Aaron White—Script

[00:01] Justin Baeder:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, bringing you the best in professional practice.

[00:06] Announcer:

Here's your host, director of the Principal Center and champion of high performance instructional leadership, Justin Baeder. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.

[00:15] Aaron White:

I'm your host, Justin Baeder, and I'm honored to be joined today by fellow Solution Tree author, Katie White. Katie is an author and consultant based in Saskatchewan who works with school leaders around the world. the author of two books. Katie has been a district and school-based administrator, a learning coach, and a K-12 classroom teacher. And she's the author of the new book, Unlocked, Assessment as the Key to Everyday Creativity in the Classroom.

[00:42] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:44] Aaron White:

Katie, welcome to Principal Center Radio.

[00:46] Aaron White:

Hey, thanks for inviting me. I'm excited to be here.

[00:48] Aaron White:

Well, I'm so excited to have you on the show to talk about creativity, especially in conjunction with assessment, because I think a lot of people will hear this title, incorporating assessment and creativity in the same subtitle of one book and wonder, what in the world do those have to do with one another? So Katie, what does assessment have to do with creativity?

[01:08] Aaron White:

Well, the premise of the book is that there's lots and lots of literature out there about creativity and the creative process and the various stages that humans kind of flow through as they're getting their creative on. And then there's a whole bunch of literature about assessment, formative assessment, summative assessment reporting. And I just started to think that maybe they weren't as separate as they seemed. And so I started to investigate creativity research and really think about the language that was being used around creativity. And I realized that a lot of the things that we would call driving the creative process on or inviting people to dig deeper are actually assessment processes. So I started to just overlap those two things and say, hey, how do they relate?

[02:01]

And I think I'm making a case here that assessment is in fact the very thing that human beings do when they're digging deeper and deeper into their own creative process.

[02:14] Aaron White:

Now, I think a lot of people would say, but I thought creativity was something that was kind of open-ended and there's no assessment, there's no judgment. It's just kind of, you know, whatever flows, flows. How does assessment not ruin creativity, right? Because I think we've all heard Sir Ken Robinson speak on creativity. And I think his message, you know, has struck a chord with a lot of people and kind of made us feel like maybe we've kind of squelched creativity through things like assessment. So how do those work together?

[02:48] Aaron White:

So in my first book, I spent a lot of time talking about how we might need to re-story assessment. And I think that I continue that theme in the second book with a really strong emphasis on what I mean by re-storying assessment. So when we talk about assessment or evaluation or those terms, a lot of things seem to pop into our heads. Things like testing and bubbles and multiple choice and high stakes and those kinds of assessment processes definitely stifle creativity. They're difficult. to get creative because we're working towards such a narrow target.

[03:31]

But I think the kind of assessment that I really, really promoted in my first book and continue to promote are formative assessment processes. So those are things like thinking about what we're trying to achieve, thinking about where we are in relation to our goals, thinking about how the decisions we're making are impacting the outcomes that we're looking for, you know, reflecting on processes that we're using to get to those outcomes and whether those processes are effective, thinking about things like performance and product, you know, and how that relates to our own satisfaction with what we're doing. So it's a much more organic way of assessing. It's not about a test, but it is certainly about figuring out what we're trying to achieve in these open-ended contexts and working towards that in a purposeful way.

[04:22] Aaron White:

And that sounds very familiar to me as kind of the way a music teacher or a drama teacher would talk about the work that they do with students and would talk about the way that they use assessment. But I think it also kind of brings up some of the distance that we try to put between the traditional core academic subjects and creativity. I think we've kind of enforced that distance through so many different mechanisms in recent years where creativity is maybe something to save for the end if we have time for it, but it's definitely not something that we do when standardized testing is coming up. We're a little bit afraid of it and we think it might do some bad things to our test scores. So I appreciate the light that you're shedding on this and the different perspective and, as you said, the restorying around that.

[05:07] Aaron White:

The other thing that's really challenging, I think, around subject areas like math or English language arts where we're really concerned about those test results is even if we want to open up our creative space, even if we think that that is going to lead to richer and deeper learning, the other very big challenge for teachers is time. And so there's this sort of pull between wanting to make learning experiential and, you know, open-ended, but being afraid that we're not going to get to all of those learning goals that we have to achieve, that we know are going to appear on those tests. So certainly part of our conversation will have to be about how to balance those two things.

