MS Teachers Present at National Conference

Middle School teachers Jennifer Kwiatek and Martha Barrett recently presented at the annual convention of the National Association for Gifted Children in Tampa, Florida. Their topic was the integration of creativity skills into a middle school “biome” unit, and the change in quality that seem to occur in student learning when these skills were integrated.

This particular unit was originally taught in 2006, with students simply being encouraged to “be creative.” In the interim, Mrs. Kwiatek was trained in Creative Studies at Buffalo State, and she incorporated this training when the unit was being planned for spring of 2008.

This time, rather than directing students to be creative, the unit emphasized teaching students how to be creative using the Torrance Incubation Model (TIM), a framework for designing lessons that enhances students’ creative thinking skills. This model consists of three stages:

1. Heighten Anticipation: creating the desire to know and arouse curiosity
2. Deepen Expectations: sustaining the motivation created and encourage deeper exploration of a topic
3. Extend Learning: keeping it going even after the lesson is over

The following skills are associated with this model:

• Find the Problem - recognition or awareness of a situation
• Produce and Consider Many Alternatives - generating many and varied ideas
• Be Flexible - perceiving a problem in different perspectives
• Be Original - moving away from the obvious
• Highlight the Essence - identifying what is most important and absolutely essential
• Elaborate – but not Excessively - adding details or ideas and developing themKeep Open - resisting premature closure
• Be Aware of Emotions - recognizing verbal and non-verbal cues
• Put Your Ideas in Context - putting experiences together in a meaningful way and making connections
• Combine and Synthesize - combining relatively unrelated elements
• Visualize It – Richly and Colourfully - using vivid and exciting imagery
• Enjoy and Use Fantasy - imagine, play and consider things that are not concrete or do not exist
• Make it Swing – Make it Ring! - responding to sound and movement
• Look at it Another Way - being able to see things from a different visual or psychological perspective
• Visualize the Inside - paying attention to the internal dynamic of things
• Breakthrough – Extend the Boundaries - thinking outside prescribed requirements
• Let Humor Flow and Use It - perceiving incongruity and responding to a surprise
• Get Glimpses of the Future – wonder and dream about possibilities

In applying this model and these skills, among the approaches that Mrs. Barrett and Mrs. Kwiatek employed was asking students to determine why exploring Biomes might be important to their learning; brainstorming activities for teaching others about biomes; and making future predictions based upon past and present knowledge (to learn this skill, students began by making past, present, and future predictions regarding Mrs. Barrett!).

The result? Both units involved creating biomes and touring various grades through these biomes. The 2008 unit offered these enhancements:

• The creation of biomes involved the use of a much wider variety of material used in much more creative fashion than in 2006
• The focus on predicting the future condition of a biome encouraged higher level thinking than the previous unit
• Tour speeches were scripted for the new unit with a focus on information that would keep audience attention
• The unit eased the students into the material by heightening their anticipation and extended the learning after the guided tours
• Included activities that promoted reasoning, predicting, analyzing, and drawing conclusions
• Creativity was explicitly taught rather than expected

As often happens at Park, student provided a valuable assessment of the new unit:

“The 5th and 6th grade biome project was creative because, any teacher could have you research a biome, but we had to recreate the biome in a selected area. We had to be creative and use everything in our area to recreate our biome. On top of that we had to dress like we would if we were actually in that biome. We were required to explain different aspects of our biome and present to the elementary school, parents, and anyone who wanted to come and see what we did. This was a very memorable experience, especially because it was interesting to learn in a creative, and fun way. I got a lot out of this experience…”

~ Julian, Grade 5