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The 6 Pillars of Creativity and How to Master the Art of “Effective Surprise” 

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The 6 Pillars of Creativity and How to Master the Art of “Effective Surprise” 

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One of the greatest preoccupations not only of our culture but of our civilization is the question of what creativity is, dating back to the dawn of recorded thought. But it wasn't until the advent of modern psychology in the early twentieth century that our answers to the question began to take the shape of something more structured and systematic than metaphysical hunches - there's Graham Wallace's model of the four stages of the creative process from 1926, a five-step "technique for producing ideas" from 1939, Arthur Koestler's famous "bisociation" theory of how creativity works from 1964, and a number of derivative modern ideas.

But one of the most compelling in the past century comes from the influential Harvard psychologist Jerome Bruner (October 1, 1915-June 6, 2016), celebrated for his contributions to cognitive psychology and learning theory in education. In 1962, Bruner published On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand (public library) - a wonderfully dimensional exploration of "the act of knowing in itself and how it is shaped and in turn gives form to language, science, literature, and art," exploring not the biological mystery of left-handedness but the metaphorical mesmerism of the left hand, which has traditionally represented the power of intuition, imagination, and spontaneity: The title of the collection comes from Bruner's childhood fascination with the symbolism of the right hand as the doer and the left as the dreamer, and it is this toxic divide between the two that he sets out to counter with equal parts insight and irreverence. Articulating the same essential concern that Susan Sontag echoed two decades later in lamenting how the artificial divide between intuition and intelligence limits us, Bruner pits himself "in the role of a would-be mediator between the humanist and the scientist" and gently guides the metaphoric left hand to tickle the right, which has become "too stiff with technique," into creative awakening.

In one of the most timelessly illuminating essays from the collection, "The Conditions of Creativity," Bruner writes:

There is something antic about creating, although the enterprise be serious. And there is a matching antic spirit that goes with writing about it, for if ever there was a silent process, it is the creative one. Antic and serious and silent. Yet there is good reason to inquire about creativity, a reason beyond practicality, for practicality is not a reason but a justification after the fact. The reason is the ancient search of the humanist for the excellence of man: the next creative act may bring man to a new dignity.

Noting that there is a "shrillness to our contemporary concern with creativity" - something perhaps even more observably true today than half a century ago, when he pondered the question - Bruner offers an essential caveat: Our search for those sources of dignity through creation is dictated by the cultural patterns of the time. In previous eras, it came from creating works of art in the image of "God," but the technological boom of the twentieth century - an era "whose massive achievement is an intricate technological order" - brought forth a new preoccupation with pragmatism as a measure of creative merit, at the same time making it insufficient to be "merely useful." Bruner writes:

The servant can pattern himself on the master - and so he did when God was master and Man His servant creating works in His glory - but the machine is the servant of man, and to pattern one's function on the machine provides no measure of dignity. The machine is useful, the system in terms of which the machines gain their use is efficient, but what is man?

The artist, the writer, and to a new degree the scientist seek an answer in the nature of their acts. They create or they seek to create, and this in itself endows the process with dignity. there is "creative" writing and "pure" science, each justifying the work of its producer in its own right.

Of psychologists' task in explicating the process, Bruner admonishes:

Make no mistake about it: it is not simply as technicians that we are being called, but as adjutants to the moralist. My antic sense rises in self-defense. My advice, in the midst of the seriousness, is to keep an eye for the tinker shuffle, the flying of kites, and kindred sources of surprised amusement.

Indeed, this notion of "surprised amusement" becomes central to Bruner's conception of creativity, which he defines with succinct elegance:

An act that produces effective surprise [is] the hallmark of the creative enterprise.

It is essential, here to distinguish between creativity and originality. In a sentiment that brings to mind Twain's famous assertion that plagiarism is the seed of creative work, Alexander Graham Bell's conviction that "our most original compositions are composed exclusively of expressions derived from others," and Henry Miller's poetic debunking of the originality illusion, Bruner cautions:

The road to banality is paved with creative intentions. Surprise is not easily defined. It is the unexpected that strikes one with wonder or astonishment. What is curious about effective surprise is that it need not be rare or infrequent or bizarre and is often none of these things. Effective surprises ... seem rather to have the quality of obviousness about them when they occur, producing a shock of recognition following which there is no longer astonishment.

He goes on to outline three kinds of effectiveness in surprise.

Predictive effectiveness is "the kind of surprise that yields high predictive value in its wake" - for instance, as in the most elegant formulae of mathematics and physics, which hold that whenever certain conditions are present, a specific outcome is guaranteed to be produced. (All of these 17 equations that changed the world are excellent examples.) Predictive effectiveness doesn't always come through surprise - it's often "the slow accretion of knowledge and urge." And yet, Bruner argues, "the surprise may only come when we look back and see whence we have come" - the very thing Steve Jobs described in his autobiographical account of his own creative journey, in noting that "you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards."

