In this episode, we delve into the critical role of creativity and critical thinking within the educational sphere, exploring how these fundamental skills are pivotal across all subjects, especially in science. Our guests highlight the dynamic ways these skills can be integrated into daily teaching practices to enhance student learning and engagement, particularly through problem-solving.
In this episode, we delve into the critical role of creativity and critical thinking within the educational sphere, exploring how these fundamental skills are pivotal across all subjects, especially in science. Our guests highlight the dynamic ways these skills can be integrated into daily teaching practices to enhance student learning and engagement, particularly through problem-solving.
Join Dr. Jen Mansfield and Mel Gatt for a vibrant exploration of creativity and critical thinking in shaping today’s educational landscape. Together, they unravel the complexity of these essential skills, offering rich insights into how they can transform classroom dynamics and empower students. Through lively conversation, our guests provide practical strategies for embedding these skills into teaching, highlight the nuanced ways they can be nurtured in students and tackle the intricate challenge of assessing such dynamic competencies.
Together, we explore:
Dive into this episode to discover how fostering creativity and critical thinking can revolutionize educational practices, making learning more dynamic and impactful. Join us on this creative journey in Let’s Talk Teaching.
Resources:
Special Guests:
Dr Jen Mansfield
Senior Lecturer, Science Education - Monash University
Melissa Gatt
Learning and Teaching Leader - St Peter’s Catholic Parish Primary School, Epping
If you’re enjoying Let’s Talk Teaching, don’t forget to subscribe, rate and review! You can follow us on Instagram, X and Facebook, and share your thoughts on the show by using the hashtag #letstalkteachingpodcast
If you’re interested in hearing more about the short courses, undergraduate and postgraduate study options that Monash Education offers, please visit: Monash Education's learn more page.
We are grateful for the support of Monash University’s Faculty of Education in producing this podcast.
[00:00:00] Bec: This podcast is recorded on the land of the Boon Wurrung people of the Eastern Kulin Nation. We'd like to pay our respect to Elders past and present, and acknowledge that this land was stolen and never ceded. Welcome to Let's Talk Teaching, the podcast created by teachers for teachers. I'm Associate Professor Rebecca Cooper, Assistant Dean of Initial Teacher Education at Monash University's Faculty of Education, and I'll be your host for this series.
[00:00:28] Bec: Our aim is to create a conversational series that's informative, engaging, and relevant to your teaching practice. Joined by academics and teaching alumni from Monash University, we'll be exploring the challenges, issues, and experiences you might be facing in and out of the classroom. Drawing on their personal experiences to provide you with valuable insights into the world of teaching.
[00:00:53] Bec: In a world that's changing faster than ever, the skills of creativity and critical thinking are becoming more and more [00:01:00] essential. Today, in our final episode for this season of Let's Talk Teaching, we explore how these skills can be cultivated in the classroom, turning students from passive learners into thinkers and creators.
[00:01:12] Bec: Dr. Jen Mansfield, Senior Lecturer in Science Education at Monash University, and Melissa Gatt, Learning and Teaching Leader at St. Peter's Catholic Parish Primary School, join us to share some of their innovative strategies for developing these skills in the classroom. This is an inspiring episode packed with ideas to spark creativity and critical thinking in learners of all ages.
[00:01:36] Bec: Let's get started. Jen and Mel, welcome to our last episode for the season. Jen, what interested you in the first place about creativity and critical thinking?
[00:01:48] Jen: Critical creative thinking is at the heart of scientific endeavor. As a scientist and coming into science education, I see that great value in better understanding the role that [00:02:00] creativity and critical thinking play in science, but also the role they play in science education.
[00:02:04] Jen: If we want kids to really understand how scientists do the work that they do, because it's a very creative endeavor, but also requires a lot of critical thinking. And so by better understanding that myself. I'm in a better position to be able to teach about it and teach pre service teachers how they can take critical creative thinking into their classroom and to nurture that in their students.
[00:02:27] Bec: Mel, what interested you in it?
[00:02:29] Mel: Yeah, uh, along the same lines as Jen, um, but from a classroom point of view and working within a primary school, uh, context, we're at the point now where, um, science education within a lens, um, or a STEM embedded approach to curriculum is really, has started to move away from not just the core content, um, subject matter, so to speak, and what the curriculum is there as a guide, but more [00:03:00] about how to be a learner and those dispositions and proficiencies or capabilities for a better word around merging, not just subject content, but.
