By David Meador, Curriculum Specialist
dmeador@pitsco.com
Creativity and innovation – fraternal twins of
the mind. These two work side by side to move
humankind forward and solve the problems that
we face as individuals and societies.
Education should be students using
these gifts of theirs to answer questions
implicit in the new material they encounter.
Education should be teachers
demonstrating these in the approaches
they use in their classrooms to guide
student learning.
Education should be administrators
modeling these in the programs they design
to enhance the ability of teachers to teach.
Education should be policy makers
implementing these in systems that
encourage and facilitate designs that create
environments that maximize student potential.
For years students, teachers, and
administrators have worked with systems
that seem to run counter to creativity and
innovation, all in an effort to teach something
with measurable results that can be used as
a marker for “success.” Recently, however,
the wind that was the driving force behind
this seems to have died down and now even
started to shift in a new direction. Many
of the political and business leaders in the
country are starting to champion the cause
and call for a need to ensure creativity
and innovation in education – something
students, teachers, and administrators have been working at integrating into the recent
drive in measurable results.
Three states (Massachusetts,
Oklahoma, and California) have begun to
make strides toward this goal and with
voices on a national level being raised in
support of this idea, the likelihood is that it
will spread to other locations. These three
states have made concrete steps forward
in the implementation of creativity and/or
innovation indices to help schools gauge
their success in providing approaches
that will engage students and cause them
to become the creative innovators of
solutions in the future.
Massachusetts has established a
commission to draft recommendations for
an index for all public schools in the state.
Oklahoma has announced a plan to
partner with private industry to produce its
innovation index and create what its governor
called a “very valuable tool to help Oklahoma
be a national leader in innovation, critical
thinking, and entrepreneurship.”
The California state senate has actually
passed a bill to develop a creativity index
for schools to use.
All three of these examples focus on the
need stated by industry to foster creative
problem solvers to deal with challenges
created by new innovations worldwide.
Pitsco’s middle-level curriculum (Modules)
and new science programs are tailor-made
for creativity and innovation. The innovative
products and instructional methods used
in Pitsco curriculum enable teachers and
administrators to offer relevant examples
of how they model this in their instructional
design. Students having the opportunity to
use real-world, modern equipment as they
learn content related to a variety of subjects
is undoubtedly a plus when trying to justify
a program design. Pitsco’s science program
teaches students the basic skills necessary
to be creative and then offers them the
opportunity to practice that creativity,
evaluate it, and apply more creative solutions
to improve their original designs. In a system
where creativity and innovation are the
flagships of success, Pitsco products offer
the strength to carry a student, classroom,
and school to success.
Education should be all of us working
together creatively and innovatively to
improve the lives of everyone by ensuring
that each person has been given the
opportunity to maximize his or her ability.
It is good that some educators have begun
to recognize that these are necessary parts
of education. Albert Einstein surely knew
this when he said, “We can’t solve problems
by using the same kind of thinking we used
when we created them.”