Bruner's second form is formal effectiveness, the kind most frequently encountered in mathematics and logic, and occasionally music. He cites French polymath Henri Poincaré's famous account of how creativity works, which holds that "sudden illumination" - the mythic Eureka! moment - is the unconscious combinatorial process that reveals "the unsuspected kinship between ... facts, long known, but wrongly believed to be strangers to one another."

The third, Bruner notes, is the hardest to describe. Metaphorical effectiveness is also manifested by "connecting domains of experience that were before apart," but what distinguishes it from the formal kind is that the mechanisms of connectedness come for the realm of art rather than science and logic - the kind of connectedness that Carl Jung described as "visionary," in contrast to the merely psychological. (Metaphorical thinking, after all, is at the developmental root of human imagination.) While we are wired to make sense of the world via categorization, "metaphoric combination leaps beyond systematic placement, explores connections that before were unsuspected."

The unifying mechanism for all three, however, remains what Einstein termed "combinatory play." Bruner writes:

All of the forms of effective surprise grow out of a combinatorial activity - a placing of things in new perspectives.

Echoing Tolstoy's notion of "emotional infectiousness," Bruner adds:

There are certain deep sharings of plight among human beings that make it possible the communication of the artist to the beholder... The artist - whatever his medium - must be close enough to these conditions in himself so that they may guide his choice among combinations, provide him with the genuine and protect him from the paste.

And so we get to the true gift of effective surprise:

The triumph of effective surprise is that it takes one beyond the common ways of experiencing the world... Creative products have this power of reordering experience and thought in their image. In science, the reordering is much the same from one beholder of a formula to another. In art, the imitation is in part self-imitation. It is the case too that the effective surprise of the creative [person] provides a new instrument for manipulating the world - physically as with the creation of the wheel or symbolically as with the creation of .

The main paradox of such combinatorial creation, however, is that effective surprise is almost always followed by "the exercise of technique" - in other words, creativity requires the fusion of inspiration and technique, which appear at first to be opposite in spirit: one spontaneous, the other derived from repeated deliberate practice. To resolve the "paradox and antimony," Bruner proposes six essential conditions of creativity:

1. Detachment and commitment. A willingness to divorce oneself from the obvious is surely a prerequisite for the fresh combinatorial act that produces effective surprise. there must be as a necessary, if not a sufficient, condition a detachment from the forms as they exist... But it is a detachment of commitment. For there is about it a caring, a deep need to understand something, to master a technique, to render a meaning. So while the poet, the mathematician, the scientist must each achieve detachment, they do it in the interest of commitment. And at one stroke they, the creative ones, are disengaged from that which exists conventionally and are engaged deeply in what they construct to replace it.

2. Passion and decorum. By passion I understand a willingness and ability to let one's impulses express themselves in one's life through one's work... Passion, like discriminating taste, grows on its use. You more likely act yourself into feeling than feel yourself into action... But again a paradox: it is not all urgent vitality. There is decorum in creative activity: a love of form, an etiquette toward the object of our efforts, a respect for materials... So both are necessary and there must surely be a subtle matter of timing involved - when the impulse, when the taming.

3. Freedom to be dominated by the object. You begin to write a poem. Before long it, the poem, begins to develop metrical, stanzaic,symbolical requirements. You, as the writer of the poem, are serving it - it seems. or you may be pursuing the task of building a formal model to represent the known properties of single nerve fibers and their synapses: soon the model takes over... There is something odd about the phenomenon. We externalize an object, a product of our thoughts, treat it as "out there." Freud remarked, commenting on projection, that human beings seem better able to deal with stimuli from the outside than from within. So it is with the externalizing of a creative work, permitting it to develop its own being, its own autonomy coming to serve it. It is as if it were easier to cope with there, as if this arrangement permitted the emergence of more unconscious impulse, more material not readily accessible...
To be dominated by an object of one's own creation - perhaps its extreme is Pygmalion dominated by Galatea - is to be free of the defenses that keep us hidden from ourselves.

As the object takes over and demands to be completed "in its own terms," there is a new opportunity to express a style and an individuality. Likely as not, it is so partly because we are rid of the internal juggling of possibilities, because we have represented them "out there" where we can look at them, consider them.

4. Deferral and immediacy. There is an immediacy to creating anything, a sense of direction, an objective, a general idea, a feeling. Yet the immediacy is anything but a quick orgasm of completion. Completion is deferred...
Having read a good many journals and diaries by writers I have come to the tentative conclusion that the principal guard against precocious completion, in writing at least, is boredom. I have little doubt that the same protection avails the scientist. It is the boredom of conflict, knowing deep down what one wishes to say and knowing that one has not said it. one acts on the impulse to exploit an idea, to begin. One also acts on the impulse of boredom, to defer. Thus Virginia Woolf, trying to finish in February 1928: "Always, always, the last chapter slips out of my hands. One gets bored. One whips oneself up. I still hope for a fresh wind and don't very much bother, except that I miss the fun that was so tremendously lively all October, November, and December.

