Reflections on Teaching

Further thoughts on our Teaching Reflections:

Masking Tape Visual Piece as seen at Decodova Museum.

Masking Tape Visual Piece by Thomas.

Martha Kuhlman:

Does every assignment need a rubric?

What would make a creative assignment “successful” for both the teacher and the students? (Success could likely be different things.)

Chen Zhang:

Does competition help/hinder the creative process?

How does evaluation of both peer and professor play a role in improvement?

What is “open innovation”? (See Chen’s slides)

Kristen Park:

How can we create a space for creativity?

What would the container for creativity look like?

How might saturation projects help students hold and create a space for creativity? (Saturation projects: a project that asks students to go back again and again to an idea/object, but look at it from new and different angles or manipulate it with new or different mediums.)

Rebekah Greene:

How do we clear a space in students’ minds for analytical thought?

Can we give them permission to have a “space of freedom” for random thoughts and expressions, for aesthetic averageness, for mediocre reflections?

Does such a space become both a mechanism to clear the mind for more critical reflection, as well as serve as fodder for deeper creative thought?

Thomas Hartl:

How do we help students get “into the mind” of the question so that they do not rely on ineffective and unsustainable rote memorization?

Are tricky questions ever valuable?

How do we get students to see the solution (the product/the end) and be curious about navigating the map from their current reality to that end that is presented? (The question to answer; answer to question spiral).

Display seen at MFA Gift Shop.

Version completed by Thomas and Zoe.

Jane McKay-Nesbitt:

Can students appreciate creativity by using audience as a means to focus their creativity?

Why can’t we measure the subjective components of creative work?

Why do we shy away from this?

Vanna Donoyan:

When students get fired up by an idea and they are taking the lead, how does one “manage” their creativity?

How do we escape the student conditioned need for a grade?

And how do we, as teachers, escape our reliance on that “need for a grade” as a means to motivate students?

Can we provide them with different “bars” to measure their process against?

Vanna's photographs of her garden.

Alan Olinsky:

What do you find when you actually run the data (example of the Titanic)?

How do you teach students to think about potential evidence they want to unearth from data?

Alex Perullo:

How do you measure the quality of learning when tackling so many issues—content, race, understanding of global complexity?

How can you “tackle” the difficulty subjects—like race—in a short expanse of time?

How do we trust to a context of learning that is broad enough (beyond our teaching) that these issues are being addressed elsewhere? (OR) How do we insure that such teaching is happening elsewhere?

Stefani Boyer:

How do we teach students to be adaptive and creative right on the spot?

Are we adaptive and creative “on the spot”?

How do we model this for students?

Some further general questions that emerged:

Evaluating creative work is vital because creativity cannot just be left to its initial messy stages. Those stages are important. However, as instructors our job is to make a space for the initial messiness and then teach them discernment and challenge them to be better. So, perhaps, the issue is less whether we should evaluate, but how we do this?

How do we insure that the work we are doing is sustained and supported elsewhere because repetition is key to learning? When teaching the subjects we do (on race or other subject) and the processes we do (like design, creativity or critical thinking), how do we insure its presence elsewhere? What parts of this are related to “trust,” “frustration,” “critical mass building,” etc.?