KLF I: Introducing the Torrance Incubation Model

I am delighted to be invited to speak during the Kindergarten Learning Forum (KLF) later this month. This is sure a stretch of my flexibility to cater to the specific needs of a special group of educators. This is even more meaningful as my own kids are in the pre-school going age, especially for Joshua where I have witnessed his cognitive development under the guidance of very creative teachers from 3 different pre-schools.


As I pondered on how best to demonstrate some of the key creative metaphors behind Torrance's pioneering work on creativity in education, I decided to design a playful approach to demonstrate learning about Creatively in an experiential manner. I am keen to observe how the Torrance Incubation Model can be the “... a simple, powerful, general-purpose teaching model that integrates creativity skills with content and knowledge” (Torrance, 1993, p. 187). In my 45 minutes workshop, I hope to explore and witness the integrative potential of this model that combines both the anticipatory and participatory teaching and learning approach.




Stage 1: Heightening Anticipation

Of late, the craze and revival of playing yo-yo struck an interesting cord with me and my kids. As a father, I enjoy the discussion and testing of ideas together with Joshua on the different yo-yo strategies and that to me was a creative engagement. We sharpened our yo-yo skills after a process with countless debates, trialing and celebrating little perks of success while trying to consider many alternatives. While dad and son were busying doing all of the above, little Joanna can't help but attentively emulate and adapt to the best of her abilities the wacky actions of dad and brother. Of course, the rich discussion arising from our 'equal footing' since we were both new to the game allowed much freewheeling, and very often, the wilder the ideas the more fun we had together.

The point here is, how do I use this platform to help these kindergarten educators return to their 'innocence' and just remain open to new ideas? I guess as a person grows and matures, he/she develops a variety of mental and social expectations. The engagement of playing with a less-than-familiar object such as a yo-yo would be a nice physical warm-up activity to effectively facilitate creative thinking, even in adults. In this regard, the yo-yo would serve as an useful metaphor to depict how we can play with our imagination, either individually or collaboratively. More relevantly, I hope to reinforce the awareness that as imaginative pre-school teachers, they can use creative movement such as warm-up games or dance as a good supplementary technique for any subject matters.

O yes, not to mention, the pre-work of registering for my session already aimed to enthuse the participants with expecting the unexpected, the title and synopsis of my session reads:


“ Help me be more CREATIVE .... 
   I like to have my Yo Yo back, please?"

This workshop has been specially designed to re-ignite the passion to teach about Creativity and to teach creatively, using a Yo-Yo.
A father of two, John gets bundles of inspiration by simply enjoying the creative process of imagination and invention with them. For this hands-on interactive session, how would you like to:

• Discover how you can enjoy learning about creativity by being 'play-full'
• Get the best out of your students' imagination
  
• Invite your students to become coachable by toying with a yo-yo
  

KLF II: Deepening Expectations with the YO-YO metaphor

Why 'YO-YO' or Do I mean 'YEO-YEO'?

Face it, I am an EGOistic teacher. Allowing my students to 'hip-hop-ly' greet me with a "Yo, Mr Yeo" has worked to my advantage as a teacher as it established a personal connection between me and my students. Thus, to revisit this "yeo-yeo" effect to facilitate new learning, getting warmed up with a real Yo-Yo this time would hopefully help to strengthen the use of everyday objects for problem solving.

The source of inspiration was a really a story that I posted earlier this year (From Whose Perspective) when I conducted a workshop in Hong Kong where through one of the brainstorming activities, I was humbly made to realise how a simple yo-yo can powerfully turn an innovation company around.

The earlier entry talked about how Stage 1 (Heightening the Anticipation) beings the engagement process by getting participants ready to learn. The following two stages contain the information processing patterns or strategies presented as metaphors dealing with some complex behaviors likely to be encountered in the learning of creativity (Torrance & Safter, 1990).

Stage 2: DEEPENING EXPECTATIONS

The Yo-Yo is an appropriate devise to match many of the metaphors for this stage including Digging Deeper, Looking Twice, Listening for Smells, Listening/Talking to a Cat or Crossing Out Mistakes, Cutting Holes to See Through, Cutting Corners, Getting in Deep Water, and Getting Out of Locked Doors.