5. The internal drama. There is within each person his own cast of characters* - an ascetic, and perhaps a glutton, a prig, a frightened child, a little man, even an onlooker, sometimes a Renaissance man. The great works of the theater are decompositions of such a cast, the rendering into external drama of the internal one, the conversion of the internal cast into dramatis personae...
As in the drama, so too a life can be described as a script, constantly rewritten, guiding the unfolding internal drama. It surely does not do to limit the drama to the stiff characters of the Freudian morality play - the undaunted ego, the brutish id, the censorious and punitive superego. Is the internal cast a reflection of the identifications to which we have been committed? I do not think it is as simple as that. It is a way of grouping our internal demands and there are idealized models over and beyond those with whom we have special identification - figures in myth, in life, in the comics, in history, creations of fantasy...

It is the working out of conflict and coalition within the set of identities that compose the person that one finds the source of many of the richest and most surprising combinations. It is not merely the artist and the writer, but the inventor too who is the beneficiary.

6. The dilemma of abilities. What shall we say of energy, of combinatorial zest, of intelligence, of alertness, of perseverance? I shall say nothing about them. They are obviously important but, from a deeper point of view, they are also trivial. For at any level of energy or intelligence there can be more or less of creating in our sense. Stupid people create for each other as well as benefiting from what comes from afar. So too do slothful and torpid people. I have been speaking of creativity, not of genius.

He ends with an essential disclaimer that sprinkles our cultural compulsion for explaining way the creative process with some much-needed grains of salt.

I end with the same perplexity in attempting to find some way of thinking reasonably about the creative process. At the outset I proposed that we define the creative act as effective surprise - the production of novelty. It is reasonable to suppose that we will someday devise a proper scientific theory capable of understanding and predicting such acts. Perhaps we will understand the energies that produce the creative act much as we have come to understand how the dynamo produces its energy. It may be, however, that there is another mode of approach to knowing how the process generates itself, and this will be the way in which we understand how symbols and ideas ... capture [our] thoughts. Often it is the poet who grasps these matters most firmly and communicates them most concisely. Perhaps it is our conceit that there is only one way of understanding a phenomenon. I have argued that just as there is predictive effectiveness, so is there metaphoric effectiveness. For the while, at least, we can do worse than to live with a metaphoric understanding of creativity.

On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand is enormously insightful and enriching in its entirety, exploring such facets of the creative experience as the act of discovery, art as a form of consciousness, our search for identity, and the question of fate in the age of science. Complement it with the excellent A Technique for Producing Ideas, Madeleine L'Engle on creativity and Sarah Lewis on creativity and the difference between mastery and success.
* See 28-year-old Susan Sontag's ideas about the four people a great writer must be, which she outlined in her diary in December of 1961, shortly after Bruner's essay was first published. "Jerry Bruner" appeared among her voracious reading diet recorded elsewhere in the diary, so it is highly likely that her concept of the four inner personae was influenced by Bruner.

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Pioneering Psychologist Jerome Bruner on the 6 Pillars of Creativity and How to Master the Art of "Effective Surprise"

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One of the greatest preoccupations not only of our culture but of our civilization is the question of what creativity is, dating back to the dawn of recorded thought.

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10 Ways to Improve Transfer of Learning 

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10 Ways to Improve Transfer of Learning 

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Whether you're a student or working professional looking to keep your skills current, the importance of being able to transfer what you learn in one context to an entirely new one cannot be overstated. Of course, the goal of any learning or training is to eventually be able to apply it in real-world situations, but a PayScale survey released last year found that 60 percent of employers don't believe recent graduates are well-prepared for their jobs.

One possible reason for this is that memory is context dependent, so transferring or recalling something that was learned in a classroom setting to a fast-paced work environment isn't always easy.

Once you understand how to go about transferring your knowledge to new contexts, however, you could change jobs or even careers and still find ways to apply your prior knowledge to the situations and problems you might face in a new role.

With this in mind, here are some tips for taking what you learn in educational settings and applying it in the workplace and other areas of your life.

1. Focus on the relevance of what you're learning

Research shows that when learning is relevant, students are able to connect what they're learning to what they already know and build new neural connections and long-term memory storage.

So if you want your learning to be engaging and to be able to remember it in other contexts, it's important to establish relevance early on. Think about how you might apply what you're learning today in your future job or everyday life and then try to tie it to some of your short or long-term goals.
For instance, if one of your long-term goals is to land a job in IT, focusing on how your course will help you reach that goal can make even the most tedious study material seem more engaging, because you understand that it's important to your future goals.

2. Take time to reflect and self-explain

Before you can transfer knowledge to new contexts, you need to understand the concept inside and out, which is why it's important to take time for reflection and self-explanation. Research shows that self-explanation can help you to identify any incorrect assumptions, lead to a deeper understanding of the material, and ultimately promote knowledge transfer.