[00:03:12] Mel: The capabilities on how to apply all that and the critical and creative thinking capability, especially within Victorian curriculum, really helps to foster and merge that transdisciplinary approach.
[00:03:24] Bec: So before we go any further, we're already talking about creativity and critical thinking, but what do you, what do you both mean by that when you, when you say that?
[00:03:32] Jen: It's good to be able to define these things. Otherwise we could be talking at cross purposes. So creativity and critical thinking are actually different things, but you could consider them to kind of be on a bit of a continuum. So creative thinking is the thinking that you do where you originate something new, you ideate, you make connections to stuff you already know and try to connect to things that you don't know, for example.
[00:03:56] Jen: And so creative thinking Can be quite blue sky. You can [00:04:00] come up with a lot of ideas and really ideate a lot of things, but you need your critical thinking to be able to critically think about those ideas and say, actually, that might not work in this particular situation, or that might be limited, um, for this particular prototype, for example.
[00:04:17] Jen: So critical thinking is imperative because it helps us analyze, but also evaluate as well. So we can have one without the other, but when we're thinking particularly in science, they kind of go hand in hand and they're very complimentary, but they are quite distinct and different. And is that the way
[00:04:36] Mel: you explain it when you're working with kids, Mel?
[00:04:39] Mel: Uh, not necessarily, not to that level, but the students certainly know That there are ways to be creative in their thinking and a way of allowing those creative imaginative juices, so to speak, to really flourish. But then along the lines of what Jen just said, that we actually have to explicitly [00:05:00] teach the critical side of higher order thinking so that the students know how to refine their their thoughts, how to receive feedback from their peers and their teachers, and to almost evaluate their own thinking around what has worked well and what could be even better if.
[00:05:21] Mel: That skill in itself for little people, you can't assume that that's something that they innately know. And so yes, we're very deliberate and very intentional in our teaching to foster that culture, uh, specifically around. being critical in their thinking.
[00:05:37] Bec: So when you're doing that in the classroom, how might you start?
[00:05:39] Bec: What's, what's sort of a good starting point for teaching those sorts of skills? So
[00:05:44] Mel: we're starting to double in the idea specifically around metacognition, um, where students have reflective journals, and we are certainly starting to. When I say starting, it's always been there, this idea of, um, [00:06:00] embracing the failure or being comfortable with being uncomfortable with learning.
[00:06:04] Mel: But we've really just started to hone in and be a little bit more, um, intentional when those opportunities become evident. Because what we're sort of finding is that higher order thinking or, you know, thinking in general and reflection is. quite hard to see. It's sometimes not tangible. You can't really see what's going on in somebody's head.
[00:06:28] Mel: And if they're quiet or not forward coming in offering their thoughts, that doesn't mean that they're not being great thinkers. So we've had to be quite inventive and look at different models from different schools, um, to see how we can make their thinking visible. And then we go from there.
[00:06:47] Bec: So what model are you using with your students?
[00:06:50] Bec: What have you found that's worked for you?
[00:06:51] Mel: Yeah. So we've doubled a little bit in, um, there's a school called Thomas Teller school, I think in London, and they've [00:07:00] got habits of mind and they're color coded. So the students will know that collaboration is the color orange, being inquisitive and asking great.
[00:07:09] Mel: questions and wondering is yellow, having great discipline and grit in their learning is green, and the colors go on. Um, and so when we're in a situation where students are collaborating and sharing their ideas, the teacher might say, Oh, I've just witnessed some really great collaboration there. Here's an orange token.
[00:07:28] Mel: And then they go and just, you know, have a visual display in the classroom. And, um, At a glance at the end of the term or at the end of an inquiry, the teacher can look at the color coding system and say, Oh, look at all the orange we have. We've been great collaborators or as a teacher, I've offered great opportunities and conditions of learning to foster collaboration, but not a lot of green, which means I can be reflective in my planning and say, as a teacher, I need to offer more opportunities for students to show discipline and grit, um, to [00:08:00] continue learning.
[00:08:00] Mel: They're learning.
