Creative excellence with technological innovation

Today I published the following article to our community. It is a celebration of creative excellence at Te Huruhuru Ao o Horomaka Hornby High School. The bulk of the text was provided by Mr Uai Lie, our Head of Faculty Technology, and the leader of the project.

Creative communities?

We recently held a performing arts evening. Not just any old performing arts evening, mind you, as members of our kura community came together to support one of our many talented students Nadia who is fundraising to support her trip to the Globe Theatre, London. Nadia was selected for the Aotearoa New Zealand team of students to visit and perform at The Globe, out of the University of Otago Sheila Winn Shakespeare festival. A wonderful acknowledgement of tremendous talent.

Staff, students, and even our wonderful  ex-Head Student Shardey,  got up in front of several hundred staff, students, and whānau, and 'strutted their stuff'. From song to instrumental performance to poetry (both the Bard, and original poetry from several staff), a group of people took a risk, put themselves up there, out there, in support of one of our own. We have watched Nadia's talent grow as it has been nurtured by our staff, and supported by Nadia's wonderful peers.

It seemed to me that the evening was significant on a number of levels.

This outpouring of support for one of our own was huge, and very usual, very typical, for an awesome community. Community members rally to the cause whatever it might be, and Nadia's cause, her talent,  appear to have captured their imagination and their aroha. Nadia is 'one of ours'.

At a deeper level I am wondering if we gained a wee insight, a wee glimpse, into the heart of a 'creative community'?  Which begs the question about what makes for a creative community? I did a bit of a search, looking for a definition, and for some idea of the characteristics of a 'creative community'. The references tended to be focussed purely on the creative arts. That in itself is not a bad thing, but of course within our kura we see creativity as going beyond the traditional creative arts, and permeating everything about who and what we are, and what we do.

Here was one definition I found for a 'creative community'.

Creative communities come in all shapes and sizes and offer all sorts of benefits; from practical advice and skill-sharing to emotional support. Even the most independent of makers can’t turn their aspirations into reality on their own - creatives need creatives.

https://91magazine.co.uk/blog/2019/8/9/how-to-build-a-creative-community

'Creatives need creatives';.. interesting, creatives 'feed off each others' ideas and inspiration'. When I think about the visual arts, I see teachers supporting learners to choose an artist role model and work through a process that begins with that role model's work. Creatives feeding off the work of other creatives. In my own poetry writing I am inspired by the free verse poetry of others. Writers like Bukowski come to mind. Is there really much that is 'new under the sun'?

I also found this:

What is a creative community?

A creative community describes a group of people who come together around a shared challenge or theme to create, act and share, or a concentration of creatives operating in a shared locale.

Creative communities operate on relationships of trust, shared goals and objectives and generate spill-over benefits for people and communities. By identifying, responding to, and articulating their own needs, creative communities use partnership working to open up opportunity. They co-design and co-deliver interventions, and challenge received ways of thinking about some of the most significant challenges facing society today.

https://www.ukri.org/blog/creative-communities-create-act-share/

That resonated on several levels too... note the reference to 'create .... and share', which possibly by pure coincidence connected in my head with our 'Learn, Create, Share' pedagogy. I also interpret it to mean that the act of creation is given meaning through the act of sharing with others. We are certainly largely a gregarious species, we thrive on social contact and sharing, don't we? I discover increasing connections to our Manaiakalani kaupapa.

This is an in credibly superficial look at the question of learning communities, but it did strike me that the acts of creation and sharing were very much to the fore in our fundraising performance evening. I also saw lots of risk taking from a wide range of people, from accomplished performers to beginners, all happy to share their journey so far with a wide audience. Back in 2016 we identified risk taking as one of the essential components necessary for creativity to thrive, and accordingly built it into our strategic plan as one of our three areas of strategic intent.

In previous posts I have also identified components such as deep subject knowledge, cultural and personal connection, and a relentless focus on creativity, all as necessary components, or perhaps necessary pre-conditions, for creativity to thrive. For Te Huruhuru Ao o Horomaka, these seem to be essential pre-conditions if we are to creep that bit closer to our aspiration, our vision, as 'he puna auaha, a centre of creative excellence'.

I shouldn't try to over think this though. The evening quite simply put the spotlight on an amazing community, a community that values its members, that wraps its arms around its members, in a way which other communities may not. And the support form business sponsors with prizes for the raffles for the evening was amazing.. thank you thank you thank you... We take all of this for granted at our peril.

Go Nadia, we are very proud of you!!! #manahoromaka

The elephant needs eating

I spent an evening and a day in the company of an outstanding group of educators, a group all of whom embody that essential moral imperative in education leadership that our rangatahi desperately need. It was our first face to face Manaiakalani Convenors' hui of the year, and it ended with a big question from three of our own rangatira - Russell, Dorothy, and Jenny: what do we want from Manaiakalani now?