So when you're learning about something that's completely new to you, take a moment to think about how you would explain it in your own words, whether this means using simpler words that are easier for you to remember or finding a way to connect the new information to something you already know by using real-world examples.

3. Use a variety of learning media

Another way to facilitate the transfer of learning to new contexts is to use as many different learning media as possible, from text and imagery to video and audio.

Research shows that using pictures, narration, and text can help prevent your cognitive resources from becoming overloaded and improve learning transfer. One study found that learners who used relevant visuals were able to retain more information and scored higher on transfer tests than those who used only text. They also perceived the content as easier to learn when visuals were used.

Even if your course doesn't have visuals or narration built into it, you can try to find ways to supplement what you're learning by using a variety of educational resources such as YouTube and TED Talks or iTunes U, EdX, and Coursera.

4. Change things up as often as possible

It's easy to get stuck in a rut with your learning by studying around the same time, in the same location, and using the same study strategies every day. But when you get used to constantly studying in the same way, it can be difficult to transfer the knowledge you acquire to new environments and situations.

Research shows that organising your learning in a more random way improves retention and transfer after (but not during) the training. So although studying in different environments and conditions may initially make it harder to remember what you're learning, in the long run it will help you retain the information more effectively.

This concept is known as desirable difficulties, because although introducing certain difficulties into the learning process will initially feel uncomfortable, it also encourages a deeper processing of materials.

5. Identify any gaps in your knowledge

Without a complete understanding of the concept or information you're learning, transferring it to new contexts will be more difficult. With this in mind, it's important to identify any gaps in your knowledge and then work on strengthening your weaker areas.

One excellent way to do this is through practice testing, as you'll be able to see exactly what types of questions you're consistently getting wrong and what topics you have yet to master. Similarly, practice tests will also show you which topics you have already mastered, which allows you to focus on the areas that need the most work.

6. Establish clear learning goals

Establishing clear learning goals will give you a better understanding of what you're trying to get out of your learning and how you might later transfer that knowledge and apply it in your work or personal life. If you know what the expected learning outcomes are, you'll also be able to focus on the right material.

When setting learning goals, it's better to be specific rather than general so you'll be able to measure your progress as you go along, but make sure your goals are realistic too. For example, if you're learning a new language, making it your goal to be fluent within one month is not very realistic. Making it your goal to learn the vocabulary and phrases necessary to go shopping or eat out at a restaurant is more doable, however.

7. Practise generalising

Generalising is the ability to transfer the knowledge or skills you gain in one setting to a new one. It's all about seeing the bigger picture and looking for more widely applicable rules, ideas, or principles. For example, a child that learns to stack wooden blocks could generalise that skill and later use it to build more elaborate creations using Lego bricks.

So when studying a new topic or concept, think about your past lessons or experiences and look for patterns and relationships. You can then determine whether these generalisations can be supported by other evidence you know of.

8. Make your learning social

If much of your learning happens when you're alone, it can help to have a chance to discuss it with others. This gives you the opportunity to explain what you're learning in your own words and apply your knowledge to new situations. Research also shows that collaborative learning promotes engagement and benefits long-term retention.

Even if you're not learning on the job or in a group setting, you can try online learning tools like Twitter, Blackboard, Edmodo, Quora, and others.

9. Use analogies and metaphors

Analogies and metaphors are great for drawing on your prior knowledge or experience and making associations between seemingly unrelated ideas. So when learning something new and trying to connect it to something you already know, it can help to think of appropriate analogies or metaphors.

Analogies compare two things and show how they are similar, such as "It was as light as a feather" or "He was solid as a rock." A metaphor is a figure of speech that describes something in a way that isn't literally true but helps to explain an idea or make a stronger impact, such as "Love is a battlefield."

10. Find daily opportunities to apply what you've learned

Applying what you've learned at school to real-world problems takes a lot of practice, so it's important to look for opportunities to apply what you're learning in your everyday life.

For example, if you have been studying a new language, make a conscious effort to remember the foreign names of different objects around the house when you get up in the morning. If you just attended a customer service training course, try to employ one of the new strategies you learned about when dealing with customers on your first day back at work.

Not sure how to start applying what you have learned in your job or everyday life? Go back and check your learning goals to remind yourself of what you set out to learn.

Marianne Stenger is a London-based freelance writer and journalist with extensive experience covering all things learning and development. She's particularly interested in the psychology of learning and how technology is changing the way we learn. Her articles have been featured by the likes of ABC Education, The Huffington Post, Lifehacker, and Psych Central. Follow her on Twitter @MarianneStenger.

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10 Ways to Improve Transfer of Learning | InformED

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Whether you're a student or working professional looking to keep your skills current, the importance of being able to transfer what you learn in one context to an entirely new one cannot be overstated. Of course, the goal of any learning or training is to eventually be able to apply it in real-world situations, but...