[05:48] Aaron White:

Absolutely. And in the book, you talk about unlocking several things, starting with the creative space. Talk to us about that idea of the creative space.

[06:00] Aaron White:

Right. So it's how we prepare ourselves and our students to receive open-ended contexts. And so it's thinking about things like the physical space, the creative physical space. So it's thinking about the materials that we might introduce or whether that be raw materials like, you know, crayons and paints, or whether it's things like manipulatives in math or photographs that might inspire. So all of those kinds of material things, we think about things like seating and how we might flex that a little bit so that kids are collaborating and seeking feedback. And then it's also thinking about things like the emotional space.

[06:40]

So how we create safety and trust in the classroom and so that our students can be vulnerable enough to take the risks that are essential for creativity. Because the other part of creativity that makes people pretty nervous is things can go wrong. In fact, things going wrong is kind of a pivotal thing in creative processes. So we have to have a really safe emotional space for that to happen for students. And that takes a fair amount of concerted effort. And then there's You know, there's things like making sure that kids can make choices and, you know, and know how to navigate a classroom space so that they can be increasingly independent.

[07:21]

All those really cool, rich things that come out of creative learning. So that's what I mean by setting up a creative space.

[07:28] Aaron White:

Absolutely. It reminds me of the importance of, you know, classroom culture when it comes to things like project based learning. My wife, Dr. Amy Baeder, does a lot on project based learning and helping teachers kind of prepare for project based learning. And yeah, it starts there with that, that creating that sense of safety and that classroom culture that is priming, you know, setting students up to feel safe and successful in doing that kind of risk taking work.

[07:57] Aaron White:

Like it's also about creating a space where teachers feel comfortable doing that too. And I think it's important to acknowledge that when you move to open-ended contexts like project-based learning or inquiry or creativity, that there's an element of risk for teachers too. We have to give up some things that are pretty strongly tied to the identity of a teacher. And so part of the conversation in my book is talking about how to make sure that teachers feel comfortable more comfortable in taking those same risks that we're asking students to take.

[08:27] Aaron White:

And then you go into unlocking three E's in the center of the book. Talk to us about the three E's.

[08:33] Aaron White:

First of all, I have to acknowledge all of the creativity work that came before mine. So there's lots and lots of ways that people have tried to make sense of the creative process or the stages that people tend to go through. And I don't mean to imply that it's linear. It's very organic. We can flip back and forth. But So there's all kinds of names that people have attached to those stages.

[08:54]

So what I did is I took all of the literature that I could find about it and I consolidated it into three stages. The first one is exploration. The second one is elaboration. And then the third one is expression. And so I have to say they can be named other things, but the essence of them is that there's a time for kids to explore things in a really open-ended fashion, what I call catalysts or things that get them thinking, get them excited about learning, get them selecting materials and objects and starting to put things together and get a sense of what they're hoping to achieve. And then elaboration is where they dig a little bit deeper.

[09:38]

They start to refine their choices. They start to make more purposeful decisions and their goals become a lot clearer and the success criteria become a lot clearer for kids at that stage. Eventually, we move to expression, which is the time when we decide who we're going to share our creative work with. And that might be in the form of a performance, a very large performance, or it might be just having a conversation with a partner. But it's part of creativity is sharing it. It's a way of communicating who we are.

[10:08]

and what we're trying to achieve. And so that third E is focused on expression.

[10:13] Aaron White:

Well, that makes total sense. You know, if I think about students in some sort of performing arts class, those are highly intuitive and logical categories, right? Exploration, elaboration, and expression. What would the elaboration look like in kind of a performing arts context?

[10:30] Aaron White:

So elaboration in a performing arts or a visual arts context, any of those practical and applied arts Elaboration is where we start to think about some of the early decisions that we've been making in terms of trying to get to a goal. So if we're trying to create a play or a monologue or something like that, we're thinking about our language, our expression, our tone, all of those things. And usually in the elaboration stage, we're engaged pretty heavily in what I call in the book dialogue with self and dialogue with others. So we're seeking information and documentation that would indicate, you know, what we've been doing so far and we compare it to our goals and we ask for help from others. We ask them whether they were able to hear our voices when we were projecting. We ask whether they picked up on our intention to communicate sadness or joy.

