think Creativity & Intelligences Quest
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6th & 7th September Sheraton, Brigade Gateway 26/1, Dr. Rajkumar Road, Malleshwaram-Rajajinagar, Bangalore- 560055
Karen Bergquist Lueth
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Welcome to think CIQ 2015. Changing Education Paradigms.
think Creativity & Intelligences Quest
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Think Creativity & Intelligences Quest (CIQ), is an initiative of three leaders in the field of school education namely Mr. Mansoor Ali Khan of DPS, Bangalore, Mr. S Selvarajan of SRV, Rasipuram and Dr. M Srinivasan of GEAR Innovative Intl. School, Bangalore. The mission is to promote Creativity, Intelligences & Innovation with a “bottom up� approach. We aim to achieve this through a quarterly Journal and an annual conference for children, mentors, parents as well as thinkers to share and evolve by paying meaningful attention to research, thinking, innovation and creativity.
CIQ Greetings!
The power of Innovation and the potential of a creative thought are yet to be really understood as yet. Development of this mindset should actually start from age zero. Parents, teachers and the entire community have the responsibility towards this. Our eďŹƒcacy and impact will depend on our awareness, commitment and the tools we have at our disposal. These tools are not mass produced. Each one has to chart their own course and be responsible for the outcome. In this context of enormous responsibility and expectations, the idea of think Creativity & Intelligences Quest germinated. We are here, with a plan to help those who understand the importance of creativity, innovation, research, brain development and Intelligences. The miracle of learning and thinking starts during Early Childhood. We have numerous models of ECE and schools of thought, be it Behaviorists, Constructivists, Cognitivists or Creativists. The child at this age is capable of learning phenomenally great provided the child gets an environment suited to his style of thinking and learning. How else would a child learn in the first five years much more than what he/ she would in the entire life, after 5 ! ( Howard Gardner). Parents, teachers and the educating community need to know what to do and how to do. This understanding is not genetically transferred. We need work on it. We need to pool our experiences, listen to experts and ensure that every child gets the BEST. Towards this end, it's imperative your entire institution and your colleagues participate in the second edition of think CIQ, to be held on the 6th and 7th of September 2015 at the Sheraton Hotel, Brigade Gateway. A unique confluence of thoughts and ideas to equip you for the challenges in grooming the current and future generations. Warm Regards, M. Srinivasan Founder & Curator Think CIQ
2015
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The first edition of our conference was to Inspire the stakeholders in a child’s life. This year we are focusing on Changing Education Paradigms. 2015 has been a year of small but significant changes. Policy makers are looking at reforming the way we educate our children so they could take their place in the economies of the 21st century. Educationists around the world are trying to figure out how they can educate a child to have a cultural identity, while being part of the process of globalisation. Trying to do what we did in the past will not result in a different outcome.
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Changing the Educational Paradigm The current system of education was conceived and structured for a different age, keeping in mind the economic circumstances of the 19th century- the Industrial Revolution. The academic ability of a child today cannot be subjected to just knowledge. Children don’t appreciate being segregated into academic and non academic brackets, and have broken all gender and career stereotypes. This has caused a certain sense of chaos in the way a child wants to learn and needs to learn. The unfortunate outcome is actually desensitizing them from enjoying learning. One such victim of this mentality is the arts. Art is not valued as an aesthetic experience, that too when a child’s senses are operating at his/her peak.
If we are interested in the model of education for today, we need to break from conformity and standardised testing and take a different approach. We need to rethink, initiate and redesign our curriculum and focus on why we learn rather than only what we learn. How we learn can then be a non prescribed approach. That is what we mean by “Changing the Paradigm.”
Our Keynote speaker Shelley Gonzales has an interesting perspective and approach to curriculum.