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Dylan Wiliam: Teaching not a research-based profession

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In many ways, teaching is an unusual job. It shares with other professions the requirement that individuals make decisions with imperfect knowledge, but, unlike other professions, there is no shared knowledge base - no set of facts that all involved in doing the job would agree on. The late Professor Ted Wragg, of Exeter University, once suggested that if you got a group of headteachers together, the only thing you could get them to agree on would be the need to pick up litter.

Unlike most other professions, teachers spend much of their working lives without much contact with other professionals, marking or planning work on their own, or with their children in the classroom, and although the widespread use of classroom assistants has changed this a little, in most schools, teamwork is not a major part of many teachers' typical working day.

Teaching is also different from most other professions in that there is a continuing debate about whether professional qualifications are needed - something that would be unthinkable in medicine or the law. In five years' time, we will have a shortfall of 7,000 doctors and 66,000 nurses and doctors in the NHS. Solution? Let's just adapt the "Troops to Teachers" scheme. I don't think anyone would seriously suggest that.

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Pisa: Comparisons 'not useful'

Research: 'Some research is good - but experience is better '

A further difference between teaching and other professions is the role of research, and who creates it. Very few teachers are involved in academic research, and the vast bulk of published research in education is produced by academics in universities who are rarely involved in teaching the students that are the focus of their research. In other professions, much of the published research is done by those who are still practising.

The role of research in education

The traditional explanation of this is that teaching is not really a profession at all. It is, at best a "partial profession"[1] because its practitioners are not as skilled as those in other professions. While such criticisms do have some measure of truth, I think this is at least partly due to the fact that in the professions that appear to be more "professional" this is not because the state of knowledge is any more advanced, but because those professions have focused on the "low-hanging fruit" and choose not to talk very much about the issues where the evidence is less certain.

For example, in medicine, it is widely agreed that while antibiotics can be effective in the treatment of bacterial infections, they are ineffective against viral infections. This is part of the "knowledge base" in medicine. Except we know that medics often prescribe antibiotics for infections that are likely to be viral in origin. This could be for a number of reasons. Doctors may be prescribing antibiotics "just in case" they are wrong about the viral nature of the infection. It may be that busy GPs feel pressured into giving patients treatments that are unlikely to be effective just to be seen to be doing something (which may, after all, be effective because of the placebo effect). Whatever the reason, what actually happens in what Andrew Pickering calls "the mangle of practice"[2] is a lot more complicated that we generally assume.

More importantly, even in areas where there is a reasonably strong research base, like medicine, that evidence does not provide guidance for a lot of what doctors need to do.

For example, there is reasonably strong agreement amongst medical researchers that it is important that patients complete a course of antibiotics rather than stopping as soon as they feel better, because an incomplete course can result in leaving alive the most resistant bacteria, which will then multiply rapidly. Doctors, therefore, need to make sure that patients understand why, even if they feel better, it is important to complete a course of antibiotics. We don't know much about the best way to do this, because this is an extremely difficult topic to research, requiring an understanding of the quality of the relationship between the patient and the doctor, and a whole host of contextual factors.

In my view, teaching appears to be less "professional" than other professions because the problems that teachers need to solve are just much harder. Physics works because protons and electrons don't have good days and bad days; they behave consistently, and predictably. As soon as humans are part of the picture, things get a lot more complicated.

And that is why I do not think that teaching will ever be a research-based profession. Classrooms are just too complicated for research ever to tell teachers what to do. Teachers need to know about research, to be sure, so that they can make smarter decisions about where to invest their time, but teachers, and school leaders need to become critical consumers of research - using research evidence where it is available and relevant, but also recognising that there are many things teachers need to make decisions about where there is no research evidence, and also realising that sometimes the research that is available may not be applicable in a particular context.

What this means, I think, that those who call for "evidence-based education" are missing the point. Evidence is important, of course, but what is more important is that we need to build teacher expertise and professionalism so that teachers can make better judgments about when, and how, to use research. Two things seem to me to be particularly important here.

First, I think, is that rather than treating teachers as technicians, where we have researchers figuring out how best to teach, and then telling what teachers to do in Lawrence Stenhouse's memorable phrase, treating each teacher as a kind of "intellectual navvy"[3] who is told where to dig, but not why - instead we have to recognise that teacher expertise cannot be put into words. The kind of knowledge that expert teachers have is more like the knowledge of how to ride a bicycle than it is the knowledge of how to solve quadratic equations. I can explain to someone how to solve quadratic equations, but I cannot explain to someone how to ride a bicycle. Each person has to figure it out for themselves. There may be guidance I can give, but there is no set of instructions that will be guaranteed to work.

