Draw for Learning
Visual literacy.
If seeing is believing then how might seeing learning help?
Quite a lot actually. Consider 80% of sensory impressions are visual. We can take in some 10 million pieces of information in per second. So why write every thing?
Mind mapping is simply capturing information in a way that replicates nature to include how we think and perceive things, through association and by making connections.
Replace written learning with the five-branch flow of a mind map for visual clarity, ease and speed for comprehension. Whether teaching, learning or reviewing, Mind Maps conveniently also provide the Creative Thinking Skill of highlighting the essence of a topic.
In fact, Mind Maps put the information conveniently into hand. With the big idea in the palm, the five branches are easily numerated on the fingers. Great, right ?
Start with something familiar to students, like fish. If you live in a fishing village this makes sense. If fish is not top of mind, pick something else, fun and relatable before moving toward class lessons, whatever they are.
Mind Maps were made popular by psychologist Tony Buzan, though they date back centuries.
Mind Maps are playful and open-ended while following a clear structure, making them a perfect creative thinking tool for processing information.
Thought leaders around the world identify creativity as a crucial 21st century skill.
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Mind Map
Mind Maps as Hand Maps
Start Mind Maps with Familiar Topics - Like Fish
Mind Maps for Lessons
Tanya is currently in Madagascar at Wings of Change, a vocational hospital school and hotel social enterprise in the fishing village of Ambatozavavy.
www.wingsofchange.co
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Open to Novelty
We must have light.
Day light, moonlight, phone light, candle lights, spotlights and the like. The lights that naturally occur and that we need change over the course of the day, and night. During a 24 hour period different light-types hand off to each other in a simple, seemlessly quiet collaboration making life possible.
And then there’s guiding lights. At different times for different purposes people come into our lives to teach, to guide and to collaborate to make it true: We must have light.
There’s a we-ness to life. Day becomes night, proving that a certain harmony of elements make it possible to live. When in balance, nature works wonders.
Collaboration is a 21st century skill. Really though, it’s an appeal for us humans to do what nature does, and that is find a way to work in harmony.
If we do not work together, we simply cannot work through all this complexity in the world.
Example: It will take all of us working together, if we are to live sustainably on planet Earth. Climate is clearly out of balance.
Not understanding, lack of clarity and ambiguity are a 21st century norm. Trust-building exercises teach that it’s ok if we are blinded. That’s why together is better, especially now. We need each other, as professionals, as humans.
Blind trust either works in our favor or it does not. It depends on the quality of the team. Will others help, step up, provide some guidance?
If we defer judgment, tolerate the ambiguities and lean into each other, there’s a much better chance of working together and having a better quality of life experience.
Blind trust - it’s not so much the blind leading the blind, where either no one takes action, or someone randomly takes an action. Actually, that might be part of the problem today. Rather, a blind trust, the kind that highlights confidence in each other, is what creates the opportunity for collaboration to occur.
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Just like every person, every light has a special purpose.
Tanya facilitates creative process for problem solving. She’s currently at Wings of Change, a vocational hospitality school and hotel the remote tropical island of Nosy Be, Madagascar.
Wings has the dual mission of lifting students out of poverty through education and impacting the community.
Since opening in 2021, two hundred students have graduated from the program with an 84% success rate of professional employment.
Clean up Nosy Be is a community project in problem and solution finding to plastics and waste in the environment. #sauvonslasplanete, #cleanupnb
www.wingsofchange.co
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Class Notes on Creative Thinking Skills
Develop for delivery.
Transforming ideas into solutions. It’s a process.
Transformation so cool. Like when a chameleon changes color to attract a mate. How amazing is that? Seriously. Change in nature is, well, natural. Duh.
What if we accepted change more naturally? And because change is natural, it is important. In fact, change defines the cycles of life. Nothing is static. We are all in motion.
Solutions emerge by allowing for ideas open up a bit. We play with them, almost like toys. Get curious about an idea to explore it.
Incomplete thoughts are like an incomplete paint job. It just doesn’t feel complete. And because its incomplete, you could finish it in any number of ways. That’s creative process.