[11:23]

All of those things that are part of dialoguing with others. And then we're also dialoguing with ourselves. We're thinking about whether we're happy with our performances or our products as they're being developed. And that's all happening during that elaboration stage. We might be changing up materials that we'd selected earlier. We might go a different route with a different size of a brush.

[11:47]

Or there's just so many ways that we can make those really big decisions during elaboration that get us closer to those goals that we're trying to achieve.

[11:56] Aaron White:

And if I think about a traditional subject, you know, maybe in a language arts classroom or social studies classroom that's using project-based learning, that I can see as being kind of where the rubber meets the road as students are fleshing out their project. As you said, making those decisions about how they're going to get to where they need to end up. Let's talk more about elaboration in, you know, a non-arts classroom, though. What can that look like? Because I feel like we intuitively get the idea of exploration, you know, search far and wide, you know, see what's out there, try some things, explore. But this is where we start to get uncomfortable, you know, in our core classes because we feel like, hey, this is a core class.

[12:35]

We have to get serious about this and we don't know how when it comes to creativity.

[12:39] Aaron White:

Yeah, so that's the part that makes me so excited because I think that that's where assessment and creativity intersect in a really purposeful way. So no matter what context we're engaging learners in, it's during elaboration that we're starting to be really, really crystal clear about what we're trying to achieve. We're really getting a sense of where we're hoping to get to and what that might look like. And so I think of exploration as kind of opening up the space. It's, you know, it's very open and we can go all kinds of places. But elaboration is where we're starting to narrow it.

[13:16]

Again, we're starting to get real clarity about what we're trying to do. And one of the things that a lot of people are afraid of is that creativity is just a free for all. You know, so in a math class, if I think about creativity, I actually thought about it a lot. I would give students a lot of what you would call loose parts or buttons and seeds and egg cartons and ways of sort of making sense of numbers. But it wasn't me just throwing that stuff at them and saying, go for it. Let's see what we can do with numbers there.

[13:47]

You know, during elaboration, we're trying to achieve something, right? Whether it's a sense of place value or, you know, a sense of comparing numbers or whatever it is that we're trying to do. And I think it's during elaboration in some of those more traditional classes when we can work alongside students and really articulate what we're supposed to do with all these materials, what the purpose of them is. And as long as kids have choice and voice in how that works, I think it's okay to have goals, if that makes sense. So I think that'll help people feel more in control because this isn't a free-for-all.

[14:25] Aaron White:

Well, absolutely. And if we're talking about something like project based learning or standards based grading, where there is an outcome that needs to have certain features, you know, there is maybe a rubric or there are standards that students need to demonstrate that they've mastered. As you said, it can't be a free for all. And that's a lot of teachers' worst nightmare is a free for all, right? We don't necessarily need to be the sage on the stage with total control over everything, but we do want to make sure that our students are purposefully learning something and not just engaging in controlled chaos. Makes total sense.

[14:58] Aaron White:

Right. And I think part of the really wonderful outcome of creative process is we might have a goal or a target in our head, or it might be very explicitly shared with kids. But what ends up happening through a creative process is we end up hitting, for lack of a better word, a bunch of other goals. You know, when we sit down at the end of a class period that's been really creative, we say, okay, so how did we do in relation to the goal we were trying to achieve? But holy man, look at all of these communication goals, all of these problem solving goals that we also dug into a fair bit. And we might find that our documentation of the creative process, you know, photos, video, artifacts, can really give us insight into even other goals that we weren't intending on hitting and the other thing that I talk a lot about is if the product is pretty determined by that learning goal then the creativity rests in the process and how kids can get there so there's always it's almost like it's one or the other either we're adjusting the product or performance or we have a chance to adjust the process but somewhere in there there has to be flexibility.

[16:05] Aaron White:

Right. And if there's not, then we end up just getting basically 30 of the same thing, which is what we're trying to get away from with worksheets and things like that. Exactly. And then your final chapter in the book focuses on reflection and response. How does that kind of pull it all together?

[16:21] Aaron White:

So reflection is part of all of the stages, right? I mean, self-assessment is really entwined with reflection. So is feedback, all of those really critical aspects. assessment processes. But at the end of a project or a performance, there's a time for what I call deep reflection, where we ask kids to think about how they got to the end that they got to. And I have to say, it's different from sitting them down with a checklist or even a rubric and saying, how do you think you did?

