I still have passion for this profession. What do I attribute this to? I think the biggest asset is my ability to tap into my creativity in order to rejuvenate myself, to find projects, situations, and new challenges that keep me fresh and relevant. This is not always an easy thing to do. Comfort is…well…comfortable. Change can be difficult. Why would someone do things differently if what they have been doing seems to work?

The Need for Feed

As teachers, we need to feed our creative side. Given that teaching is a reflective profession, one in which we can always make things better, you can identify a lesson that is not going as well as you wish it to and think about changes you could possibly make. You could create a completely new lesson, something you have not done in the past, learn something new yourself, or find a new way to teach something you know about. You could take on a challenge that will force you to be creative to figure it out.

If the past year in education has taught us anything, when backed into a corner, we can find creative solutions. We may have been forced into this, but it is amazing what we can do when we tap into that creativity. As stressful as the past year has been on many teachers, I think many of them will find themselves rejuvenated because they were able to be so creative. Hopefully, this will continue even after things go “back to normal.” Normal is boring. Normal lacks creativity. Normal doesn’t inspire people. Normal is comfortable. Normal is not where the best teaching takes place.

Three Things to Try

Here are three things you can do to feed your creativity and allow it to inspire you in the classroom.

1. Try New Things

This could be a new subject, a new assessment, a new technology, a new activity, a new teaching strategy. It is not new for the sake of doing something new; it is doing something new because it allows you to use your creativity whilst problem-solving. The excitement of learning along with our students is something that stops when we keep doing the things we have always done. Find new ways to teach and you will get out of that rut of doing the same thing over and over.

2. Challenge Yourself

As a gifted coordinator, I get this phone call all of the time:

Parent: My child is scheduled to take a cognitive test. What can they do to prepare for it?

Me: You can’t really do anything to prepare for it. It’s a cognitive instrument that measures ability.

Parent: No, I mean, is there anything they can study?

Me: It’s not a test you can study for. A student either has the ability, or they do not.

Parent: So there’s nothing my child can do to improve his chances of being identified?

Me: Not really.

And yet, when you look at the top-selling books for gifted education on Amazon, four of the top ten sellers, fifteen of the top 50, are books designed to help students score better on a cognitive gifted test.

I understand the concept of a test prep book. How many students increase their ACT or SAT score by reading through a study guide? My major concern about test prep for a cognitive test is that it is all about allocating resources. In other words, ability is distributed evenly amongst people on the planet, but resources are not. For better or worse, some children have parents who go out of their way to provide any and every advantage they can, while others have parents who either do not or are not even aware of these resources. It is fair that child A, whose parents are college educated and use a vocabulary commensurate with that, reads to her every night, and watches vocabulary building shows on YouTube, scores gifted even though child B, who was not exposed to the opportunities that child A was but who has a higher ability, is not identified? It does not seem fair.

I decided to run a little experiment. I chose my daughter, who is 11 years old, for a couple of reasons. First, she has been tested for cognitive a couple of times before, consistently scoring around the 115 mark. She is that almost gifted child who, with a slight push, might get over the hump and score the required 130 for identification. Secondly, being her parent, I can subject her to such an experiment without needing permission nor with concern over a lawsuit, unless my wife sues me, which would be a wash.

My daughter was scheduled to take the Naglieri test, so I went onto Amazon and ordered an NNAT3 Practice Test. It was $25 for the book, so I was a bit surprised when it arrived and was fairly thin. I mean, I spent $20 on an ACT prep book for my older daughter, and it was nearly 900 pages. This slim tome was 44 pages. In its defense, it had an additional 6 pages for notes putting the total at 50, but not what I expected. The book was divided into 4 sections, each focusing on a different skill. There was pattern completion, reasoning by analogy, serial reasoning, and spatial visualization.

I figured this would be good for my daughter because the Naglieri is not as traditional looking as most national standardized tests. Sometimes, just knowing what they are looking for can be a big advantage to students. It is a non-verbal test, so if you had never been exposed to it before, this series of patterns and shapes might be confusing. This might give her a better chance on the test because she would be familiar with this setup.

When a student is working on a math problem, we always implore them to show their work. There are many reasons why we do this:

• To know what they were thinking

• To understand the process they were going through

• To know how they arrived at this product

And yet, when a student creates a piece of art, or composes a little diddy on their violin, or writes a poem, we rarely ask them to “show their work.” Instead, we let the art speak for itself. Unfortunately by doing this, we are not forcing the artist to consider the creative thinking that went into the work.