[00:08:01] Jen: Fantastic. So Jen, you're doing some research in this area, is that right? Yeah. In particular, creativity and imagination in science and looking specifically at helping to develop students views about where scientists use creativity and imagination. Because if they don't quite understand how science works, then when they do science in the classroom and it doesn't isn't necessarily reflective of how science is done.
[00:08:26] Jen: They can leave school not really appreciating that creativity and imagination are really important in science. Why is it important in science, particularly for kids in a classroom? School science sometimes doesn't represent that creativity of science in science because consensually agreed, scientific knowledge that we've known about for quite a while that arose because of creativity, but we don't necessarily present it as such.
[00:08:54] Jen: We, kids can learn things basically as facts, so to speak. And [00:09:00] so not really realize that they were created by humans through a very creative endeavor. And so by helping them understand, how creativity is involved in science, we can help them better appreciate that science, that creativity is actually imperative in scientific endeavor.
[00:09:16] Jen: So are you working with students
[00:09:18] Bec: or
[00:09:18] Jen: teachers or school, whole
[00:09:19] Bec: schools? What's the sort of? So
[00:09:21] Jen: our research was looking at tertiary level students views about nature of science because we wanted to capture what their post secondary views about the nature of science was. So when they left school, what were their views about the nature of science there?
[00:09:35] Jen: Because a lot of in particular, our cohort was pre service teachers and biomedical students. And we wanted to better understand, well, sometimes pre service teachers in particular become teachers and can become science teachers, but biomedical students can go into biomedicine or they could go into teaching later.
[00:09:54] Jen: And so if they have naive views about the nature of science, they might then take those into teaching with [00:10:00] them. And so we wanted to see what the views were in that particular cohort. So then we could adjust our teaching, particularly in biomedical science and in education, uh, to help develop more mature views, particularly about creativity.
[00:10:14] Jen: That's really interesting work, Jen, really
[00:10:15] Bec: interesting work. Thank you. Mel, you said before that, you know, creativity and critical thinking was kind of part of the curriculum. Can you expand on that a little bit for us?
[00:10:25] Mel: So in Victorian curriculum, and I'm sure that there's an equivalent in the Australian curriculum, but there are core curriculum areas, learning areas, and we also have the capabilities.
[00:10:36] Mel: And one of those capabilities is the critical and creative thinking capability. And then that's broken up into strands. And one of the strands is to formulate questions and have reasons or be able to justify your reasoning. Another subsection is to be able to justify it's, um, different [00:11:00] possibilities.
[00:11:00] Mel: And there's another subsection, which is metacognition. So when we have come together as a. staff, my role as learning and teaching leader to try to build a culture that's not just in the STEM science space, but it actually is a culture that extends across the whole school. So again, as primary school teachers, we are the generalist teacher and we teach everything.
[00:11:26] Mel: We are the magicians. We have. Really set together as a school staff and had some professional learning around specifically the metacognitive principles within the critical and creative thinking capability and actually try to unpack those habits. Of mind, all those learning dispositions. Tell us a bit what you mean by learning disposition there.
[00:11:50] Mel: So the dispositions of being critical and being a creative thinker. So I touched on collaboration before. There's also persistence, [00:12:00] showing resilience. There's being reflective. There's being a great researcher. There's being critical in your researching. You know, we're very, again, deliberate when students.
[00:12:12] Mel: are on the internet and you know, the first thing that you read isn't always the answer. And to bounce off what Jen said before, it's around, you know, when we look at the sciences in particular, it's around, if you're going to formulate a hypothesis, for example, it's about where can I go to find my answers?
[00:12:32] Mel: And if the answer isn't exactly what I was trying to find, or if it doesn't exactly align with what. My findings would, um, be proving, um, where can I go or what's my next step? And so what excites me in a primary school context is we're trying to foster these little people to almost debunk what hard science is so that [00:13:00] hopefully when they go into secondary college, they aspire to go into.
[00:13:06] Mel: What is typically perceived as hard science, the physics, chemistry, for example, and then the ultimate goal goal is to then continue to want to further study at a tertiary level so that as a nation, we have a great talent pool to have. Um, youth of today be the future of tomorrow that can really make Australia a competitive nation in regards to the sciences and STEM disciplines in general.
