Tag: editing

105/365 Initial Thoughts on Quantum Creativity

As recommended a friend, I’ve been reading Pamela Meyer’s Quantum Creativity.

Meyer attempts to weave together quantum physics, improv theater, and corporate creativity in a way that helps readers access their own creative spirit through 9 principles. This far, I’ve read through the first three: listen to your essence, follow your passion, and abstain from judgement.

Rather than review the book before I’ve finished reading it, the pieces below are those Ives highlighted, underlined and starred in the introduction and first three chapters.

“Creativity requires a lively awareness of possibilities.” p. xv

“Creativity is the process; innovation is the outcome.” p. xv

“A person in a darkened room has little chance to create light by sitting in the dark and pondering the reasons for the darkness, the ramifications of continued darkness, and the impact darkness has had in his or her life.” p. xx

“Stage improvisation contains all of the elements of your workday: pressure to think on your feet, unexpected collaborative opportunities, and the bottom-line need to produce.” p. 11

“To respond to the ‘immediate stimuli of the environment,’ we let go of the logic and control that often keeps us stuck and prevents us from noticing the subtle impulses of our Essence.” p. 12

“…you may just as likely discover Follow Your Passion to lead you to change the way you work, not what you do for work.” p. 25

“True passion is the nexus of a deep connection to purpose and a willingness to act in its fulfillment…” p. 27

“If we do not follow our own passion, the passion of others can actually cause us pain.” p. 31

“‘Anything worth doing, is worth doing badly.'” p. 36

“A wise woman once said, ‘If the other person is the problem, there is no solution.'” p. 37

“Countercreative, judgement is the most insidious block to innovation.” p. 46

“Judgement destroys the wonder so necessary to create space for possibilities. Without wonder we would still live in the dark ages. Discovery propels us forward. We are all born with a desire to play; that’s how we learned about ourselves in the world. That is how we continue to learn. We forget that.” p. 46

“…it is crucial that the evaluation criteria be articulated before beginning this stage.” p. 47

“Author Judith Guest says, ‘The creator and the editor – two halves of the writer whole – should sleep in separate rooms.'” p. 48

“As soon as we label an idea ‘stupid,’ ‘out-dated,’ ‘horrible,’ or even: ‘fabulous,’ ‘brilliant,’ ‘innovative,’ we limit its potential.” p. 51

“We must delight ourselves before we can hope to move others.” p. 55

“Focusing on solutions is a wonderful way to give a clear response without judging either the idea or it’s owner.” p. 59

“Creation is big enough, hot enough, and generous enough to overcome anything your whiny belief system serves up.” p. 60

I’m now over a third of the way through the book, and Meyer is vascular ing between primer and insightful. I’m going to finish the text because the above quotations give me enough hope that I’ll find enough meat to make it worthwhile.

73/365 Schools Have Built-In Audiences

While outside audiences must be curated, and it’s a skill rightly worth teaching, there are other considerations for audience in learning and how schools can leverage them more effectively. Most specifically, students are a built-in audience, and we could leverage better.

The schools we need realize audience is built in.

The easiest way to think about this is the English classroom. Students are assigned essays to write. Even the most traditional teacher is likely, from time to time, to ask students to share their work with one another during the editing process and peer edit. In technology deserts, this is usually the act of trading handwritten drafts, asking students to read what’s on the page and mark them up. It’s a start, and we can do better.

Simply trading papers leaves the editor with a lack of direction. She’s likely to read through, mark the most glaring punctuation errors, write “good job” and hand it back to her partner.

Without guidance, students aren’t likely to get the feedback they want or need from their pre-published audiences. They’re also not likely to reflect on what that desired feedback might be. Using a more structured approach like the writer’s memo described by Jeffrey Sommers in his article “Behind the Paper: Using the Student-Teacher Memo” asks both writer and audience to think about their focus in the feedback process and what will be most helpful to the writer.

Tools like the writer’s memo take better advantage of the in-school audience than the traditional trade-and-mark approach and ask students to reflect on what they’ve created as well.

Once student work has reached a published phase, we can take better advantage of built-in audiences as well. We can ask students to make the work useful to their audience rather than a simple exhibition of the skills they’ve been working on. The most misguided example of this is the use of social video sites for school projects.

In a math class, the teacher may ask her students to create a video explaining the concepts taught (and hopefully learned) during a unit of study. The students work alone or in groups to complete the assignment, upload their videos to the designated site, and the teacher reviews them, makes comments and sends them back. In some cases the teacher might take class time to highlight some of what she has deemed as the best productions.

These videos can be more useful.

