After conferring at length with UPAL Director, Jon Drescher, I decided to deliver 3 projects to Cohorts V and VI that would foster deep consideration of phenomenon of Creativity, with a particular focus on how Creativity can be applied to School Leadership.
As I was engaged to do 2 sessions
with Cohort V and 3 with Cohort VI I decided to develop 3 related projects with
Cohort VI receiving all 3. As I see it, Creativity is important to school
leaders in 3 of the roles they may play in schools: 1) As Instructional Leader
they can do a great deal of good in reforming schools by communicating the need
to make developing Student Creativity to the teachers they guide and support,
and especially guidance in how to make that happen, 2) Transforming a school
into a Creative Community is perhaps best done by guiding the various members
and stakeholder of the school through the process of creating a vision of how
that might work and be made to work in their school. Thus, another essential
roles might be called “Vision Guide”, or perhaps even “Agent Provocatour”, an
enlightened leader anxious to share his vision with all members of the
community and to guide them in making it their own. 3) A school leader who sees
and understands the power of Creativity to transform the school from a
traditional institution to a cohesive Creative Community very often will need
to “tell the story” to become something of an evangelist, to communicate the
concept, the reality, the need, and the possibility of succeeding at it. Such a
person I feel, importantly, fills the Role of Story Teller.
Each of the 3 activities that I
planned and delivered for the 2 UPAL cohorts relates to one of these 3 roles. I
was gratified that for the most part, the UPAL students I engaged in these
ideas saw the point, sometimes in ways I hadn’t on my own. And, when presented
with the challenge (each activity had a challenge at its core) ran with it and
generated some quality thinking as well as a product that satisfied the
activity’s requirements. Below are some links to more detailed information
about how these experiences played out at Lehigh during the week I spent there
in July of 2018.
Collegially,
Mark Gura, Sessions Leader
NOTE: There is an
extensive body of photo and text documentation of the students’ work accessible
by links (below) for projects #1 and #3, for which full, half day
sessions were devoted. Due to time restrictions, Project #2, which was
conceived as an extension of Project #1 was afforded a shorter amount of time;
consequently there are no work samples provided here.
Project #1 Title: Collaborative Representation of Creativity
Links:
Project #2 Title: Group
COLLABORATIVE Collage - Transforming a School Into a Creative Community (VISION
Statement Work of Art)
Link:
(Project Description, Background, and Instructions)
https://creativityandschoolleadership.blogspot.com/2018/07/projec-2t-group-collage-transforming.html
Project #3 Title: The
School Leader as Story Teller
(Sharing the Vision in a Way It Will Be Heard)
(Sharing the Vision in a Way It Will Be Heard)
Link:
NOTE#1 : More information about the above projects and discussions related to them will be found throughout the blog:
https://creativityandschoolleadership.blogspot.com
https://creativityandschoolleadership.blogspot.com
NOTE#2 : The following link leads to the Power Point Presentation titled "Make, Learn, Succeed: Building a Culture of Creativity in Your School" which from my presention of the same name at the ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education) annual conference in Chicago/June/2018. This presentation served as the initial discussion focus for UPAL Project #1
"Collaborative Representation of CREATIVITY" at the request of students I am providing a link to it here.
https://ae-uploads.uoregon.edu/ISTE/ISTE2018/PROGRAM_SESSION_MODEL/HANDOUTS/110862543/CreativityPresentation1.pdf
"Collaborative Representation of CREATIVITY" at the request of students I am providing a link to it here.
https://ae-uploads.uoregon.edu/ISTE/ISTE2018/PROGRAM_SESSION_MODEL/HANDOUTS/110862543/CreativityPresentation1.pdf