Understanding the Why

I have heard a theory on why the best athletes do not always make the best coaches. This theory suggests that the athlete often does not know how he or she performs athletically. Their abilities seem to come naturally to them. Thus they do not know how to coach someone else into doing this action because they themselves do not understand the why. Their talent goes unspoken, and we do not learn the creative thinking that went into the action.

I feel this way about poetry and art. I will read a poem and interpret it one way, only to have someone else interpret it in a completely different way. Who is correct? Who is way off? Poets many times do not explain their poems, or why they made the stylistic device selections they made. Some people would argue it is supposed to be left up to interpretation, but imagine what insight we could get if the Eagles would merely explain their creative process behind “Hotel California,” or if Jackson Pollock explained the pain and stories behind many of the paintings he created.

Encouraging Creative Thinking

We need to be promoting creative thinking in the arts— asking students to explain the choices they made (e.g., what colors were used, why they included certain things, why they didn’t include others, and what they were trying to accomplish with the painting, whether it be a feeling, a story, or a commentary). This does not need to be a formal essay; it can be a Flipgrid video, a journal entry, or anything that helps them to explain the following question: Why did they create the art that they did?

Promoting Rigor Through Higher Level Questioning: Practical Strategies for Developing Students' Critical Thinking equips teachers with effective questioning strategies and challenges students to think critically, as well as explore their curiosity and imagination. Learn more about Bloom’s taxonomy, the power of questioning, and more in this interview with the author, Todd Stanley.

Q: It seems like a simple question, but why are critical thinking skills so important for today’s students?

A: Because critical thinking is something students will be doing all of the time for the rest of their lives. For us to not equip them with these skills would mean sending students into the real world without a skill set they will definitely need. If you Google “top skills employers are looking for,” everyone from colleges, to businesses, to job search sites mention critical thinking as something that is valued. Nowhere on these lists is there anything about memorizing content, which is a skill schools spend a lot of time on.

Q: Why do teachers have a hard time implementing higher level questioning?

A: Honestly, because it is easier to grade the lower level questions. When there is a clear right or wrong answer, as happens with most lower level questions, it is easy to mark it correct or not. A more open-ended question requires more time and attention of the teacher in grading, which can be time consuming. However, what is interesting is that students themselves come to higher level thinking quite naturally, especially the gifted ones. These are the kids who are asking a billion questions all of the time because they are innately curious. What if we took this and used it to expand their thinking even more?

In addition to this, before there was the internet or Alexa or Siri, one had to know content because there was not a quick place you could find it. Now it is literally at our fingertips (or our voice). Education, in many cases, has not adjusted to this. We focus too heavily on content and not enough on skills. For example, as a geography teacher, I do not see the value in making students memorize the state capitals, yet this is something a lot of teachers are still having students do. I would much rather teach students how to find a map that would give them the answer they desire.

I also believe that many teachers have difficulty making the distinction between difficult and rigorous. When some teachers want to challenge students, they ask a more difficult question. An example of this would be asking a question such as this:

Name the scientist who discovered a cure for polio.

You might find some people who recall that Jonas Salk was the man who developed the polio vaccine, but it is not something you can reason or critically think about. You either read it somewhere or someone told you. However, if you ask the question like this:

How might the world be different if Jonas Salk had not developed a vaccine for polio?

Then there are all sorts of possibilities, some more plausible than others. Students would have to critically think to imagine how things would be different. It is not necessarily a more difficult question, but the type of thinking required to attempt an answer is certainly going to access different parts of the brain and raise the rigor.

I have written about the distinction between difficulty and rigor in more detail here.

Q: What should teachers do in order to get started with promoting rigor in their classrooms?

A: Gain an awareness of your own questioning skills. Teaching is a very self-reflective practice and yet some teachers suffer from what I call “American Idol syndrome.” This means they think they are asking higher level questions on their assessments and in their day-to-day questions, but if you watch the tape or look at the data, they will find they are not. I suffered from this very malady when I first started teaching. It wasn’t until I did an audit of my assessments that I came to realize that the ratio of higher level questions to lower level ones was quite low. Once I became aware of this I was able to go back to my assessments and adjust my questions, transforming a lower level to a higher level with just a tweak here or there.

Gifted finds itself in a precarious situation that I am always reminded of when working with districts that are out of state. The situation is this; there isn’t a whole lot of consistency with what gifted is.

Different states have different definitions of it.