[00:13:34] Bec: So you've spoken a lot about science and using creativity and critical thinking in science. Is it different if you look at it from the perspective of different subjects and different areas?
[00:13:44] Mel: I work very closely with the Numeracy Leader. I would say absolutely not. They enhance, um, those, again, those dispositions or the capabilities to be critical and, and, and creative in thinking go hand in hand [00:14:00] with mathematic problem solving.
[00:14:02] Mel: For example, you know, the, our model these days within numeracy is around, um, teachers are anticipating possible errors in, um, maths. Once we've anticipated those misconceptions for another word, which also appears in science, when those become evident in the classroom, we have a culture where students bounce off each other and try to, um, disprove or prove their strategy and their formula.
[00:14:29] Mel: Again, not one size of thinking is always the right way. If, if it's the right way for me and I get the right answer, then let's just go for it. Go with that
[00:14:38] Jen: one and to bounce ideas like that. I mean, you need for creative thought to be nurtured. You need to hear different perspectives and think about it in light of what you know, but also identify what you don't know, because that's a really important part too in critical thinking is identifying what's known and what's not known.
[00:14:57] Jen: So then you can go, okay, so what more do [00:15:00] I need? to know. So when you talked about resilient learners and, and grit, that being able to self manage how they go or where they go next, I think that's a really important skill to, for them to develop, but also important for us as educators to make that really explicit, like you were saying before, Mel, is that is a very creative endeavour that you did, or that's a very critical thinking aspect.
[00:15:23] Jen: action that you did there where you made those connections or you drew on that previous knowledge, you identified what you didn't know, or you, you weighed up the strengths and weaknesses of that position. So making those things clear and explicit, I think also helps to amplify. We use critical creative thinking.
[00:15:40] Jen: all the time, but we just don't necessarily make it explicit. And I think by naming it and framing it makes it more obvious and particularly in education and for myself working with teachers helping Those teachers to realize that part of the curriculum they have to teach, they're probably already doing those [00:16:00] things.
[00:16:00] Jen: They're probably already doing activities that do nurture critical creative thinking, but maybe that just hasn't been made explicit and maybe they could beef it up a little bit and do more of those sorts of things.
[00:16:11] Mel: I'd also like to add there that for students to be self managers of their own learning is a really imperative part of being critical and creative.
[00:16:22] Mel: Whilst thinking and sometimes student voice as a term and student autonomy as a term, uh, misaligned that there sometimes in the teaching, um, or in education, they can be used simultaneously, but in fact, they're quite different in what way Mel? So in a way for students to have a voice is, you know, to share their idea or their opinion, but having the autonomy is that next level within that metacognition section or that substrand of the capability that I referred to earlier is to say, [00:17:00] if there's something that I actually don't know.
[00:17:03] Mel: What are my next steps? Where can I go to find the answer? Who can help me? And how can, how is it that I know what it is that I don't know? And again, that's something even as adults, we. struggle to be that self reflective. But if children seem to just know how to do this when we are very explicit, um, and we want to try to capture early scientific wonder and awe that children have.
[00:17:38] Mel: When they can learn to talk, Mommy, why is the sky blue? You know, they turn over rocks and pick petals off of flowers and try to dig for worms. And then they come to school and the bell goes, and then we have to conform to subjects and books and timeframes. But we want to try to almost not [00:18:00] lose that curiosity, that natural endeavor.
[00:18:04] Mel: To want to go and find out, and when it comes to the point where I don't know, we just don't give up, or we don't come complacent, we strive to continue to, to look for answers, which is at the heart of being a great scientist.
[00:18:19] Bec: So, when you start naming it and, and framing it as, as Jen said before for the kids, do the kids get it, or do they think you're just being a bit, You know?
[00:18:29] Bec: Oh, that's nice.
[00:18:31] Mel: They do. It's just new vocabulary. Okay. And if you introduce the vocabulary and the emotion and the feeling that's linked to that vocab, and you live it and it's enacted and the conditions of learning, um, it's, it's Uh, there to foster great persistence, great resilience, respect for one another's opinions and perspectives.
