What CPDD Did

THE CREATION PROCESS

By Tham Kum Chee, Martin Chew, Michael Low

The creation process used at Cedar Primary to produce the set of pedagogical strategies was a secondary product of the Pedagogies of the Future project (see diagrammatic representation of the creation process on the next page).  

The process begins with defining the Big Question or problem that an organization wishes to find a solution for. This is followed by an environment or trend scan, or research into areas that are related to the context or issue under discussion. Alpha thoughts comprise preliminary ideas that could address the issue at hand. However, to diverge and explore further before converging upon common answers, a step to provide insights is recommended. In the case of the Pedagogies of the Future (POTF) project – this involved ethnographic study of three teachers and six pupils. Concept trails were paths of exploration leading from the alpha thoughts, to formulate beta ideas which teams could further brainstorm and test on their subjects. In the case of the POTF project, each party in the collaborative study was involved in “Idea Labs” to explore aspects of what would make teaching and learning relevant for the 21^st century. Each of the steps in the creation process can be referred to at any point in time for iteration.

Having tracked the process used in the project, the team was curious to see if the creation process would work with other situations, not necessarily to do just with pedagogical strategies.  To test the process, the curriculum specialists chose as a partner Woodgrove Secondary School (Woodgrove).  Woodgrove had indicated its wish, for 2008, to conduct Project Work (PW) with the school’s strategic direction and strengths in mind.  Specifically, the Big Question Woodgrove wanted to investigate was, “How to incorporate design into the teaching of Project Work in order to make PW more relevant to students in Woodgrove?”  

In total, CPDD worked with Woodgrove over 1½ days in November and 2 days in December 2007, using the creation process to answer Woodgrove’s Big Question.  The process involved Woodgrove’s PW team of staff coming together to conduct an environmental scan (eg. why and to whom does design matter), articulating their thoughts (alpha thoughts) and shaping these alpha thoughts into beta ideas to capture what was considered important to have; the process also involved insight quests in the form of external parties such as Republic Polytechnic, Staging Connections (an event management company) and Stikfas Action Figures, sharing their understanding of PW and/or design.  Finally, as part of the process, nine students were invited to join the adults on days 3 and 4 so that the intent to “make PW relevant to students in Woodgrove” was palpable. 

Woodgrove’s Learning

For Woodgrove, the most obvious gain was a model to conduct Project Work in 2008, which it believed not only supported the school’s strategic direction but also would remove teachers’ tendency to conduct PW mechanically.  It also gained an alternative way to conduct its meetings.  Previously, work was invariably compartmentalised and meetings were held to ‘solve a problem’ by, invariably, assigning follow-up action to the team member most closely related to the action.  The creation process pulled the Woodgrove PW team together on a platform where the pressure to solve a problem was removed; in its place was a process that demanded that the team entered conversations with an open mind; in a space where the team did not know where the process would lead them, it had to entrust its time to the facilitators, and become alert learners.  In the process, the team learnt new things and gained fresh perspectives.  Also deeply appreciated was the chance to hear from students first hand what would motivate them to be interested in PW.

In brief, the creation process offered Woodgrove a way to understand a situation and improve on it by conducting a reality check (context scan), learning from conversations with external parties (insight quests), inviting input from stakeholders to distil what truly matters, conceiving different possibilities, using different lenses to magnify an interest area and sharpening an idea so that it is feasible for implementation while it takes into account the interest areas that matter to stakeholders. 

CPDD’s Learning 

The Woodgrove prototype experience convinced us that the creation process could be used in situations other than that concerned with pedagogical strategies; it could be used to work on situations where a new solution or a desirable outcome that meets the needs of different stakeholders could be surfaced.  We thought at first that this creation process could be rolled out to schools in the form of a write-up coupled with ‘success stories’ and/or suggestions of how the process had been used.  After the prototype experience, however, the sense is strong that this process may be better used by HQ officers trained as facilitators to work with school staff on a problem or situation that a school identifies as needing attention.  

This arrangement has the following advantages:  

i.        The process involves many steps, requires a few rounds of use before one would dare say he is comfortable with using it, and requires multiple skills for creation to be possible.  Schools intent on solving a problem immediately may not have the patience to go through rounds of training before it can see a way to solve its problem. 

ii.       HQ officers trained as facilitators have distance from a school’s problem and would be sufficiently emotionally-detached to attend to the problem per se.  School staff, however, because they are so intimately involved in a problem, may enter a discussion with pre-conceived plans and use that platform to only advance a pre-conceived solution.  

iii.   HQ officers trained as facilitators bring freshness, perspectives and possibilities that may not have been imagined by a school.  In the Woodgrove prototype experience, LLB1 brought to Woodgrove the following opportunities never before entertained by the Woodgrove staff: a sharing by a Danish national working as an intern at The Idea Factory on INDEX, a highly prestigious design competition in the Scandinavian countries; conversations with design industry expertise and the idea of ‘co-designing’ a PW curriculum with students, for students.   

The Idea Factory has also shared that any drive for creation seems easy at first and tends to become increasingly difficult to do.  The first wave of creation is usually fruitful, as evidenced by how quickly our schools raised the profile of local ideas that have worked and ‘scaled’ them up to a wider level, or schools benchmarked themselves against existing higher standards and applied these to their school’s situation.  The next wave(s), however, will be harder to come by.  After looking within and looking outside, what can schools do to innovate next?   The creation process, used with support from external parties, may help schools look both within and outside to forge a new way to do something.