Here is the example of what Arizona defines gifted as being:

“Gifted child means a child who is of lawful school age, who due to superior intellect or advanced learning ability, or both, is not afforded an opportunity for otherwise attainable progress and development in regular classroom instruction and who needs special instruction or special ancillary services, or both, to achieve at levels commensurate with the child’s intellect and ability.”

Vermont however defines it like this:

“Gifted and talented children means children identified by professionally qualified persons who, when compared to others of their age, experience, and environment, exhibit capability of high performance in intellectual, creative or artistic areas, possess an unusual capacity for leadership or excel in specific academic fields.”

You can see that just between the two of these, Arizona only sees intellect and learning ability, while Mississippi also includes creative and artistic ability. Both though talk about ability.

Georgia on the other hand includes these but also adds students who exhibit an exceptionally high degree of motivation:

“Gifted Student – a student who demonstrates a high degree of intellectual and/or creative ability(ies), exhibits an exceptionally high degree of motivation, and/or excels in specific academic fields, and who needs special instruction and/or special ancillary services to achieve at levels commensurate with his or her abilities.”

That means a highly motivated student in Vermont might not be identified while one in Georgia would…

Case-based learning has long been an effective way to master knowledge and bring authentic, real-world learning to the classroom. Case Studies and Case-Based Learning provides strategies, examples, and resources for implementing case-based learning across the disciplines, helping teachers foster valuable thinking skills in their students. Learn more about the book and case-based learning in this interview with the author, Todd Stanley.

Q: What is case-based learning?

A: While researching my Authentic Learning book, I came across a method of teaching under the umbrella of inquiry-based learning known as case-based. It is used pretty heavily in the law and medical fields. This is when doctors look at medical cases to figure out what they could have done better, or when a lawyer looks at a past case to determine how to proceed with their own. Case-based learning involves learning from past mistakes or successes and either trying to avoid or replicate them respectively. Students are presented with a real-life case by the teacher and then must analyze it and decide what went wrong or right. This provides all sorts of learning possibilities.

Q: How is case-based learning valuable for today’s learners?

A: It is valuable because it is relevant. Oftentimes in education we learn things out of context. We learn to work with integers but do not see how they are used in our lives, or we learn the value of being able to write complete sentences, but are not shown how this is used in the real world. Case-based learning is like the show Law and Order, ripped from today’s headlines. It takes a real-life situation, something that has already happened, and allows students to analyze it and then problem solve, all which access higher level thinking. Because it is from real life, students can better see the context of how what they are learning applies to their lives.

These 21st-century skills translate to the workforce, where workers are called upon to be problem solvers. Someone who is able to problem solve well would be a very valuable employee. Because this is a highly sought-after skill by top businesses, equipping a student with this will prepare them for the job market.

Q: What are some tips for any teacher new to case-based learning?

When people hear the term creativity, they typically associate it with artistic ability. As my younger daughter tells me, “Daddy, you are not creative because you cannot paint pictures like Mommy and me.” I plead with her (I know. Pleading with a middle schooler is a sure sign of insanity.) that I have written over 20 books. Doesn’t that make me creative? “No, because they are boring educational books, not magical adventures or characters with special abilities,” is the answer I get back. This is the myth that many people believe; that creativity has to do with only the arts whether it be painting/drawing, composing a song, or dancing. Surely you cannot use creativity in areas such as ELA, math, science, or social studies?

As a teacher, I know that creativity can be used in these subject areas. In addition to creative writing, ELA classes have a lot of critical thinking because you are required to read a book and must try to predict where the story might go, or you are constructing a persuasive essay and have to determine how to hook your audience.

How much creativity is occurring in math when students are asked to figure out when train A and train B, which leave from different stations at different times, will eventually cross paths? Creativity is embedded in problem-solving and it forms the substance of what you do in math class. In science, students often use the design process; a process that requires imagination: imagine all of the possibilities, imagine all of the possible combinations, imagine all of the possible outcomes. Creativity occurs here, with the added challenge of having to harness that creativity into a feasible idea. There are several instances of creativity occurring in subject-areas not traditionally associated with creativity. You just have to look a little deeper.

World Creativity and Innovation Day and the United Nations

I found myself just as guilty of believing in this myth as anyone else. After all, I was surprised that World Creativity and Innovation Day was established by the United Nations. When I think of the United Nations, creativity is not the first thing that pops into my head. I think of folks sitting at a desk with their nation’s flag displayed, arguing for ways to make the world a better place; diplomacy at its highest level— not a place where one normally sees creativity on display. And then I started to look for it…