[00:18:53] Mel: If that's the culture that's been instilled from the very beginning, then it absolutely can be [00:19:00] embraced. We know it can be because we can hear it. We can hear students say, Oh, I don't want to do this. I didn't know that before. Oh, what are you doing over there? Can I check that out? Um, whereas before we were very explicit with making critical and creative thinking visible, we were noticing that students were almost protective over their learning and they were, you know, wanting to dob, Hey miss, she's copying me or, you know, but now it's all very much.
[00:19:31] Mel: a share. And, um, Hey, I'm noticing that you did that. You can go ahead and do that step if you'd like. I did that last week and it's not going to work. Trust me, it's not going to work. Why don't you try this? Or do you want to join our ideas together and try to make this a little bit better? That's how we know.
[00:19:48] Bec: Are there some perhaps learners that were not as visible to you before who are now Really excelling and more visible to you now because of knowing this sort of language.
[00:19:59] Mel: Um, so this is [00:20:00] the part that I'm so super proud of the school that in context that I work with, um, currently is in a low socioeconomic area with high EAL English as a second language, you know, in the STEM and in our science learning, there's really no language barrier to be critically thinking students almost just.
[00:20:24] Mel: with one another without using English or proper English. Students that normally struggle in a traditional classroom setting, um, with the books and the paper and the writing, go into the science or our STEM maker space. And those traditional organizational structures for You know, another way of saying it, um, once they're not there, the creativity can really come out and allows those students that, that are typically less confident in a [00:21:00] traditional setting really thrive.
[00:21:02] Mel: Um, and I've seen it, I've witnessed it, I enable it. And I'm super proud. Tell us a story. Who are you super, super proud of? You don't have to use their name. So just recently we had, well, we've done a little bit of a survey across the school and in general, referring back to our NAPLAN data and our other formative assessments, we noticed that, you know, surprise, surprise, girls don't perform as well in numeracy as what our, um, our boy learners.
[00:21:30] Mel: Approving. And so we really wanted to engage and, um, our girls and a lot of them were finding great interest in the STEM space, but we wanted to really bring the M in STEM. And so we had a girl group that. Went into problem based learning and had empathy around the vulnerable and the elderly people in their community.
[00:21:53] Mel: And they were quite curious about what they can do to stimulate their memories and their [00:22:00] mind, because they thought, well, what do they, like if no one visits them, how lonely they must be. And so once their, um, Empathy was peaked, they did some investigation and threw around some ideas and eventually they came around this idea of developing an app, which was completely generated by them.
[00:22:18] Mel: If you ask me as a teacher, how do you make an app? I, I don't know. I didn't learn that. I'm not an ITC, you know, trained person in my career. So, um, I just gave them a starting point. Was a learner with them and they were able to generate this. App that just had so many layers to it around, you know, tic tac toe games.
[00:22:42] Mel: And, um, it was almost like a little mini Kindle. They put books in there. They put photos of their families in there. They went off to the local retirement house and homes. They trialed it. Again, because of our high EAL context, there were a lot of elderly [00:23:00] residents there that didn't read English. So then they went back to the drawing board, looked at universal icons.
[00:23:06] Mel: So they eliminated English words, went back, trialed it. Some elderly people said, I can't see those colors. I don't like yellow. So then they went back and had a look at what colors would be better. Change the size, the fonts, all of that type of thing. And they ended up going off into a STEM showcase competition, which they were finalists in the state.
[00:23:28] Mel: And when we came back from that showcase competition, um, one of the mums who had recently enrolled her daughter at our school, They were newly arrival, um, from India, and she just broke down and cried, literally, and I just was like sharing tears with her. And she was just saying, I just wanted to come to this country so that my daughter could have a great education.
[00:23:50] Mel: I never dreamed that she would be developing an app, let alone be presenting in front of, you know, You know, an audience with limited [00:24:00] English, and she was so super confident. And yeah, that's certainly a big highlight. That was a recent highlight for me, but that will probably go down as one of my biggest ones in my career.
[00:24:09] Mel: Thanks Mel. It's really, really great to
[00:24:11] Bec: hear.
[00:24:11] Jen: That's such a good story.
[00:24:15] Bec: Listening to that story though. Mel, it really makes me wonder, is there a sense, Mel, that as a teacher, you need to be, you know, a critical thinker and be creative your, yourself? I don't necessarily mean about modeling it, but in the way that you work and you operate?
