I know. Creative teaching environment, blahdy blah, frrrt. The fact is while education has become more creative, it still is lacking. And even if the teaching has achieved something on the creative scale, testing is still very much not.
A few truisms that made me stumble on this.
- One of the reasons I tank on tests is because there's something inside of me that always wants to find a clever, innovative something. I never get rewarded for clever new ideas on tests and I sometimes get penalized. The rigid test structure is set out beforehand (that's the point) and thinking outside the box isn't encouraged.
- This even happens in creative subjects. I made a film shot in reverse (people walking backwards, etc.) that my teacher barely acknowledged. True, it wasn't a very good film, but I think he was instantly turned off by my 'gimmick'. (Which of course has been done before, if it was 'creative' from his well-informed perspective he would have been all over it. Why should a person need to be fully aware of the field before creativity is rewarded? Especially in a learning setting. Re-inventing wheels is actually a fantastic way to learn how wheels work.)
- Course structures are linear. (At least all the one's I'm aware of.)
- Sports seem to be quasi-linear. There's a regular season of so many games and then some sort of bracketed championship where you don't know the path your team will take. Even in the scheduled games, you don't know what path the game will take and creative approaches are rewarded if they are effective. (Uncreative approaches are rewarded as well, so there's something to be said for that.)
- In society we have a hard time judging creativity. The method of using a measuring stick to size up something doesn't work when the something keeps changing the nature of the measuring stick. I've noticed so many 'best actor awards' have gone to actors in bio-pics where they act like people who really existed. It's almost like the judges can finally say "now that's great acting. He totally nailed the JFK impersonation."
So could you design a course that has the linear textbook replaced with a computer program with a tree-like structure. The class is presented with a problem and they have to come up with a solution. Their way is paved with aided discovery (the teacher is the aid) of the principles/theorems/facts/logic/etc that have already been established from past academia. At the end of one branch of the tree, the program would evaluate if there are any substantial portions of the tree not covered, and would present a new problem that would take students across that ground. This sounds a bit like a computer game and I think that's a good thing.
How do you test creatively? I dunno. Perhaps it isn't possible. So maybe the test would be a similar problem to what students encountered in the course to see if they could do it again on their own.
Some of you are probably saying "yeah, this has already been done before. Do your homework." Well that's my point. So what if I'm reinventing the creative education wheel. And I do actually need to get on that homework.
A few truisms that made me stumble on this.
- One of the reasons I tank on tests is because there's something inside of me that always wants to find a clever, innovative something. I never get rewarded for clever new ideas on tests and I sometimes get penalized. The rigid test structure is set out beforehand (that's the point) and thinking outside the box isn't encouraged.
- This even happens in creative subjects. I made a film shot in reverse (people walking backwards, etc.) that my teacher barely acknowledged. True, it wasn't a very good film, but I think he was instantly turned off by my 'gimmick'. (Which of course has been done before, if it was 'creative' from his well-informed perspective he would have been all over it. Why should a person need to be fully aware of the field before creativity is rewarded? Especially in a learning setting. Re-inventing wheels is actually a fantastic way to learn how wheels work.)
- Course structures are linear. (At least all the one's I'm aware of.)
- Sports seem to be quasi-linear. There's a regular season of so many games and then some sort of bracketed championship where you don't know the path your team will take. Even in the scheduled games, you don't know what path the game will take and creative approaches are rewarded if they are effective. (Uncreative approaches are rewarded as well, so there's something to be said for that.)
- In society we have a hard time judging creativity. The method of using a measuring stick to size up something doesn't work when the something keeps changing the nature of the measuring stick. I've noticed so many 'best actor awards' have gone to actors in bio-pics where they act like people who really existed. It's almost like the judges can finally say "now that's great acting. He totally nailed the JFK impersonation."
So could you design a course that has the linear textbook replaced with a computer program with a tree-like structure. The class is presented with a problem and they have to come up with a solution. Their way is paved with aided discovery (the teacher is the aid) of the principles/theorems/facts/logic/etc that have already been established from past academia. At the end of one branch of the tree, the program would evaluate if there are any substantial portions of the tree not covered, and would present a new problem that would take students across that ground. This sounds a bit like a computer game and I think that's a good thing.
How do you test creatively? I dunno. Perhaps it isn't possible. So maybe the test would be a similar problem to what students encountered in the course to see if they could do it again on their own.
Some of you are probably saying "yeah, this has already been done before. Do your homework." Well that's my point. So what if I'm reinventing the creative education wheel. And I do actually need to get on that homework.
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