What is NsLLT Creativity?

My friend and colleague, Alice Kennedy, from southern Oregon, recently reminded me that there have been several professionals like Alfie Kohn who supported student curiosity or learning and that the NsLLT provides for a better understanding of creativity and curiosity from not just from a belief standpoint but from a theoretical standpoint. Yes, Alice, to really allow for creativity through curiosity in the schools, we have to do more than have beliefs. We have to have a theoretical basis that uses methods aligned with the theory so that the research we collect supports the best conceptual learning for problem solving and creative thinking in our students.

The predominant educational paradigm collects normative data as evidence (evidence based data) on how well children provide an expected, already produced response to a given stimulus. These types of model, practice responses types of tasks are formalized statistically to form bell-shaped curves. Sometimes, these responses are considered “correct” or “right” versus “wrong” responses for a given task by given students across a specific variable such as age, stage, content. In this model, my production as an educator is my students’ production, essentially copying, regurgitating, offering little opportunity for the students to share their natural creative thoughts. These input-output models based on the deficits of what students can and can not do create great models of evidence based bell shaped curves but little opportunity for problem solving or creative thinking among our students. Therefore, this level of expected learning is pattern-based, or the second level of the NsLLT which often punishes or suppresses problem solving and curiosity for creative thinking.

However, in the NsLLT there are two higher levels of learning above the learning of patterns: conceptual learning and language learning. When students produce their own thinking about what they know of a topic or problem, then their productions are natural, creative products. Their language through writing, talking, signing names their thinking to be shared with observers or other members of the community or classroom to interpret and then to continue sharing. Such scaffolding between what I know and others know increases the depth of conceptual learning for higher levels of thinking and bettwe