[00:24:33] Mel: Yes. So, um. Working alongside our students is certainly a skill that hasn't come naturally to me. You know, I've been teaching now for 25 years and it was very much a model of, I do, watch me, then you have a go. The model now is, You know, I would say in the past I would have referred to myself as using a pedagogy around being [00:25:00] quite student centered.
[00:25:02] Mel: Upon reflection, I don't think I actually was, I would say, Oh, we're student centered here at this school. But in its true sense, I would still, as an educator and as a curriculum leader, almost have the unit pre planned. You know, you go on your holiday break and the students come fresh for a new term and you've.
[00:25:21] Mel: You've got the new science, you know, unit of work ready to go. We're going to go to the zoo. We're about to learn about some biology here. Life cycles of a frog. We're going to draw some butterflies and caterpillars and it would all be planned. Now it's about feeling comfortable with the uncertainty. I see my role as.
[00:25:42] Mel: A teacher these days is to certainly be that one to front load and give explicit knowledge and to tune students in or hook them in for a better word. But once that foundational content knowledge has been front loaded to students, As a teacher, [00:26:00] we almost take a bit of a back foot and allow or become the facilitator of those skills and allow the students to really personalise their inquiry and be the managers of their learning.
[00:26:12] Mel: So Jen, if
[00:26:13] Bec: we're really aspiring to create teachers that are working in ways similar to Mel, how does that work? Um, play out for you in teacher education when you're thinking about, um, teaching pre service teachers to be critical thinkers and to be more creative.
[00:26:28] Jen: Yeah, absolutely. And I think particularly with pre service teachers, it's about helping them develop the confidence that they're able to go into the classroom and that they're classroom ready, but also helping to prepare them for once they've got the handle on classroom management and they feel like they've got the handle on, on content, you want to almost preempt them to be ready to let go.
[00:26:48] Jen: Goal of that control when they feel that they're ready to do that, and that, that's different for different teachers. So in teacher education, we try to slip these ideas in and make them really explicit as [00:27:00] we're going in particular, helping them identify things like, Oh, that was very metacognitive what you did.
[00:27:05] Jen: Then you were thinking about you're thinking that's really great. Is there a way in which you could use what we just did here and put that into your repertoire of teaching in your classroom? Uh, that was a very creative thing that you did. That was a very, um, critical thinking thing that you did. How could you put that into your teaching in that way?
[00:27:22] Jen: So helping the pre service teachers to, to recognize they're at a particular stage now, but in the future, That thinking about their learner first, once they've stopped thinking of themselves first, which is a natural thing when you first start teaching, putting the learner first and thinking about what the learner needs and how you can position the learner to develop that understanding themselves, to give, to give them the motivation to drive their own learning, um, and, and that's a difficult thing to do.
[00:27:51] Jen: But as Mel has shown, and particularly the teachers at her school, because they've, they've been in this project with us, problem based learning in STEM [00:28:00] project that they've done, they really empower the students and they take that, that view that I'm learning. And when you, when you take that view that I'm learning, well, you can learn everything.
[00:28:12] Jen: You're not the font of all wisdom. You don't have to be put in a position where you go, Oh, I don't know that. And I've got to make something up or, Oh, I don't know. But you can actually have the confidence to say, Why don't you tell me what, you know, I don't know much about that. Why don't you tell me about that?
[00:28:28] Jen: And we're on that journey together, but it takes that step of confidence to be able to, to do that. And that takes a little bit of time and experience.
[00:28:36] Mel: There are some challenges though. Regarding the difference in context between a primary school setting and a secondary school setting. So, you know, I said before in primary school, we are the generalist teacher and one homeroom teacher can teach many subjects.
[00:28:54] Mel: And so to look for opportunities to transfer skills and [00:29:00] dispositions and capabilities across literacy in your history class, um, within your mathematics, uh, you know, through art even. is very achievable. I think the challenge and the complexities when you step into a secondary context where, uh, some schools are still very siloed in subject area and it would be amazing if the biology teacher or the chemistry teacher could hook up with the numeracy methods teacher and say, together, how can we look at statistics when we're looking at chemical analysis or, Um, whatever it might be and try to foster a culture of that, you know, transferable skills, um, not just so heavily reliant on core content.
