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The correlation to lifetime creative accomplishment was more than three times stronger for childhood creativity than childhood IQ.

The European Union designated 2009 as the European Year of Creativity and Innovation, holding conferences on the neuroscience of creativity, financing teacher training, and instituting problem-based learning programs—curricula driven by real-world inquiry—for both children and adults. In China there has been widespread education reform to extinguish the drill-and-kill teaching style. Instead, Chinese schools are also adopting a problem-based learning approach.

The creative problem-solving program has the highest success in increasing children’s creativity

In many courses that are not focused on writing skills, instructors might not provide detailed enough instructions on their writing assignments to convey to the student what the instructors’ expectations are

a badly written essay may be the result of the student author not understanding the subject rather than not being a capable writer.

On the question of how students are incorporating and acknowledging the sources they find through their research, Howard and Jamieson report that the vast majority of the first-year writing student essays studied so far are defined primarily by “patchwriting,” evidence that students are not really understanding or engaging the material they are reading for their essays.

(In a study conducted on one college campus, a faculty member gave a student assignment to a group of colleagues for analysis. Few of them could understand what the faculty member wanted. If experienced profs are confused, how can we expect students to understand?)

Some recent research shows that many students do poorly on assignments or in participation because they do not understand what to do or why they should do it.

Attending to the need for power could be as simple as allowing students to choose from among two or three things to do--two or three paper topics, two or three activities, choosing between writing an extra paper and taking the final exam, etc. Many students have a need to have fun in active ways--in other words, they need to be noisy and excited. Rather than always avoiding or suppressing these needs, design an educational activity that fulfills them.

you need a mixture of materials, you need a collection of different perspectives, different points of view, in order to come to any new understanding.

Communities have to be open, they have to have some source of new material coming in, whether its raw material, resources, ideas, etc., and then they have to have some place where they can send their creative product, the things that they make, the ideas that they have.

A third criterion that distinguishes a community defines as a network from a community defined as a group is autonomy. And what that means is that each of the members of that community are working toward their own sense of values, their own sense of purpose, their own goals or endeavours.

Expecting students to write in our classrooms for hit-or-miss praise is criminal. Their nimble fingers can text an entire piece of writing via their mobile device to a relevant audience online at the same time they publish to a worldwide network. For them, the pay is in the joy of publication, in the act of making their work known, and of partaking of the work of others.

Take advantage of over 20 digital tools for students (Sidebar #2 - Digital Tools for Students).

You can easily transition from notes and highlights kept in Diigo.com social bookmarking tool to a written piece that appropriately cites content. Check Sidebar #3 for Electronic Citation Resources.

identifying something people believe in and inviting them to talk to each other. You don’t create the interest, you create the platform

The better you get to know and like your fellow members, and the more you care about their opinion of you, the more you participate and thus work towards a successful goal.

designing your community that reflects both the common interest and the individual contributions as equals.

The use of web logs (“blogs”) has become a popular addition to many college courses as faculty try to find new ways to integrate this popular technology into the classroom. (Beeson, 2005; Quible, 2005; Ducate, 2005, Glogoff, 2005).   By the end of 2004, 32 million Americans said they had read a blog, eight million Americans had created blogs, and almost half were created by people under age 30 (Reine, 2005).   In fact, Huffaker (2005) cites several studies that reveal that a significant number of blog authors are younger than 20.  Lenhart (2006) notes that by 2006, these numbers had increased to 12 million American adults who keep a blog, and 57 million American adults who say they read them. Thus, students come to the classroom with a facility for maintaining and communicating through blogs.  Beeson (2005) argues that it is an approach that is more in keeping with their way of thinking (29).  With the increased popularity of blogs, faculty members have been integrating them into their courses to enhance class discussion.  Past research has summarized findings from case studies involving the use of blogs in a single course (Glogoff, 2003; Quible, 2005; Ducate, 2005).  The authors of this study, conducted at a business university, assigned a similar blogging exercise in three different courses—expository writing, e-commerce, and government--in order to introduce students to the use of blogs in their respective disciplines and to help students prepare for meaningful classroom discussion. This study finds that by completing the required readings and then posting discussion questions and reflections on topics of interest to which their classmates can respond--essentially beginning the conversation prior to the class session--students become more engaged in the course material. This exercise requires students not only to read the required course materials but to engage with them critically in order to move beyond a superficial understanding of the materials.  By using the same assignment and assessment tool, the authors found that blogs can be effective in enhancing class discussion in a range of disciplines and in integrating liberal learning into professional programs.            Blogging in the Classroom

Like online threaded discussion groups, blogs are an easy way to engage in dialogue on the web outside the classroom. The availability of several blog providers such as Google’s blogger.com, LiveJournal.com, and WordPress.com make it free and easy to set up, manage, and update blogs frequently and without additional support.   By using blogs “students become familiar with blogging, a tool now used by an ever-increasing number of employers to support routine operating functions” (Quible, 2005, p. 76).

Since blogs are a fairly recent pedagogical tool, new scholarship has emerged that points to its benefits in the classroom.  The ability of students and faculty to easily update an online journal promotes blogging as a new form of communication to enhance class discussion and to create a community outside the classroom.  Flatley (2005) argues that the technological medium provides a space where students can interact with one another, and it can open up the classroom space "where discussions are continued and where every student gets an equal voice" (p. 77).  In addition, blogs can promote collaboration (Flatley, 2005; Williams & Jacobs, 2004; Oravec, 2002).

Any teacher worth his or her salt knows that if you really want to measure the level of student thinking, you have to have students write. Answers to multiple-choice questions can often be faked; answers to essay questions cannot.

I also find it odd that while many states have raised their test scores over the past few years, we as a country continue to fall in international comparisons of academic achievement. How can this be? If we are getting “better,” why are we declining internationally? In an attempt to answer these questions, Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford University studied high-achieving countries from around the world. Her findings? School systems in high-achieving countries value higher-order thinking. They parse their standards to make them lean. They use very little, if any, multiple-choice assessments to monitor student progress. They require students to research, to inquire, to write—to think critically. They give students time to reflect upon their learning. They emphasize the skills graduates will need to be college- or career-ready in a globally competitive marketplace. They surround their students with interesting books. Because their assessments demand critical thinking, their students are moving ahead. Because our assessments demand shallow thinking, our students are falling behind.