I got to see George Couros, author of The Innovator’s Mindset, speak at a conference a few weeks ago. He was a dynamic and fun speaker but more than anything I loved this graphic he shared of the characteristics of people with an innovator’s mindset.
I love this visual support for helping me think through how to craft a classroom and curriculum that support innovative thinking–for students and for myself! Usually a web isn’t my favorite kind of graphic organizer (my mind tends to like linear), but this works because innovation and creativity aren’t linear. By their very nature, these traits are messy and we need to make room for that kind of messiness in our rooms and in our minds.
The Creativity Project, edited by Colby Sharp of Nerdy Book Club fame, arrived in my mailbox this week and I’m inspired. A bunch of amazing authors put together a bunch of fascinating writing prompts and then swapped ideas and wrote in response to the prompts they were given from their fellow authors. The result is an edited, collaborative seed notebook of amazing writing and creativity. The opening piece, for example, prompted by Kate DiCamillo’s challenge to write a piece entirely in dialogue based on a line heard by a stranger on public transportation, is an absurdist short story from Lemony Snicket that reads like “Who’s on first?” about the idiom “I want to make myself perfectly clear.” Laugh out loud funny and silly. Some of the prompts are specific, like Sherman Alexie’s mock-Haiku with line-by-line content criteria that Kate Messner turned into a gut-punch historical reflection in twenty-seven words. Others are wide open, like Javaka Steptoe’s surreal photo prompt of a tree with stuffed animals growing like fruit, that inspired Chris Grabenstein’s “Fluffle-Picking Time” short story. The pieces include graphic stories, illustrations, poems, monologues, dialogues, and short stories; the prompts leave the creative world wide open.
What great inspiration for our students and ourselves! Share the prompts and give students and yourself a chance to respond. Give students a chance to write prompts for each other and for you. Put yourself in the mix to nurture your own innovator’s mind.
The Integrated Curriculum Classroom 