Second, while there are certainly differences in how good teachers are in their first year of teaching - there is such a thing as natural talent for teaching - what matters far more is the improvement that teachers make, and this is why I think we have failed to make the best of the work of Carol Dweck on mindset. She has shown that some students believe that ability at something like mathematics is more or less fixed - you are either good at mathematics or you are not. This "fixed mindset" as she calls it leads students to believe that when you fail, this must mean you have reached your highest level of achievement, and you might as well give up trying to get better. Other students think that ability is more of a malleable quantity - captured nearly by Jeffrey Howard in the phrase, "Smart is not something that you just are, smart is something you can get."[4] For these students, when they fail, it just means they need to try harder. More importantly, challenging work is not a threat to your self image - a chance to get shown up - but rather a chance to get smarter.

My point is we have been applying Carol Dweck's work to students, and I think we should be applying it just as much to teachers. We all fail as teachers, because we have such high hopes for our students. But the teacher who does not think she or he can get better blames this failure on the students. "What can you expect from students from that part of town?" "From that estate?" "With those kinds of parents?" They fail because all teachers fail, but teachers with a fixed mindset blame this failure on the students: "I taught it, they just didn't learn it."

In contrast, the teacher with a growth mindset says, "What else can I try to help this student learn?" and this has powerful implications for the whole teaching force.

First, a belief that you can get better as a teacher is the key to staying positive about the job. Whatever the management gurus say about the positive possibilities of failure, it is not pleasant. People say "you learn from your mistakes" but that's not quite right. It is much easier to learn from mistakes than from success, but without a desire to improve, failure is just failure. But with a growth mindset, failure is a chance to learn, to improve. I meet many teachers who have improved their practice over the years, and they tell me that they often feel sorry for the students they taught when they were younger. I feel the same way. But the alternative - that we do not improve as teachers - is much worse. It means that every student we ever teach gets the same deal.

Second, and much more powerful, a focus on improvement can transform the teaching force, because it detoxifies professional development. In many schools, in Scotland and elsewhere in the world, managers often operate a kind of educational triage. Figure out which teachers can't be helped, and get rid of them. Figure out which teachers are OK, and leave them alone. And for the ones that are left, the ones who are "struggling", help them get better. With this approach, professional development, or indeed support of any kind, is toxic. Being offered help is a way of saying that you aren't very good, and the goal is therefore not to be identified as being in need of help, and pretending that everything is OK.

If, on the other hand, we accept that every teacher needs to improve, not because they are not good enough, but because they can be even better, professional development becomes welcome - it is just the way we become better.

And that is why I am so proud to be associated with the work of the Tapestry Partnership, and in particular, to be here tonight, presenting these Professional Recognition Certificates from the General Teaching Council for Scotland (GTCS). The Tapestry Partnership has worked with local education authorities all over Scotland to support teachers in their quest to improve their practice. The teachers here tonight have shown that they are committed to improving their practice. They have undertaken enhanced, significant and sustained enquiry to support the development of their professional learning in a particular area of their practice. They are a model for us all.

After all, if we create a culture where every teacher believes they need to improve, not because they are not good enough, but because they can be even better, there is no limit to what we can achieve.
Dylan Wiliam is emeritus professor of educational assessment at University College London. This is a transcript of the speech he delivered this afternoon at an awards ceremony for teachers who have taken part in the Glasgow in Partnership with Tapestry's Supporting Improvement: Pedagogy and Equity Programme. Some 197 Glasgow teachers are receiving GTCS Professional Recognition awards today, while 90 recently received GTCS Professional Recognition for the Tapestry Making Thinking Visible programme.

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Dylan Wiliam: Teaching not a research-based profession

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In many ways, teaching is an unusual job. It shares with other professions the requirement that individuals make decisions with imperfect knowledge, but, unlike other professions, there is no shared knowledge base - no set of facts that all involved in doing the job would agree on.

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Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

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"We've got this, it's easy," they said. "Can we move on?"

I looked at the other students and asked, "Do you have this?"

They nodded their heads furiously up and down in a yes.

My teacher instincts said that everyone knew it, but I decided to experiment, so I wrote a problem on the board. Students were already logged in to Socrative, and a box opened up on their screens. Each student typed in his or her answer to the problem. They clicked Enter, and their answers appeared on my screen beside their names.

I was floored. Guess how many knew the right answer? Two! Just the two students who had spoken up, and no one else.

I taught for another few minutes and gave them another problem. A few more solved it, but not everyone. We took the problem another way, and then another few thought it was easy. Finally, after about 10 more minutes of teaching, everyone was mastering the problems. Their test scores proved it.

But the end result was not what you think. It didn't take me longer to teach binary numbers. You see, I don't move past this lesson until all of my students are scoring 90 percent or higher. And as a result of this experience, I taught binary numbers and all of the accompanying standards in three days instead of my usual five, and no one had to come for after-school tutoring.

I was sold on formative assessment.

Good teachers in every subject will adjust their teaching based on what students know at each point. Good formative assessment removes the embarrassment of public hand raising and gives teachers feedback that impacts how they're teaching at that moment. Instant feedback. We can do this now. Here's how.

Formative Assessment Toolkit

Learn the strengths and weaknesses of each tool. You'll need several to meet every classroom situation. These are my favorite tools for formative assessment.

