About this workshop

Description: Creativity and innovation may be the final bastion of American economic power, and we may expect every good job to require these 21st century skills in our students' future. In fact, unless a student can creatively apply knowledge, he or she doesn't really understand the material. But our core subjects typically don't emphasize the development of creativity or innovation, even though that's the path to deep understanding. Creativity is firmly a part of creative writing, but that kind of writing is not valued by No Child Left Behind or PSSA testing. Innovation should be a core element of science, but curricula tend to emphasize well-known facts and concepts rather than their creative applications. Social studies, particularly history and economics, are treated as memorization of doctrine rather than innovative interpretations or creative applications to real issues. Math is treated as though creativity and innovation don't exist, but the core of mathematics is inherently creative, and many real-world problems require creative applications of mathematics. This session will demonstrate the magnitude of this "creativity and innovation gap" for our students, and it will offer activities for each core subject that help develop the creativity and innovation that our students and our employers desperately need. Creativity is part of every discipline from computer science to business; it isn't just for the arts department. This session puts into practice some of the ideas of Thomas Friedman (The World is Flat) and Daniel Pink (A Whole New Mind).

View a work-in-progress Wikibook on Transformative Applications in Education.