Module 7 – What’s the Big Idea Assignment
In Sparks of Genius—the 13 Thinking Tools of the World’s Most Creative People, Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein state that “play is simply for the fun of it, for the enjoyment of doing and making without responsibility. There is no success or failure in play, no holding to account, no mandatory achievement…It involves what anthropologies Stephen Miller has called ‘galumphing’—awkward, exaggerated, even subversive action and the deliberate complication or elaboration of activity for its own sake,... However, to say that play has no inherent goal does not mean that its results cannot afterward be put to good purposes beyond motivating enjoyment (p.248).”
Playing is different than other creative thinking tools, because it is more than just exercising other tools for thinking; it is a tool in and of itself (p.249).
As psychologist Jean Piaget suggested, play strengthens various mental skills in one or more of three ways—“Game playing teaches the making of rules within externally bounded situations that define how we may behave or think, as well as the breaking of those rules (p.249).” In my content of teaching Chinese, I am planning to use some game-playing techniques as a teaching and learning tool to my class. For example, instead of simply telling the students the differences between the similar pronunciations and character writing, I can encourage them to play with the different pronunciations and characters, then observe and explore the differences by themselves by using tongue twisters. This activity will loosen them up and help them to work on their pronunciation while still learning Chinese. For character writing, the students can break all the similar characters into parts, then observe and compare the similarities and differences among them, and then try to put all the parts back together to form the original character. By doing the practice play, the students can “exercise and develop any thinking tool by enhancing skill through practice (p.248),” thus recognizing the similarities and differences between the sounds and character writing.
Therefore, as Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein state, playing is “more than just exercising other tools for thinking; it is a tool in and of itself. Galumphing around with the materials, techniques, and rules of any endeavor generates novel behaviors, observations, and ideas (p.249).”
Transforming, on the other hand, is defined as “the serial or simultaneous use of multiple imaginative tools in such a way that one (set of) tool(s) acts upon another (set) transforming or transformational thinking (p.273).” Transformer thinking is different than any other creative tools, because it is “involves any combination of imaginative tools and disciplinary expressions (p.289).”
I am inspired by the discovery and interpretation example of the Laetoli footprints and plan to apply transforming thinking into effective Chinese learning and teaching. I am planning to encourage students to play, observe, recognize patterns and anomalies, engage in dimensional thinking, imagine body movements, play-act, form patterns, analogize and model, ultimately transforming the Chinese speaking and character writing into kinesthetic, visual, and empathic images of the sounds and characters. One way I can implement this is by encouraging students to write the pronunciation, to draw and/or paint the sounds. Meanwhile, as Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein state, transformations are often commutative: if A can be transformed into B, then B can be transformed back into A (p.283). After encourage students to transform the original Chinese pronunciation and character writing into different forms of communication, I will also encourage them to transform them back to the originals, which will help them to understand and thus remember the correct ways to speak and write.
After all, transformational thinking is a combination tool that involves all the other previous tools we have learned, which is to say, without playing, observing, recognizing patterns and anomalies, engaging in dimensional thinking, imagining body movement, play-acting, forming patterns, analogizing and modeling, there would not be an ultimate transforming thinking. The essential point is that we, as teachers and learners, need to apply all the creative thinking tools into teaching and learning, in the process of us being creative thinkers, we can also encourage and guide our students to be creative and productive.
Xin Wang
