Our 11 year old son is in the gifted program where he spends a large part of each week being given problems/questions/ideas to work on. E.g. recently he was asked to design affordable apartments that would have suited immigrants to the US in the 1920s. The output was a report of his reasoning as well as a model of the apartments (I think this project was assigned 2 days, sometimes projects must done the same day). At the end of the semester each kid is assessed on around 20 attributes spread across 7 different categories.
I think this type of assessment is what would be needed for a creativity or problem solving program. It doesn’t involve numerical scores or letter grades but instead uses terms like ‘novice’, ‘apprentice’ and so on. It would be good to see a simplified version like this for the general student population in addition to teaching the ‘subjects’. But, at least here in the US, I think there are very few teachers who are equipped to teach this kind of activity and equally ill-equipped to make assessments.
I read the link and frankly wasn’t stirred by it. At least in our area we have teachers trained in instructing creative and making the assessments. I’d simply ask them how to expand it to the general cohorts and then start experimenting. I think all of the gifted teachers started their career with the general student population so should have a good grasp.