In my workshop, instead of me 'talking down' on what each of the above metaphors means, I have designed a series of Learning Stations for the participants to walk around and experience for themselves the strategies through some fun activities- revolving around the theme of Yo-Yo.  To heighten the metacognition level of the activities, participants after diving deep into each of my designed task will spend some time to reflect and share on their learning to rest of the groups. The essence of conducting this session in a World Cafe style is to help in generalising the above metaphors to the other problems at a later stage. Some of the key principles for the metaphors infused within the learning stations include learning to defer judgment, having a sense of congruence between moving, imaginations, and visualisation, getting beyond the surface, synthesizing diverse kinds of information, and going beyond the status quo while seeking novelty.

So the Yo-Yo Playing Stations include

1) SCAMPER: Participants will first listen to a simple story of 'Little Bitty Bunny' where a group of little bunnies found a hat but knowing the purpose of this object started to invent different uses such as a boat for the water, a basket to throw balls in, a sea-saw, etc. Thereafter, they are invited to adopt Bob Eberle's (1971) SCAMPER to generate new uses for the Yo-Yo while phyiscally playing with the Yo-yos together. Some of the visuals included in this station are brief write-ups of the history of Yo-Yos, Yo-Yo tricks, etc.

2) Forced-Connection: Unlike the above activity, participants are now invited to answer the question "How can I better see the brilliance in every one of my students?" by posting quietly and individually their ideas while shifting around a series of photographs. This way, the collective wisdom could then be tapped with the group engaged in hits and clusters by selecting some of the better and more novel ideas.

3) Word-Dance: While watching the movie' Nim's Island' together with my kids, we were discussing the fascinating details of the show and wondered several times "What if..." a certain element of the plot was changed. Based on Rhodes (1961) 4Ps definition of Creativity: Person, Press, Product and Process, participants are now invited to list out some elements of a movie that they are familiar with and to re-create a new story by mixing and matching. Think-Pair-Share is the cooperative learning strategy used in this station where participants will draft their exciting story in pairs.

(Photos contributed by my friend and a highly creative photographer- Thanks Sze Kiat! sprintist_sk@hotmail.com)

KLF III: Extending the Learning

Based on the Torrance Incubation Model, the final stage of bringing it all together in Extending the Learning spreads out some of the most intricate metaphors that helps to ignite and surface the most novel ideas with metaphors such as Having a Ball, Singing in One's Own Key, Building Sand Castles, Plugging in the Sun, Shaking Hands With Tomorrow.

This final activity for my session would bring together all the participants to create a giant brainstorming wall where the cumulative wisdom of all would contribute their ideas to "How Can  Kindergarten Teachers Facilitate More Creativity?".

By reiterating the importance of the Brainstorming ground rules, it is hope that the participants will collaborately apply the earlier brainstorming techniques from the play stations to generate some novel and valuable ideas. While giving personal meaning to the new information and relating their personal experience to the earlier tasks, hopefully, the strategies will form a basis for helping teachers to start imagining, fantasizing, searching for ideal solutions or otherwise taking off from what is been read, heard, or encountered and find available resources of energy or inspiration to enlarge, enrich, and make more accurate one's images of the future.

By 'Shaking Hands With Tomorrow', the kinesthetic experience will help to value add the very purpose why they chose to attend this play-full yo-yo session!

Steve Job Brainstorms on a White Board

My craze with APPLE.... I just (finally)bought myself a Mac Air- a dream come true. AND I can soon look forward to getting an I-phone too. But all these craze and crave for these two wonderful Apple creations goes beyond the yucky T word- Technology. I am not much of a Techie really. What struck me consistently of the products as well as the creator- Steve Jobs was really a about THE experience.

As I read about some of the highlights of Steve Job's presentation tips (http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/oct2009/sb2009106_706829.htm) I can't help but note some of the interesting pointers gleaned from the above website as well as the video of Carmine Gallo, author and communications coach (cool... but what exactly is that) who just published 'The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to Be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience' :

- Deliver MINDBLOWING keynote presentations... EVERYTIME!
- Power of EXPERIENCE- I quote "Steve Jobs does not sell computers; he sells an experience"
- Presentation skills can be coached in a STEP-BY-STEP format
- Create stunningly VISUAL presentations
- Its all about STORY-TELLING- and make them compelling
- The CEO Apple actually BRAINSTORMS and loves doing it on a white board
- Stick to the ONE thing I want people to remember- be consistent
- Avoid the least effective way to learn- NO BULLET POINTS! (opps... pardon me)
- Use IMAGES that speak volumes
- Identify an ENEMY and help people conquer that as a shared motivation
- Have fun with DEMOS- its neuroscientifically proven!

SO, if you have misgivings about the faults above, perhaps this is a baby step improvement...

Note: the above image was created in http://www.wordle.net/