What I want is system change. However I recall reading once (it may have been Sir Ken) that changing what happens in a single classroom for a single learner represents a system change for that learner (or something like that, anyway). So in my head the question posed to us is extant at multiple levels. 

One of the many strengths of our kaupapa is that it is evidence informed. We know what works, but equally our data shines a spotlight on things that are not working. We have plenty to work on right now, in particular the challenge of creating a systemic, coherent, approach to teaching reading, and writing, and maths. This is a challenge for our entire school system but for us achieving this across our 120+ school network would in itself be a significant system change. And the mahi that each kura, each leader, each teacher, undertakes is tantamount to system change.

But it's not change for all learners in Aotearoa, and the question is what is our ambition? How far do we want to go with this? Um.. how long is a piece of string?

Amongst our shared concerns are the rates of change in our kura, the resourcing of this mahi, and the quality of the ITE that should be supporting and enabling our ambition. However I am unlikely to be able to exert any great influence on these issues across the motu. A well respected colleague of mine once said 'don't try to boil the ocean, Robin', and I frequently have to remind myself of that. All I can do is influence these things within our own kura.

So my focus has to be on our own kura, and how I leverage off the amazing mahi of The Manaiakalani Programme, how I make sure that I get the best benefit for our learners from Manaiakalani and 'Learn Create Share'.

The most important act of leadership in that regard is to 'stay the course',  to 'stay on the bus', to continue to resource the mahi internally, and to be visible and vocal in that support. 

I think that's the best I can do. Yes the elephant needs eating, but we will only manage that one bite at a time.

It's what you do not what you say

There is an old adage 'people will judge you by what you do rather than what you say'. We see it often, don't we. The Principal says 'I expect you to be on time to class', and is then regularly late to meetings. The teacher tells students 'I expect you to respect me', and then proceeds to yell at them.

As I continue to think about the deliberate acts of leadership required to support the growth in creativity in schools, this became very apparent to me over the past two weeks. I've written previously that I want staff to practice, celebrate , and share, their. own creativity. I think this is important if teachers are similarly to support growth in creativity in their students. Having discovered my interest in writing free verse poetry I have taken to occasionally sharing one or two of those poems with staff to model risk taking, vulnerability, and creativity more generally.

Now there have often been outlets for staff to show their creativity on stage. Our leavers assembly regularly features a 'staff dance'. At performance evenings we often have staff who might sing (alone, or with others), and our choral group 'Voices with Soul' almost always has at least one or two staff singing in the group. 

However over the past two weeks (for reasons I cannot even guess sat) three staff have shared examples of their creativity with me. The first two shared poems with me, both of which were very cool. I was grateful (actually quite honoured.. 'chuffed' is a word my mother would have used) that they were prepared to share at all, and would definitely encourage them to share more widely in our community.

And then there was  today. One of our team, at the end of a regular meeting on more usual professional issues, drew out a ziplock plastic bag and said 'I want to show you these'. She does patchwork. As a part of her Professional Growth Cycle work, specifically around tikanga, she decided she didn't know enough about Matariki, and researched the stars. She then began creating a series of patchwork squares each dedicated to one of the stars. She had chosen patterns, and fabrics, to tell the story. This in itself was gobsmacking enough. The specific pieces, as yet not quite finished, showed creativity 'in spades'. The designs, the fabrics, the stories are beautifully told in fabric. And how creative is it to show the results of this small part of her tikanga journey in patchwork. That is b****y inspired.

As if that weren't enough, here's the 'kicker'. She thanked me for encouraging creativity in others, that she had been inspired to share this work as a result of my own acts in sharing my poems.  She expressed gratitude for my work in building an open culture that supported and nurtured creativity amongst staff and students.

My heart melted. I nearly 'teared up'. 

Putting aside my immediate emotional response, it strongly supported my. views on leadership and creativity. 

I do believe we can teach creativity, despite some views to the contrary. Ask any secondary school art or drama or music or technology teacher, or an English teacher. They do it every day. You can ALSO create the conditions in which creativity can thrive. I liken my work to that of a gardener. A gardener cannot 'make' a plant grow. But she can create the right conditions for the plants to grow. She can sow and water, fertilise and cultivate, so that plants are most likely to grow. So I think it is with creativity in schools.

Why is this important? Our Manaiakalani schools espouse the pedagogy 'Learn, Create, Share', creativity at the centre. If we want it to grow we have to be deliberate and intentional about it. We have to create the right conditions for it to sprout, to flourish, and grow, if we want to reap the harvest of improved wellbeing, and a generation of empathetic problem solvers.