Shelley Gonzales is passionate about teaching children in and about nature. She is adjunct faculty for Pacific Oaks, Mission, and West Valley Colleges, where she teaches courses in early childhood and outdoor education. She is the director of the West Valley College Child Development Center lab school, a 45-year-old early childhood program dedicated to supporting the needs of children and families in a very diverse community. She has a Master’s degree in Leadership of Early Childhood Programs from Mills College in Oakland. Her interests include working with families from diverse cultures, working with dual language learners, and nurturing pre-service teachers in curriculum development and outdoor classroom environmental education. We will be offering possibilities and avenues to address several challenges we face in our classrooms. For example, “How can I be a creative teacher ?”. We have multiple learning methods, references and resources but lack the enthusiasm to practise because we are overwhelmed with challenges. How can we see lots of possible answers to a question and multiple ways to interpret a question? ThinkCIQ will help you cope with changes, so that you can see better outcomes in the future. We believe in getting multiple and diverse answers to a question , not just one! Come and be a catalyst to change.
Shelley Gonzales Director, West Valley College Child Development Center Shelley’s Portrait by 9th grader & thinkCIQ contributor Aniketh Umesh.
The Conference is going to be an institute for learning, to break barriers for change. Our focus is how to change, rather than only why change. We are in the quest for creativity and innovation in the sphere of holistic learning and believe we need to think right from the beginnings of learning namely Preschools. ThinkCIQ is a platform to nurture this thinking and make it an essential capacity for creativity and thinking.
To help us in this endeavour, we have with us Keynote Speaker Natalie Seer, Director at Rainbow School, Stanford University.
Natalie Seer grew up with an immigrant father who did not speak his home language with his children. Though Natalie studied German in school, she needed translation help to have real conversations with her grandmother, uncle and cousin, and there are still things her father wishes he could explain to her in his home language. Since she was a teenager, now over 28 years, Natalie has worked alongside children, youth, their teachers and their families as a tutor, outreach worker, caregiver, teacher, program director, researcher and consultant mostly in the San Francisco Bay Area through community-based, not-for-profit and public organizations including the Beacons Initiative and WestEd. Over the years she has learned from and worked closely with teachers, children and their families speaking Spanish, Tongan, Tagalog, Vietnamese, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, Danish and many other languages, and her understanding of the importance of multiple language development has grown. Now she runs an international parent cooperative preschool at Stanford University, and supporting the language development of emerging multiinguals is her everyday work. Natalie holds her Bachelor of Arts in Human Biology from Stanford University and she earned her Master of Arts in Leadership in Early Education from Mills College in 2011. In 2014, Natalie received her Doctor of Education in Educational Leadership from Mills College.
Natalie Seer Director, Rainbow School, Stanford university Natalie’s Portrait by 9th grader & thinkCIQ contributor Aniketh Umesh.
Children are innately curious and if you encourage that curiosity they will learn without any further assistance. Curiosity drives imagination and is an engine for achievement. Teaching is a creative profession. It is not about a great delivery system. Great teachers mentor, engage, provoke and stimulate. Creativity on the other hand, is why human beings are diverse, dynamic and interesting. That is why creative minds are of great value.
One such great & creative teacher is our long time colleague and friend, Keynote speaker Jayanti Tambe, Executive Director of UCLA Early Care and Education.
She brings with her a tremendous source of knowledge, accumulated through her vast experience, primarily in Early Childhood Education. She has served as an Assistant Professor and Director of CORE (Institute for Community Research & Education) with Pacific Oaks College’s School of Education, where she specialized in Early Childhood Education. She also served as the Director of the Rainbow School and Pepper Tree School at Stanford University. Under her leadership, Stanford University's Rainbow School earned national recognition by NAEYC's Engaging Diverse Families Project 2010 for exemplary early childhood education programs. She was also recognized for her innovative teaching practices and was awarded the California Association for the Education of Young Children’s Rose C. Engel Teacher Innovation Grant. Through her appointment by several national associations, institutes and universities, she has been widely accredited for her innovation in teaching practices.
Jayanti Tambe Executive Director of UCLA Early Care and Education. Jayanti’s Portrait by 9th grader & thinkCIQ contributor Aniketh Umesh.
A child who can score well by giving us a perfect answer to a question versus a child who can come with the maximum number of answers to a question. Which will determine if he/she is a Genius? Divergent and lateral thinking will definitely take precedence over convergent and linear thinking, in the future.
In a test, in this book “Break Point and Beyond� 1500 preschoolers where given a divergent thinking test, and on the protocol of the test, if you scored above a certain level you would be considered to be a Genius. An astounding 98% of them scored GENIUS! This proves two things: We all have this capacity and as we grow older this capacity mostly diminishes. Why ?