[00:29:47] Bec: That also leads me to my next question, which I think is possibly one of the challenges you've got in your head is. Yeah. Do you assess this? And if so, how?
[00:29:55] Jen: Yes, I was thinking that too, Bec, because when you were talking then Mel, about the challenges, [00:30:00] there's inherent contextual challenges that stop us from being able to do the things we really want to do and nurture the skills that we want to do, because we have to report on things at the end of the day.
[00:30:10] Jen: We're accountable at the end of the day to a number of students in a class. We, you know, we don't just teach one student. We teach, for a primary teacher, a whole class of kids. Of, of students for secondaries, they might teach, you know, several classes of students. That's a lot of responsibility and teachers are really busy.
[00:30:28] Jen: I mean, they're very good at what they do, but they're really busy and they're pushed for time. So to, to really take some risks can be. Risky and quite challenging. One of the other challenges apart from contextual constraints that sort of make us go, or maybe I won't do that because I don't really have time or capacity to do at the moment is if we start assessing things, we have to naturally put some sort of criteria with which we're going to assess it.
[00:30:56] Jen: So if you say, okay, I want you to be creative. But I'm going to assess [00:31:00] it. You have to then put criteria in place that you're going to evaluate. And so if we do that, are we then stifling creativity simply by saying, I'm going to assess it, here's how I'm going to assess it. And so then it becomes a, am I doing all the things that are going to be assessed or am I actually being creative in a way that I naturally would if I wasn't being assessed on it?
[00:31:22] Jen: And so because creativity can be. We can be creative in process, but we can also create a creative product. Sometimes we fall into the trap of going, I'll assess the thing I can see, which is the product, and I'll assess how, how good it looks or how functional it is, and don't necessarily assess the thinking that went behind it or the prototyping that went into it.
[00:31:45] Jen: And that sometimes gets left behind if we don't know how necessarily to assess process as distinct from assessing the presentation or the visual appearance of a product. Because even a product, we could assess [00:32:00] the critical creative thinking that went into assessing whether that product is actually fit for purpose.
[00:32:06] Jen: So if it is a prototype. You like your app, for example, we could assess the students thinking around how well that app actually met the design brief that they went into in the first place. And that would be a really rich piece of assessment rather than just the product at the end. So it's almost worth remove the competitiveness of a score and assessing the, the.
[00:32:30] Jen: The creative thinking and the critical thinking that's gone into creating it, but that's really hard to do.
[00:32:37] Mel: We tempt. So we use the design thinking model. We like the Stanford D school model that starts the first phase of empathy. Um, and then you work through your, you know, defining an idea, then your ideator work through a prototype, um, tested, evaluated, et cetera.
[00:32:56] Mel: We certainly, again, and I've, I've used this word a few [00:33:00] times, but it really is about establishing a culture. And again, that's not something that happens overnight. You have to unpack this and what that looks like as at a staff level, do some professional learning around that, and then slowly, slowly embedded into perhaps one area of the curriculum for us in my school.
[00:33:18] Mel: We did that in the STEM makerspace room where the students were able to practice that culture and those skills, and then. We've started to embed that across all classrooms with that consistent language across, um, with all teachers. So in that design thinking model, we certainly celebrate the journey of learning, not just the end product.
[00:33:41] Mel: And sometimes that end product doesn't actually get there. And that's not what we're actually looking for. It's the thinking that goes on along the journey. We also have students co construct their success criteria. So, if we have a learning intention for this [00:34:00] inquiry around, we are all going to innovate on the Indigenous basket weaving technique to create a model to protect our kitchen garden, for example, that the tomatoes are getting eaten by insects, let's say for argument's sake.
[00:34:19] Mel: Students then will identify and co construct that with the teacher, rather the teacher saying, for you to be successful, you need to be able to do this. The students themselves come up with their own success criteria. So it's differentiated for those students that make in. One step in their rubric might be the be all and end all for them, because for them just to get up in the morning and put a uniform on, and then reaching that first descriptor in that rubric has been successful for them.