Ideas have be evaluated in order to have the opportunity to become solutions.
And remember, ideas don’t have feelings. It’s ok to toss them out if they don’t fit!
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Class Notes on Creative Thinking Skills
Exploring the Vision
Identifying Goals, Wishes and Challenges
If we are to start at the beginning of the creative process, this is the time to vision, to imagine and to dream about hopes and desires for a future ideal state.
Imagining what is desirable activates a mindset focused on possibility. Many, if not all of the things we have now began as an imagined thought. Imagine that!!
Through Visionary Thinking
Imagine a magazine or newspaper front cover a year from now with your vision. What would it say?
Let’s say becoming fluent in English is the headline. Seems pretty reasonable, if not a stretch for an ESL cohort. For now anyway.
And this is why visions matter.
Act Toward the Direction of Intention
With a vision in mind, a destination is set. It may be far out in the distance. It may seem lofty or even far-fetched. That’s fine. That is what visions are: big hairy audacious goals or BHAGs.
Unconstrained free thinking in order to expand horizons beyond what might be normally considered…yep, that’s where visions have the headspace to emerge.
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Exploring the Vision
Visionary BHAG
Statement starters for visionary thinking:
“It would be great if…”
“Wouldn’t it be great if…”
To explore negative images of the future:
“It would be awful if…”
Notes on Creativity Through English
Defer Judgment
How we think matters.
The piece is silly, weird, ambiguous
and yet somehow recognizable.
The piece is also correct.
This drawing is an experience in what it is like to defer judgment.
Thinking matters
A new season brings a new cohort to Wings of Change. New faces, new opportunities and new perspectives to see things differently, are always available to us.
Knowing how to see things differently is exactly the right approach in sharing with students how they might approach their own learning. In becoming more creative, students develop a capacity for original thought and can become better problem solvers.
for Problem Solving.
A lot of problem solving is sequential. That is to say, a lot of problems follow a pattern, a structure, a sequence of tasks in order to achieve the final goal. Cooking, addition and running a hotel are examples of challenges that require a capacity for sequential thinking and doing.
Sequencial problem solving is important!
A lot of problem solving is also resolving something complex and unclear. Unclear, because a lot of solutions are possible and ucovering what solution is best is the real problem. A sudden (think COVID) or particularly complex (think COVID again) situation can throw us for a loop and then thinking clearly for any solution can be a challenge. Pausing and having a toolkit for processing information is key in crafting a desired outcome. This is where creative capacity matters.
Complex problems are everywhere!
The Creative Process
More optimistically, exploring what possiblities are out there before possibly considering what decision could or should be made is central to what the creative process is all about.
How to cook is different from deciding what to put on the menu. How to cook is creative certainly, and is also highly sequential. What might all the dishes to put on the menu… well, now that just opens the door to infinite possiblity right there. Of course contraints and requirements such as budget and resources play a significant part in that decision making, but I digress…
Defers Judgment
We kick off each new cohort at Wings of Change in deferring judgment. That’s what the drawing is about. Deferring judgment means to delay any decision making, to put off deciding just about anything, until a decision would need to be made.
Take towels for example. Room towels can be folded in any number of ways.
There’s the standard square towel fold. And then there’s crazy fun towel folds such as flowers, lizards, elephants and the like. Like napkin folding, there seems to be endless possiblites of towel folding.
Exploring what might be possible is a great way, perhaps the best way to then determine what idea stands out and could be developed into a solution.
Allowing Something Novel and Useful to Emerge.
When shown some options, the lizard towel fold always gets the most laughs among students. I wonder how towel folding might serve as a good example in creative thinking and problem solving. I can imagine there will be some practice needed, failures for sure and eventually, something novel and useful will emerge as a cool towel fold…who knows, we may end up something even more interesting than a towel lizard.
Of course, to get to the right towel fold decor, deferring jugdment will have to happen. Some folds may be too complicated, too time consuming, too crazy etc… Let’s explore and see what happens!