Deep knowledge, collaboration, and creativity

In conversation with a long time friend, we turned to education. To put some perspective on this, he is a recently retired university professor, currently holding the title 'Emeritus Professor,' someone who began life as a secondary teacher before progressing into doctoral study. He has lots of experience at the 'pointy end' of our sector in both secondary and tertiary teaching, study, and research. He is also NOT a 'boring old **', NOT one of those reactionary 'things were better in my day' people - refreshing, to say the least.

The kōrero got around to the issue of research, and how high level research, at doctoral level and beyond especially, often involves multiple perspectives that are brought to bear through collaboration, and how this is often a case of making connections between existing ideas, of creating new understanding by synthesising what we already know. He had a wonderful example of how a fresh water ecologist and a geneticist had combined their expertise to develop a method of DNA testing of fresh water stream water using DNA testing to build a picture of the biodiversity of life in fresh water. All of this requires what I was initially going to describe as 'expert subject knowledge', but I think I actually mean 'deep subject knowledge'. Our world seems to me to be filled with too may self proclaimed 'experts' who in fact operate from a very shallow knowledge base.

As he described some of his work, my mind fired off in all sorts of directions. The first is the importance of subject knowledge. One of the criticisms I still hear of NCEA is that it not longer values content knowledge (and by default that we as a teaching profession no longer value knowledge). For the record let me restate my position: NCEA focuses on thinking. However you can't think in a vacuum. So to teach deeper thinking you have to build knowledge. I suggest that the deeper the knowledge you can develop, the deeper the thinking you can attempt. However for that to happen teachers have to be 'deliberate and intentional' in teaching for both the deeper knowledge AND the deeper thinking. This is one of the reasons that in our Manaiakalani clusters across Aotearoa we share our mahi around the development of critical literacy skills, regardless of the age and stage of our learners.

If we refer back to Professor Peter O'Connor's Creative Schools Index, one of the eleven dimensions of the index is "Discipline knowledge: To develop expertise in a domain of knowledge that involves specialised content and process understandings." I've written about this idea before here.

But another idea struck me: how could we better leverage off the differing levels of 'deeper knowledge' that our kaiako, and our students, each have in order to build creativity, or 'creative capacity', in our learners? Here are some of my 'wonderings' (I'm still trying to decide if I love or hate that word!!) on the question.

Perhaps first and foremost this is a matter of leadership. By that I refer to leadership at all levels in our kura: the leadership of the Principal, the leadership of the teachers, and the leadership of our learners, our akonga. So, what would a Principal's leadership look like if that leadership were seeking to build collaboration amongst teachers, collaboration that might build new understandings of how to cause learning, and how to build new knowledge? What would a teacher's leadership look like as they sought to collaborate with others, and to build collaboration amongst and between akonga? And what would we be encouraging as attributes and habits amongst our akonga if we are trying to help them to understand the benefits, the power, of collaboration in their lives? 

Perhaps passion projects, project based learning, genius hour, call it what you will, is an important component, particularly where that work is undertaken in groups. Perhaps our Business and Enterprise kete is a great example because of requires students to collaborate in groups. Equally, participation in drama, in sports teams, or kapahaka, are important  and powerful ways to build the habits, the attributes, that akonga need to be able to collaborate later in their lives.

I always recall comments from Professor Eric Mazur of Harvard University in a conference address where he said (and I am paraphrasing here) that in his career to that point he had authored 84 academic papers, and not a single one of them was his work alone. Every one of them was a collaboration.

As a specific thought, it does seem to me that at the senior leadership level in secondary kura, encouraging and supporting thinking that connects traditional subject silos would do that. Encouraging new senior courses that leverage off the amazing flexibility of NCEA, where we recombine standards to create new cross-disciplinary courses, might also be an example of leadership. That thought in itself I hope will help inform an understanding of our own Hornby High School journey as we build cross curriculum courses for our learners.

And one final point: this all requires deep subject knowledge. Therefore we will still require subject specialists. We will still require the mathematics teachers, the biology teachers, the English teachers, the Te Reo teachers. It's just that their expertise needs to be layered across our curriculum and our mahi in a way that is different to what we have done for the last 150 years.