This is surely not the last time these concepts will be taught in the school. The next year or next semester, other students will follow and need to learn these concepts. Too often the teacher will forget the video archive students have created and leave them to languish. Instead, leveraging built-in audience means realizing these new students can start their learning with the previous year’s videos and utilize the commenting function to activate the prior students as tutors or co-teachers of the content. Suddenly, the videos live on and the previous students are asked to re-activate knowledge in the service of this new audience.

A year is a long time to wait, and there’s no need. Sticking with our math video example, consider the power of teachers of subsequent math classes collaborating and the teacher of the higher-level math class asking what concepts the lower-level math class will be learning about first. Then, the higher-level students review the previous year’s content and craft learning tools to help the younger students. Given the spiraling of most math curricula, this return to more fundamental concepts is likely to shore up the higher-level students’ skills while providing lower-level students learning objects that are crafted in language divorced from the formality of textbooks.

As the Internet has opened the world up to our schools, the temptation has become to think of the world as our audience. Remembering the audience already in our classrooms and schools can help to deepen knowledge and work to create local learning communities.

Classy: Rethinking the conversation of revision in writing

As much as I believe the tools should be in the background, this is as much about tools as it is about learning.

Two years ago, I started asking my G11 students to write bi-weekly analytical essays on topics of their choosing. Every other week, they are responsible for drafting an original thesis, doing research to back it up and then composing a brief analytical essay proving their points.

The essays were dubbed “2fers,” as they were due every two weeks and assigned as being 2 pages in length.

Larissa Pahomov, my G11 English teaching counterpart also decided to have her students complete these papers. This quickly became a lesson in the effects of a grade-wide assignment. Every SLA senior knows 2fers, and every SLA sophomore knows they’re on the horizon.

This year, we tried something new.

Revision and editing are always difficult components of the writing process in a 1:1 program (and any other program, for that matter). Whereas my English teachers asked me to turn in copies of each of my drafts with my final copy, writing on the computer calls for something else.

I edit and revise as I compose on the computer. I’m editing and revising as I type this. My first sentence of this piece went through three drafts the world will never see.

Still, when I’m done writing something that’s a little shaky, I’ll send it to someone else to check out.

Most of my students don’t have that switch in their brain.

Physiologically, the adolescent brain isn’t built for reflection. Sharing an electronic doc via e-mail can end up with many copies. Printing can waste paper and creates one more thing to keep track of. If I think I’ve edited it whilst writing, wasting time to have someone else do the same thing, well, wastes time.

This year, the students are utilizing our new installation of google apps for education in their 2fer writing.

Here’s how it went down:

  • With a max of three 2fers per quarter, each student created a file in the first quarter that would contain that quarter’s 2fers.
  • Those files were shared with me.
  • I dropped each file in a shared folder so all students could see every other student’s work.

At first, students were told to pick the most ruthless editor they could think of and ask them to look at their first papers.

The first go wasn’t great. Not everyone looked at their chosen partner’s essay. Some people chose editors with skill levels insufficient for pushing their writing forward as far as possible.

For the second go round, I assigned each student to a group of three. They kept their original editors, but were also responsible for looking at the two others in their group.

Results improved.

Now, this is not to say I was completely removed from the process. On the contrary, I was in there as well.

When I was assessing, my comments were added to their peers’. The rubric was pasted at the end of each essay with targeted comments for improvement.

Here’s the beauty. On the second round of 2fers, I saw the students using the same language as I had used in my feedback. I didn’t need to correct formatting, they were doing it for one another.

At its best, the revision became wonderful asynchronous conversations about the ideas and arguments being made. At its worst, it was surface level revision. Either way, it brought improvement, and students were learning the habits and language of revision.

I know this looks like a writing workshop, but it’s not quite. I know it looks like an electronic portfolio, but it’s not quite.

It’s asynchronous nature challenges that. The fact that no conversation or draft is never really done challenges that.

What’s more, in a writing workshop, what gets turned in at the end is usually the final copy. The conversation that led to that copy is hidden or lost unless, like my high school English teachers, students are asked to turn in all drafts. Even then, I’m fairly certain that was a check for completion, not a check for conversation.

At the start of the second quarter, I asked students to review their Q1 docs and look for trends in the comments their editors and I left. From their, they wrote goals for improvement in the second quarter. Those goals were posted at the top of their Q2 2fer doc.

They brought the most important pieces of the old conversation with them to the new conversation.

I realize the pieces of this aren’t anything new. The process, on the other hand, and the tools utilize to build the process, strike me as something new. I’m throwing this in the “Doing old things better in new ways” category.