Today in my Art 2 class I used Creative Test #1 from Philip Carter and Ken Russell’s book Psychometric Testing.

On the board I wrote:                        

Creativity- Do you Have it?

·      Creativity Training

·      Certainty Assessment

·      Creative Thinking Strategies

We talked a few minutes and then made connections to the Creativity Takes Time exercise.

The test is fairly simple, make something recognizable from the 12 shapes and then have a peer evaluate and score for creativity.

For a student in a doctoral program, especially one where she just finished a unit on measurement validity, nothing is simple however.

Potential Issues with Validity:

·      Gave the first class the instruction: “don’t draw 2 of the same thing, for example 2 faces”. Oooops, that suggestion tells them ahead of time what the expectations for creativity are.

Shalley found that when participants were instructed to be creative and given productivity goals the creative results were higher. It seems simply being told to be creative results in more creative behavior.

Shalley, C. E. (1991). Effects Of Productivity Goals, Creativity Goals, And Personal Discretion On Individual Creativity.. Journal of Applied Psychology, 76(2), 179-185.

·      ELL, IEP. Hearing impaired, how do students with these types of disabilities or difference skew or not skew results?

·      Noise levels. Class one, super quiet, class two, super noisy. I guess when doing a qualitative study as long as this represents their typical classroom setting the various differences would not effect results since this is the environment they are used to being in. Put them in a computer classroom with headphones, then I could see an issue.

·      Sharing of papers, talking about ideas: collaboration is an essential part of problem-solving but some experts argue that it gets in the way of creative thinking. Steve Wozinak does not believe that anything revolutionary has even been invented by committee.

The amount of time spent on task varied widely, all students were given 30 minutes to complete. This directly speaks to internal motivation, because no rewards of any sort were offered.

Scoring is very subjective in this exercise; I actually am considering having Art 4 kids score them to see of that makes a difference. There were some good discussions during the scoring sessions, but lots of disagreement and difference of opinions.

----This afternoon I had my 4 AP Art kids take the Creative Test and had 5 Art IV students rescore the Art II's test and the AP tests. Initial glance I saw the Art IV's scored much lower than the Art II's as far as what were considered creative answers, and the work of the AP students did not necessarily look more creative. My first thought is  creativity training is essential to an art program, and we don't do enough of it: training, evaluation, assessment, discussion.

I plan on looking at the results a little more thoroughly in the upcoming weeks, but these 3 doctoral classes, and everything else I have on my plate are kicking my butt! Thank goodness Fall Break is next week!

The past few weeks I have seen some classes embrace their Google+ Communities, some treat them like another assignment (albeit fun assignments), and some ignore them except to chat and +1 viral videos.

I decided to ask my Graphic Media classes what they wanted to use their community for. They are the classes that spend the whole period in front of a computer, yet they are also the classes that ignore the community the most. They use Google Drive to upload and share photos, they use Gmail to send me emails and they converse on the Google + chat, but other than post a few viral videos and + 1'ing  some Star Wars photos, the Graphic Media Community is pretty much a wasteland. 

So I posted this question: Many of you are in my other classes where we are using our Communities in various ways. What are some ways you would like to use our Community for THIS class?

I got about 6 responses (out of 18 students) and most wanted to use the community for critiquing of personal photos they upload. To me these responses seem so typical of high schools students and their attitude towards social media. They want to get on the newest & latest site but only to do the same things they did on the old sites. Uploading their own photos and having students comment seems an awfully lot like Instagram, Deviant Art, and even how I see some of my student use Twitter. I do appreciate the teenager need for feedback and approval, and their need to be the center of attention, always & at all times, but I don't want them to just do the same thing with Google+ that they do with all the other social media sites. 
I posted an assignment for them to research photographers. They will use the album feature to upload photos and then ask and answer questions about their chosen photographer and their peers' chosen photographers. Once they become more knowledgeable about historically significant photos, then I will probably have them upload their personal photos for critiques. 
I'm hoping as they spend more time in the community they will come up with new ways to use this social media site instead of the same old same old. Time will tell.

CLASSROOM CONVERSATION CLIPS
I have been looking a lot at intrinsic motivation because of some doctoral work I am in the middle of this semester. This summer I read on creativity and learned that frustration can be a necessary part of the creative process.
A few of my Art 2's almost burst into tears today out of frustration with their painting projects. I know this is part of the process as a young artist moves forward in their artistic growth, as they move past the "good enough" stage, but it is always hard for me to watch their struggles.
Thinking about how intrinsically motivated they are (they have to be to get this frustrated I think) and knowing that this is part of the process of creativity helps, but I still hate to see people cry!

IPad Fridays have morphed into iPads whenever I can snag them from the library! 

The iPad cart doesn’t get much use around here this early in the school year so I have been able to use them throughout the week, not just on Fridays. I can see how positive a classroom set of iPads would be; the curriculum and classroom implications blow my mind!

Anyways….until that mysterious donor decides to grant me a classroom set, I will be very happy to have almost unlimited access, at least for the time being, to the school’s iPad cart.

Yesterday in Art III we worked in Google Docs, on a shared spreadsheet document. The class was developing a rubric for grading their idiom linoleum block prints. They split into 4 groups and each group had a category: print quality, composition, idiom or value, to work with. They were to write the descriptors for the various levels of competency.

There were drawbacks and benefits to working this way.

Benefits

• All groups can see changes instantaneously.
• Encourages feedback across the groups.
• Student monitoring is very easy, I watched the changes to the document occur on my own iPad as I walked around the room.
• Allows for collaboration across class periods. I have a singleton student in another class who, because we are using Google Docs, can collaborate with the other students even though she is in a different class period.

Drawbacks

• Changes are very easy to make – on the whole document. We had a few instances where someone in another group mistakenly deleted some information.
• Typing on iPads is difficult for many students. I am increasingly finding this to be a drawback to this type of technology.

The last technology integration for this project will be for each student to upload a picture of his or her print into our Google+ Community. I am going to have them comment on each other’s work from home as a homework assignment. I will post screenshots once that gets underway!

Google+ Community Update – AP ART

Teachers – Beware! If you use Google+ Communities with your upper level students be sure to comment yourself, often and frequently! My AP Art kids are beginning to use their community to share with each other ideas, images, comments about concentration ideas, but woe to the teacher who does not respond equally and in a timely manner to each and every student’s post! Students really do love feedback, art kids love to talk about their ideas and their work, and this is a great way to encourage discussions outside of the 7-2 school day, but as a teacher you also have to be committed to sharing throughout the day and weekends.

Life got a bit complicated for me this past week or so, and I slacked a bit on my comments. I made my amends though, and I think my high maintenance AP students forgave me!