1. Quick Feedback: Socrative can be used for quick quizzes and also on the fly, as I've already shared. Here's another feature: Before class, I create quizzes that we can play as a game called Space Race. The website automatically divides the class into teams. Kids know what color team they're on and can look at the rockets racing one another on the board. I don't always record the grade, particularly when I know I have more teaching to do.

The advantage of Socrative is that it gives me percentages that I can use as a grade if we're ready for that. You can even use it for traditional quizzes if desired.

Formative is another tool in this category, with some different advantages. Whereas in Socrative you see the answers and what students are doing, Formative can have students draw on their device, type answers, or use a variety of methods all updated live on your screen as students enter their answer. Math teachers with 1:1 devices will likely prefer this one.

2. Live Quiz Games: Kahoot, Quizziz, and Quizlet Live let us build fun quizzes. Students use computers, cell phones, or other devices to join the game. In some platforms, you can embed videos and make the game part of the teaching process, or students can create review games to share. One disadvantage is that students can use aliases. I like these tools, but do prefer the accountability and data I get out of Socrative and SMART Lab (see below) over Kahoot and the live quiz games.

I knew Kahoot was a winner when I finished 10 minutes early on the last day of school and my class asked to play SAT vocab review with it.

3. Integrated Presentation and Quiz Tools: I use SMART Notebook, which has an add-on called SMART Lab. It lets me make Kahoot-like games but gathers results like Socrative. SMART Lab is a free add-on for those who have purchased the SMART Notebook software, and you don't need a SMART board.

Nearpod is another fantastic tool along these lines. You can create presentations that include quizzes, assessments, drawing boards, and more.

I appreciate the integrated nature of Nearpod and SMART Lab because I don't really like having to present material, then switch over to a formative assessment tool, and then go back to the presentation tool. Everything is in one place.

4. Formative Assessment With Videos: There are two uses of formative assessment with videos. First, when students watch videos, as they do in flipped classrooms, you want to know that students know what they're doing.

I used to recommend Zaption, but that tool shut down. And while Vizia claimed to be a replacement, I recommend Edpuzzle instead. Edpuzzle lets you embed questions in the video, interact with your students, and know how your students are engaging with digital content.

The second and perhaps most exciting formative assessment method is to have students create videos to demonstrate learning. For example, students can use Let's Recap or Explain Everything to create videos documenting their learning. (If you want students to read to you or use audio, Fluency Tutor is a good alternative.)

I find this second method so exciting because it is a huge time-saver. For example, students who are learning to count can do so on video or audio. Then, using the same app or a tool like Seesaw, a teacher can listen to and give feedback on their work after class or at another time. The long line at the teacher desk is just no longer necessary.

5. No Devices? But what if your students have no computers, no cell phones, no nothing? Do you have a smartphone or tablet? If so, you've got two simple answers.

For verbal questions: Log in to Plickers and create a card for each student. The cards look a bit like QR codes, and students can use them to answer multiple-choice questions by rotating them (one side represents A, another B, and so on). When you ask a question, students hold up their cards with their answer at the top side. Looking at the class through the Plicker app on your smartphone, you'll see the name of each student and his or her answer-instant feedback!

For quick quizzes: QuickKey is a mobile scanning app for the iPhone. There are several others, such as ZipGrade and GradeCam. Your questions must be multiple choice. Print out the short form and have students fill in the bubbles. Use your smartphone to scan the quizzes and immediately know what your students know.

No More Surprises

Test scores should never be a surprise. You don't need to be a mind reader-you just need a formative assessment toolbox, and you need to use it every day.

I invite you to share your formative assessment tools and tips in the comments, because there are dozens if not hundreds of ways to assess. Our students need us to be excellent teachers, and formative assessment is one way to do it.

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Fantastic, Fast Formative Assessment Tools | Edutopia

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"We've got this, it's easy," they said. "Can we move on?" I looked at the other students and asked, "Do you have this?" They nodded their heads furiously up and down in a yes. My teacher instincts said that everyone knew it, but I decided to experiment, so I wrote a problem on the board.

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Previewing strategies help activate students’ prior knowledge

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Previewing strategies help activate students’ prior knowledge

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Cognitively speaking, previewing strategies help activate students’ prior knowledge. Here are strategies to give students a glimpse of the content that the teacher is about to address. #NASOT

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Cognitively speaking, previewing strategies help activate students’ prior knowledge. Here are strategies to give students a glimpse of the content that the teacher is about to address. #NASOT https://t.co/WXFyYWV8k4

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Cognitively speaking, previewing strategies help activate students’ prior knowledge. Here are strategies to give students a glimpse of the content that the teacher is about to address. #NASOT pic.twitter.com/WXFyYWV8k4
— Robert J. Marzano (@robertjmarzano) April 15, 2018

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Cognitively speaking, previewing strategies help activate students’ prior knowledge. Here are strategies to give students a glimpse of the content that the teacher is about to address. #NASOT https://t.co/WXFyYWV8k4

