Learning+and+Innovation+Skills

1. What does it look like with young children?
 * Learning and Innovation Skills **
 * Creativity and Innovation
 * Brainstorming
 * Create new ideas
 * Elaborate, refine, analyze, and evaluate their own ideas to maximize creative efforts
 * Share new ideas and perspectives: learn to communicate within and across groups
 * Originality and inventiveness
 * Focus on risk-taking and confidence building development
 * Real-world connections
 * Encourage children’s recognition of their contribution
 * Fostering/modeling listening to others, respecting ideas, acknowledging different ideas/perspectives, and providing opportunities to share with one another and understand in life, we will not always get our way and that’s ok.
 * Persistence in learning
 * Modeling how to handle when you make a mistake or what to do when something does not go the way you had planned; helping children understand it is okay to make a mistake-risk taking
 * Risk-taking, providing opportunities to learn from non-successes:
 * Brainstorming
 * Planning
 * Producing
 * Evaluating
 * Critical thinking and problem solving
 * Reasoning
 * Parts of whole to produce outcome
 * Analyze and evaluate evidence, arguments and beliefs
 * Reflect on learning experiences and processes
 * Problem solving in innovative ways
 * Make connections between information
 * Essentially children should be able to receive feedback, analyze the feedback, and make decisions based on the feedback to come up with the best possible result
 * Communication and Collaboration
 * Articulate ideas effectively through oral, written, technologies, and nonverbal communication in diverse environments
 * Communicate for a range of purposes
 * Assume shared responsibility in collaborative work, recognize individual contributions
 * Work effectively in diverse groups and teams, range of abilities, ages, knowledge

2. How do we do this currently?
 * Creativity and Innovation
 * Project work
 * Meeting times to discuss work and ideas
 * Questioning to elicit ideas and perspectives
 * Using webs to plan with children and other planning tools
 * Critical thinking and problem solving
 * Ask prompting questions and recognize the process
 * Provide opportunities for them to reflect
 * Communication and Collaboration
 * Provide opportunities for extended collaborative projects
 * Provide opportunities to communicate through media and technology

3. Where do we need to go?
 * Creativity and Innovation
 * Embed time in the schedule for reflection and evaluation
 * Consider how to use different types of organizers with children to plan
 * List out different types of organizers
 * Critical thinking and problem solving
 * Pull out handout about the problem solving process
 * Expose them to the language of the process and recognize situations in which they use critical thinking
 * Modeling and thinking-aloud our own problem solving process
 * Creating organizers to help them synthesize the information they have been presented with
 * Mapping
 * Communication and Collaboration
 * Function: when to use what, think about with technology in mind
 * Model effect listening and communicating
 * Improve our communication and collaboration to develop a greater understanding of the process and results to relay and model for students.

Conversation about what learning and innovation skills are AND what they might look like in early childhood...
 * Notes from the book study conversation on 3/14/2012 **
 * modeling how to think differently (taking in information in different ways and processing and synthesizing that information)
 * intentionally deepen our own modeling to include additional content areas (e.g. financial literacy, health literacy, world languages, environmental literacy)
 * strengthen our own awareness as adult learners
 * mapping our own thinking and actions to support student understanding of different ways of thinking
 * interdisciplinary framework is something that we need to see across content areas
 * viewing failures as opportunities to learn - focusing on persistence and problem solving
 * students can document/plan what they are working on and revise it as they go
 * modeling and communication are critical for supporting persistence
 * Example... salt water / fresh water exploration
 * the ways the child documents and disseminates the information he learns to his peers supports advancement of these skills
 * following the children's lead, allowing them to be creative and expand upon their own ideas
 * helping children remember what they wondered about, what they talked about, where their interests have lead them
 * meaningful learning projects driven by engaging questions and problems
 * supporting children's diverse assessment of their own learning - and how are we teaching them to assess their own work and thinking
 * children admire each other more, appreciate each others perspectives, grow deeper friendships through opportunities for effective communication and collaboration
 * project based work supports 21st century communication and collaboration (strength of this program)
 * each child sees his/her self as a part of the whole system (the classroom community, the school community, the world...)