A8MichaelMinerva

A8MichaelMinerva

To-Do

please discuss / address the following issues: claim: "Few of today's classroom focus on helping students develop as creative thinkers"

1. Do you agree / disagree with this statement of the article?
2. From your personal experience: which are the three most prominent events / activities in your life as a students (in school, in the university) which have helped you to become a more creative thinker?
   1. Analyze these three events by elaborating your description with the framework defined by the creative thinking spiral.
   2. For each of the processes did you have and use tools to support your activity?
3. Discuss whether the processes of the creative thinking spiral are or will influence your research in your course project and in which way.

1. Do you agree with the statement?

In many ways I do agree with this statement. To begin, my experience in High School very much reinforced the claims of the author. Most classes that I took involved the teacher lecturing in a static and robotic fashion about the material covered in the classes text. Then, their was most often homework assigned that went over the exact same material with no shift of focus to synthesis or application of the covered material. The whole endeavor seemed repetitive and it was clear that the focus of the exercise was to hammer in certain key points into the mind of the student instead of giving the student the needed skills to break down and attack a problem. Many media reports would suggest that this problem is only getting worse with recent political attempts to fix the American school system. It seems that with the adoption of the no child left behind act, a school funding is highly tied to the scores of students and highly specialized achievement tests. These tests focus almost entirely on the students aptitude in the areas of basic reading, writing, math and science skills, but do not reflect any critical thinking skills a student may have. This motivates teachers and administrators, to design curriculum that will cause students to get increased scores on these assessment tests instead of focusing on the skills that will help students succeed in college and more importantly in a world that changes faster and faster everyday.

2. Analyze the three most prominent events / activities in your life as a students (in school, in the university) which have helped you to become a more creative thinker

I would say the greatest contributor to my creative thinking was my elementary school. I attended a Montesouri school from pre-school through fifth. This school was quite different from what I heard about other elementary schools in that there was no set curriculum and the lesson plan for each student was tailored to their strengths and weaknesses. Also, the structure of the day was quite loose. The students were normally not instructed as to which task they had to do when, and how they would have to solve the problems they chose to tackle on any given day. Of course there were some limitations on freedom of choice so that students who were good at math would not completely neglect other subjects. Also, we had a wide variety of alternative learning tools ranging from the old (such as an abacus) to the new (such as lego logo) and we were encouraged to design our own projects that sparked whatever interest we had.

3. Discuss whether the processes of the creative thinking spiral are or will influence your research in your course project and in which way.

I do not think the creative thinking spiral will directly influence my research. I am analyzing the open source linux project and it seems to me that such a massive project is not really representative of the creative thinking spiral. This process seems to describe how an individual or group goes about designing something from scratch instead of how people contribute to an already existing project. I suppose the one way I could look at it from the perspective of the creative thinking spiral, would be in terms of a new feature being added to the operating system and see if it is common that people follow the path described by the spiral.