[16:52]

That's not the kind of reflection I'm talking about. I'm So when you were generating ideas, what process did you use? Did you write it on a whiteboard? Did you enter it into a Google Doc? Like how did you sort of document your generation of ideas? Where did you go to to get new ideas?

[17:13]

Did you research? Did you talk to a mentor? Did you Skype someone? And then did that work for you? Was it effective? Did it get you to an end that you were hoping for?

[17:24]

And then the best part of this stage is, How might you take all of those processes that you used this time and apply them to your next creative process? So which things do you want to repeat? Which things didn't work for you? For example, a student might say, you know, I worked with a partner during elaboration and I found it took me four times longer than I wanted it to to get to the end. that I was hoping. So maybe it was about the partner I chose, maybe it was about where we were working, or maybe it was just the fact that collaboration wasn't appropriate at that time.

[18:00]

So next time I might shift how I do that. So it's a real, really a good chance for teachers and students to think about how they're learning, how they're approaching a task, and then how they might transfer that and translate it to another context.

[18:15] Aaron White:

And I love the ownership there of the process, because sometimes as educators, we take too much responsibility for the process. And we say, well, if this didn't work the way I wanted it to for my students, then I need to rethink everything. I need to start from scratch, whatever. And what I hear you saying in there is that students have the opportunity to and should reflect on their process and get better at that process as well. So it's not just something that we need to kind of go back to the drawing board if our groups don't work together as well as we think they need to. There are actually opportunities for student-directed improvement along the way.

[18:51] Aaron White:

Yeah, and that becomes increasingly important, the older kids get, because at the end of the day, we're trying to build learners. We're trying to build kids who are independently able to navigate a really complex world. And I know that in the name of good teaching... We sometimes feel like we have to own those decisions, but I think at some point it gets a little bit unhealthy, to be honest, for both teachers and students.

[19:14]

I think it's a tremendous responsibility for teachers to shoulder having to adjust their lessons all the time. without any input from kids. I mean, I really think this has to be a shared conversation for sure.

[19:26] Aaron White:

Katie, what kinds of schools do you work with in terms of the work that they're doing? So when a school typically brings you in to help them with assessment or help them with creativity, what kinds of things are they working on that they need help with?

[19:39] Aaron White:

Well, I don't get the chance to work as often in creativity as I'd like to, because I think our our education systems, they're slowly turning in that direction. You know, there's a tremendous amount of pressure on our educators to get things done. And so opening up our spaces to creativity is a hard conversation in many places where I work. I would say there are some exceptions. In Canada here, there are some provinces that have moved to what we call competencies. And so they're really focusing on creativity.

[20:16]

But most of the work I do is around assessment. And what schools are trying to do is figure out how, I think there's a few parts to that. I think they're trying to figure out how to design strong assessment that captures good, authentic learning. I think they're trying to figure out how to capture that authentic learning, because lots of it happens inside our heads, and so we have to figure out a way to get it out. And then I think a lot of schools are also wrestling with, so then what? If we're going to re-story assessment as a process that propels learning forward instead of just looking back and assigning it a value, if we're going to propel learning forward, then that means that we have to figure out how to respond to assessment information.

[21:04]

And so a lot of the conversations that I have with schools focus on what we do when we figure out that students have strengths and what we do when we figure out students have needs, how we might adjust our instruction. And that's where I think I see the greatest dovetail, really, with my creativity work, because our responses to what kids need can be incredibly varied. There's a whole bunch of things that we can do, and it really... The thing that I love best about working with teachers in that exact context is we get to be creative too.

[21:40]

We get to think, okay, so what are all the ways that we can maybe help students differently than how we approached it last time? So that seems to be where most of my work sits right now.

[21:53] Aaron White:

So the book is Unlocked, Assessment as the Key to Everyday Creativity in the Classroom. And Katie, if people want to learn more about your work or get in touch with you, where's the best place for them to find you online?

[22:05] Aaron White:

Oh boy, I feel like I'm everywhere. I'm on Twitter. My Twitter handle is at katiewhite426. So you can find me there and I'm a regular Twitter user. I've also got an email, k.white at sasktel.net, which you can find right through my Twitter profile as well.

[22:26]

I blog very regularly on the Solution Tree Assessment Center website. website on their blog. And you'll find that a lot of my blog posts are about assessment and open-ended context. So the exact topic we're talking about. So those are just some of the places where you can find me. www.kyconsulting.com is my website.

[22:51] Announcer:

Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.