A child needs a broader curriculum that celebrates his/her potential talents. According to Edward de Bono, lateral thinking deliberately distances itself from standard perceptions of creativity as either "vertical" logic (the classic method for problem solving: working out the solution step-by-step from the given data) or "horizontal" imagination (having many ideas but being unconcerned with the detailed implementation of them). One such lateral thinker is Dr. Leonie Baldacchino, Director of the Edward De Bono Institute for the design and development of Thinking at the University of Malta. She joins us again, not only as a keynote speaker but also as a friend, who supports our campaign for change.
Dr. Leonie Baldacchino
Ph.D. in Entrepreneurship from Warwick Business School ( UK), M.A. in Creativity and Innovation & B.Psy. (Hons.) from the University of Malta Director of the Edward De Bono Institute for the design and development of Thinking at the University of Malta. Â
2015 Â agenda
September 6th
8.30-9.30
Registration
9.30-10.30
Inauguration
10.30-11.00
Chai Break
11.00-12.00
Brain Development by Natalie Seer
12.00-1.00
STEM to Full STEAM Ahead
By Jayanti Tambe
1.00-2.00
Lunch
2.00-3.00
Nutrition By Gauri Shankar
3.00-4.00
Play based learning By Shelley Gonzales
4.00-4.30 4.30-6.00
Entrepreneurship in ECE By Leonie Baldacchino
Health & Hygiene By Dr. Prashanth
Hands-on is minds on By Jayanti Tambe
Chai Break Reading By Gauri Kirtane
Theatre in Preschools By Sandbox Collective
Sleep By Gita Sridhar
2015 Â agenda
September 7th
8.30-9.00 9.00-10.30
Recap Lateral thinking By Leonie Baldacchino
10.30-11.00 My Journey By Manju Arif
12.00-1.00
Problem solving in ECE By Natalie Seer
2.00-3.00 3.00-4.00 4.00-4.30 4.30-6.00
The Project Approach By Natalie Seer
Chai Break
11.00-12.00
1.00-2.00
Reggio Emilia By Jayanti Tambe
Messy Science By Shelley Gonzales
Language in Curriculum By Natalie Seer
The outdoor learning Circle Time By Shelley Gonzales By Jayanti Tambe
Lunch Emergent Curriculum By Shelley Gonzales Panel Discussion Dr. M. Srinivasan and Key note Speakers
Chai Break Multiple Intelligences By Dr. M. Srinivasan
How do you Register for
chang{e} ?
Bengaluru Ask your school for thinkCIQ 2015 tickets. Tickets available at GEAR Foundation, GEAR Road, Off Sarjapur Road & Outer Ring Road, Doddakannelli, Bengaluru-560035 School of India, Anekal Road, Bannerghatta, Bengaluru-560083 Delhi Public School- East, Survey No.43/1B & 45, Sulikunte Village, Dommasandra Post, Bengaluru-562125
Other cities Send us a request for thinkCIQ 2015 tickets atthinkCIQ2015@gear.ac.in Last dates for Registration – 30th August 2015. Limited seats available. Kindly contact your schools at the earliest.
i CQ i CQ i CQ i CQ Come and be a part of chang{e} this  2015.
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t.h. .n.k TALENT
HARNESS
noun. N a t u r a l aptitude or skill
verb. Control and make use of (natural resources), especially to produce energy.
Hone verb. Sharpen, refine or p e r f e c t (something) over a period of time.
IMAGINATION
noun. The ability of the mind to be creative or resourceful. i: The ninth letter of the alphabet. noun. the meaning of the first person term symbol. The imaginary quantity equal to the square root of minus 1.
n TIMES determiner. An indefinite number(of), an u n s p e c i fi e d number or variable, usually an integer.
KNOWLEDGE noun. F a c t s , information, and skills a c q u i r e d t h r o u g h experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject. awareness or familiarity gained by experience of a f a c t o r situation.
2015 Â
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.� ~ Albert Einstein
Nurture Thinking. Foster Talents.
www.thinkCIQ.in