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Cognitively speaking, previewing strategies help activate students’ prior knowledge. Here are strategies to give students a glimpse of the content that the teacher is about to address. #NASOT https://t.co/WXFyYWV8k4

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Cognitively speaking, previewing strategies help activate students’ prior knowledge. Here are strategies to give students a glimpse of the content that the teacher is about to address. #NASOT

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(for students)

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Bringing Inquiry-Based Learning Into Your Class 

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Bringing Inquiry-Based Learning Into Your Class 

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The Types of Student Inquiry

The Types of Student Inquiry are a scaffolded approach to inquiry in the classroom, one that gradually increases student agency over learning while providing learners with the necessary skills, knowledge, and understanding to be successful in their inquiry.

In the shallow end of the Types of Student Inquiry pool, Structured Inquiry gives the teacher control of the essential question, the starting point-for example, "What defines a culture?" or "What is the importance of the scientific method?" These questions are not answered in a single lesson and do not have a single answer, and, in fact, our understanding of an essential question may change over time as we research it. In Structured Inquiry, the teacher also controls specific learning activities, the resources students will use to create understanding, and the summative assessment learners will complete to demonstrate their understanding.

In Controlled Inquiry, the teacher provides several essential questions. Learners unpack several resources predetermined by the teacher to provide valuable context and rich meaning relative to the essential questions. All learners typically demonstrate their understanding using the same summative assessment.

In Guided Inquiry, the teacher further empowers student agency by providing several essential questions, having the students select the resources they will use to research their answers, and allowing them to choose how they will demonstrate understanding. Student agency over learning comes through this selection of resources and the summative assessment.

And finally, in the deep end of the inquiry pool, Free Inquiry allows learners, with the support of the teacher, to construct their own essential question, research a wide array of resources, customize their learning activities, and design their own summative assessment to demonstrate their learning.

How Are the Types of Student Inquiry Helpful?

Inquiry is most successful when strongly scaffolded. The Types of Student Inquiry act as a scope and sequence to support learners in their journey toward Free Inquiry. In my classroom, we begin in a Structured Inquiry model, transition to a Controlled Inquiry unit, move on to Guided Inquiry, and if all goes well, conclude in Free Inquiry. These four types of inquiry make up our time together in the course.

This structure allows us to successfully address the curriculum and the "must know" content and skills of each discipline, grade level, and course. In the Structured, Controlled, and Guided units, I plan to achieve specific learning objectives and unpack particular resources in order to best prepare my learners for whatever summative assessment they will see at the end of our time together. Whether it's a provincial, state, or governing body exam or the SAT, I ensure that this material is learned during the types of student inquiry I have more control over.

Students should feel connected to their learning, certain about how to plan their inquiry, and comfortable with its responsibility. The Types of Student Inquiry structure our coursework and learning in a gradual release of control model, one where students learn essential inquiry skills throughout the year rather than being thrown into the deep end of the inquiry pool right away.

Each of my students has a copy of the swimming pool illustration above, and it hangs on our classroom wall. It illustrates the gradual increase of student agency our inquiry journey will provide, the changing skill set the inquiry learner will gain, and the ever-transforming role of the teacher. It also allows me to speak to the questions, concerns, or anxieties students may encounter in their inquiry. The swimming pool analogy illustrates that we won't go anywhere in the pool until the learner is prepared to do so and that I'm always there to provide support, whether it be in the pool or facilitating from the side.

How to Move Forward in Adopting Inquiry

First, look through the lens of your learners when considering how you want to shape your classroom. Keep them at the heart of your decisions. Think of them as you plan what inquiry will look like in your classroom, imagine how they will respond to the gradual increase in agency, and question how you can best meet their needs.

Second, think big and start small. Take some time to imagine the inquiry classroom you want in a few years and begin to plan to make this dream a reality. Start with a unit you love or that you've seen resonate with your learners. Revamp it to begin with an essential question and frame it in one of the Types of Student Inquiry. At the end, reflect with your learners on how it went.

And last, try to become comfortable with the mess of uncertainty. Even with the scaffolding of the Types of Student Inquiry and the many structures I have in place to support increasing student agency, inquiry doesn't offer a clear destination. What essential questions learners ask, what resources they will unpack, and what new understandings they create are all initially unknown when we begin our inquiry journey. Be prepared for this and for your learners to need support in adopting inquiry as their own.

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Bringing Inquiry-Based Learning Into Your Class

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The Types of Student Inquiry are a scaffolded approach to inquiry in the classroom, one that gradually increases student agency over learning while providing learners with the necessary skills, knowledge, and understanding to be successful in their inquiry.

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C oncept maps are tools for organizing and representing knowledge. They include concepts, usually enclosed in circles or boxes of some type, and relationships between concepts or propositions, ( indicated by a connecting line and linking word ) between two concepts. Linking words on the line specify the relationship between the two concepts.