[00:34:53] Mel: But somebody else who's quite, you know, A capable student might say, for me to be successful, I'm going to go to [00:35:00] rubric three stars, for example, and this is what the teacher should be looking for. And that's them taking autonomy on their
[00:35:08] Jen: own learning. Makes me think about it from a secondary perspective, how valuable it is to have portfolios.
[00:35:14] Jen: And like this common design, for example, is distinct from science, which has an exam. The art subjects have that portfolio and they talk through the process of how they got to where they got. What a rich piece of information that portfolio is. I mean, in science, in secondary science, in VCA, we're looking at a log book is, could that be used as a way of helping to chart student knowledge?
[00:35:38] Jen: But I'm thinking from a senior secondary perspective. So what sort of. Other ways could we get students to document the process, not just copy notes, but what, what could we get them to do that creates a bit of a portfolio that helps us chart the critical creative thinking that's been happening all the way along and not just the end point.
[00:35:57] Bec: So if teachers out there are really interested in [00:36:00] creativity and critical thinking and want to bring it into their classroom, where might they look? Uh, for some resources or even just some follow up reading.
[00:36:07] Jen: I think the language in the curriculum is a really great place to start, uh, because that gives you a language around that, how to break down critical creative thinking into smaller bits.
[00:36:17] Jen: The other really fantastic resource I would direct people to is the OECD critical creative thinking project. And that project, a number of countries contributed to that research that came out of that. on the OECD website, and it usually comes up if you search for that. There are a number of class friendly rubrics that have been designed by teachers for teachers, and they break down critical creative thinking into its smaller constituent parts.
[00:36:43] Jen: And that language is very user friendly and very easy to then make connections between, uh, this is what I do in my classes. I can see the connections in the rubric and I, I emphasize them when I'm teaching about them. So strengths and weaknesses, for example, is in that rubric. Empathy [00:37:00] is in that rubric, ideating, evaluating the product, evaluating how well that prototype actually meets the design brief.
[00:37:07] Jen: That's part of that rubric. So that language, you can incorporate it quite easily because it's very user friendly.
[00:37:13] Mel: I would recommend two texts. I really love Making Thinking Visible by Professor Ron Richard. And I really like Critical and Creative Thinking by Professor Bill Lucas as well. They're great resources.
[00:37:28] Mel: They're, they're very user friendly for classroom teachers. Um, you can adopt some of the strategies and techniques into your everyday teaching practice, especially around questioning. I've had to make a shift. As a teacher, I'm very good at affirming student responses. Yes. Well done. Good. Great. Thank you.
[00:37:52] Mel: And now I'm one to be quite neutral in my affirmation. So, um, does anybody have [00:38:00] something to share? Somebody might share a response and I just thank them. Thank you for sharing. Has anybody else got something that they would like to add? Does somebody disagree? And. Just by making that shift in teacher practice has allowed the students in our school to stop guessing what's in the teacher's mind.
[00:38:21] Mel: Because if they haven't thought exactly what the teacher was thinking, but they still have a valuable thought, they might be less open to share that. at worse, they might think that they're wrong. And so just by making that small little shift in questioning technique, which is something that both those texts that I refer to represent and, and, and offer goes a long way to building that culture of being
[00:38:51] Bec: great thinkers.
[00:38:53] Bec: Thanks so much. That's a really great suggestion, a really good place to start. And thank you both so much for chatting with me. Thank you. [00:39:00] And that's a wrap on the final episode for this season of Let's Talk Teaching. Thanks for listening and being part of this journey exploring the world of teaching. We hope our conversations have offered you valuable strategies and perspectives that inspire you to reflect on and develop your teaching practice.
[00:39:19] Bec: And if anything from this season has resonated with you, share it with someone you think might find it valuable. We've included a wealth of practical resources in our show notes that support your teaching journey. Be sure to check them out. If you're enjoying the show, don't forget to subscribe, rate and review, and follow us on Instagram at monash underscore education.
[00:39:41] Bec: X at Monash Education and Facebook at Education Monash and tell us what you thought of today's episode using the hashtag Let's Talk Teaching Podcast. We are grateful for the support of Monash University's Faculty of Education in producing this podcast. For more information on short [00:40:00] courses and undergraduate and postgraduate study options, visit Head to monash.
[00:40:04] Bec: edu. au forward slash education forward slash learn more. Thanks again for listening to Let's Talk Teaching.