Principalship has many component parts. It's complex work. It's hard to suggest that any one component is more important than any other, although I am a great support of Vivianne Robinson's 'Student Centred Leadership' work which defines the hard core of our work so well. However in the mix I 'reckon' (yes another 'reckon') there need to be those acts required to create the conditions in which creativity can thrive.

It appears that it is an open non judgmental response to risk taking, a willingness to share as a way to model risk taking, an explicit signal that overt acts of creativity are valued, that makes a difference. It's definitely what you do, not what you say, that makes a difference.

I took it from these three experiences of the past two weeks that I may actually be getting the hang of this 'Principalship' thing. 'He puna auaha a centre of creative excellence'.. maybe.. just maybe!!!

 

PS Once the patchwork is finished, I will ask the teacher's permission, and hopefully be able to share this splendid beautiful inspiring piece of creativity. And I hope to convince the two poets to share their wonderful words too.

Why aren't more schools more creative?

 If you do a bit of a search on the web about leadership and creativity, you tend to get results that focus on the business domain. Having done that, I was interested in what some of the literature said about how leaders can sustain greater levels of creativity in organizations, and how that might pertain to schools. If you like, my driving question is ‘why aren’t more schools more creative’?

I wasn’t undertaking some sort of literature review, nothing as comprehensive as that (although I know I should). I did come across one interesting article, ‘Creativity and the role of the leader’, by Teresa M. Amabile and Mukti Khaire (Harvard Business review, October 2008). Amabile and Khaire identified a series of factors which they suggest support greater creativity in business. Here is my summary:

• Higher success rates tend to come from ideas suggested from within teams than from the top down
• Highlight those who support others, described as “how to get people to shut up at the right time” (Pge 5)
• More likely when people from different disciplines and areas of expertise share their thinking (Pge 5) from Franz Johanssen, “The Medici Effect”
• Diversity enhances creativity, from work by  Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks, Fiona Lee, Ch-Ying Cheng
• Kim Scott, at that time working at Google who suggested that creativity within an organisation depends on “vibrant, ongoing collaboration and free idea flow, layers of management often lead to more bureaucracy” (Pge 7)
• They cite Scott Cook, “You’re most interested in fundamental paradigm changes,” he observed, “and yet you tend to staff your new projects with the people who did very well working on version 15 of the last big thing. You're crazy if you think you’re going to get a big shift out of the verison 15 team.” (Page 12)
• ‘Embrace the certainty of failure’, “Virtually everyone …. agreed that managers must decrease fear of failure and that the goal should be to experiment constantly, fail early and often, and learn as much as possible in the process.” (Pge 13)
• Howard Gardner, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education who has conducted research on ‘good work’ with professors Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi of C laremont Graduate University and William Damon of Stanford, said “The potential for passionate engagement in one’s work is highest when the work itself is seen as noble”, (Pge 15)

If you have made it through reading that list, well done. I reflected a little on this and its connection with schools. I thought that many schools probably have many of the characteristics on this list. 

• Many kura are team focussed, with distributed leadership structures that support creative problem solving. 
• Teacher teams are often cross disciplinary, although you could argue they are all teachers and hardly cross disciplinary at all. It depends on what you mean by cross-disciplinary.
• There are of course variations in leadership style in kura; not all Principals delegate well, or support creativity in any aspects of a kura’s operations etc. But equally there are those who do. 

This still left me with my key question: why aren’t more schools more creative? Sir Ken Robinson suggested that schools in fact kill creativity.

I thought about the willingness of both leaders and teachers to accept the idea of failure, to take risks. I think we are collectively a ‘risk averse’ profession. I have two ‘wonderings’ in this regard, two ‘hunches’ if you will.

• Are we the product (and therefore victims) of our own success? After all, to be a teacher you have probably known success throughout much of an academic pathway (with the occasional failure along the way)? 
• Many teachers do, I think, see our mahi as ‘noble’ in intent and a possible consequence of this might be that we are less willing to accept the possibility of failure for our students. We perhaps see this as such high stakes that we want to minimise risk for our learners?
• Are we risk averse because of the results focussed public dialogue, the tyranny of the metrics at times imposed upon us by our political masters, and the league table mentality that is perpetuated by the media and which still prevails in some communities at least, around achievement?
• Are we risk averse because we feel constrained by a mandated curriculum outside if which we are afraid to step? Even as a Manaiakalani school with an underlying pedagogy 'Learn, Create, Share', that is a pedagogy in which creativity is at the centre, we have to work hard, to be deliberate and intentional, in order to sustain and grow creativity.

These last questions lead me to wonder if we have failed to reach agreement about the purpose of education? Did we EVER have a consensus about the purpose of education? 

My thinking does however also remind me that I need to be deliberate and intentional actions I need to use to support, sustain, and grow creativity.