School science labs often prescribe the experiments, but they seldom teach how to come up with an experiment. Science teachers explain the scientific method, but fail to have their students postulate things to test scientifically. Instead, they are very busy teaching about what other scientists have already postulated and tested. How can students in these classes learn how to come up with their own ideas for experiments.

Imaginative thinking is at the core of art, science, and a number of other disciplines, but the science of imaginative thinking is kept secret from students. Their teachers do not talk about it nor explain it. Imaginative thinking is often not practiced as part of these coursed. For many students the source of ideas for art really remains a mystery. Many students continue to lack the confidence as well as the thinking skills to generate and develop their own ideas. In some instances, art students are expected to learn by copying work from the teacher, from magazines, or from the students around them. Science class experiments are more often prescribed than invented.

As adults, these students may be good imitators, good office and factory workers, but not well suited to solve new problems. They grow up to trust the ideas of experts, and fail to consider their own ideas. They have not learned critical assessment. In some cases they tragically follow the wrong experts and their life becomes a failure—at times even creating violent and tragic consequences.

The Seduction of Education by the Mirror Neuron
As humans we are very efficient at learning by imitation.

Recently, brain scientists Giacomo Rizzolatti, Leonardo Fogassi, and Vittorio Gallese at the university in Parma, Italy, discovered and identified mirror neurons in our brains.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/3204/01.html
1) Mirror Neuron URL to Wikipedia:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_neuron
Mirror Neuron URL to PBS Nova Page:  http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/3204/01.html

These are the "monkey see/monkey do" neurons. The scientists found them first in monkeys, but human brains are much better at this than monkey brains. Teachers and educational researchers all know that imitation is extremely efficient at getting students to learn to do a given task. In fact the mirror neurons are extremely important to our early development, as well as for much subsequent learning. Imitation almost does not require "teaching". Teaching to get a mirror neuron practice response requires modeling, demonstrating, or showing an example. Our mirror neurons can make us imitate without thinking. It is an instinct. At first it may be amateurish, but it is relatively effortless and we may even be surprised at our first efforts.

Do we consider this teaching? Yes. For some types of learning I agree that this is the best kind of teaching--and it works so well that we may have forgotten that it is not for everything. The mirror neurons are perfect for certain kinds of dexterity skills. Imitation is probably the best approach for keyboard training, for learning to write cursive, for firearms training, for learning to master clay on potter's wheel, and any number of skills for which we are not looking for a better approach. Not every task calls for innovation. Many physical genius tasks call for a good deal of expert modeling.

As art teachers, we do not have to reinvent throwing on the potter's wheel. In using a potter's wheel, a master potter could be the best teacher for the physical skill, but may not always be the best teacher to help students understand how to assess the merits of original expressive work. Since the advent of the industrial revolution, pottery has morphed into an art form rather than an everyday necessity. This does not negate the need to learn the physical aspects of throwing. It is just to say that art teachers have a complex task that often includes widely different goals that need to be tailored to vastly different parts of the mind.

HOW IS THE REST OF THE BRAIN DEVELOPED?
This leaves us with the dilemma of how to teach students to learn how to learn to do the not-given task. How do we teach imagination, critical thinking, and choice making when there are so many choices to imitate in life? Imitation is great when the expert has the right solution, and when you can be sure that you have selected the best of the right experts. However, as things change, imitation fails. The experts are quickly out-dated, but the package label on ideas does not include a shelf-life designation. On the other hand, imagination is the ability to see the unseen. It is the ability to assess scenarios before they exist. We need to use imagination (divergent thinking) in order to tell if the expert is out of date or wrong.

But, how do we teach imagination, innovation, and critical thinking? We do not have to reinvent the wheel, but we do have to teach invention. A lesson that could teach us HOW to INVENT the wheel would in fact be be very useful (as invention practice). Imitation teaches us how to make wheels in today's world, but it was imagination that brought about the invention of the wheel. The wheel was not invented by the mirror neuron. Nothing has ever been invented by imitation.

In teaching art some parts of the curriculum are simply not the kinds of things that we can expect to teach by employing the students' mirror neurons. Art, by definition, is no longer art when it is copied or reproduced. We do not learn how to learn to think like an artist by using our mirror neurons. We need to understand this. However, many students and some art teachers do not realize this. They know by experience that imitation is working well for them, and some art teachers encourage it by showing examples when it is inappropriate. To the student it looks like something to imitate. To the teacher, it looks like art. How will our students learn how to use their imaginations and critical thinking skills if we are not teaching them to use the methods that 'imaginers' and critical thinkers use?

Simply taking away the examples without teaching the use of the elusive 'imagination neurons' leaves the kids out in the cold. We should not be surprised if they enterprise to find something to copy. Schools, parents, and society do so much to condition us to be spectators rather than active strategic game players. As teachers we constantly say, "Please pay attention, watch closely, listen carefully, and so on." Original thinking becomes very risky, and most of us stop doing it.

Studies show that we loose our divergent thinking ability as we mature. Using eight tests of divergent thinking, researchers gave the tests to 1600 preschool children.

"The first tests were given when the children were between three and five years of age. Ninety-eight percent of the children scored in the genius category. When these same children took the identical test five years later, only 32 percent scored that high. Five years later it was down 10 percent. Two hundred thousand adults over the age of 25 have taken the same tests. Only two percent scored at the genius level." 2--Land and Jarman (based on Taylor)

Why does this happen? We should not assume that education, parenting, and societal factors are the only things causing this loss of creative thinking habits and skills. The normal biological development of our brains may be programmed to change the way the brain works as we mature. Divergent thinking allows our brains to scan all compartments and categories to look in all the unexpected places for a possible ideas. Young children have fewer fixed categories, so it may be natural for their brains to be flexible and quick about this. As we accumulate more knowledge we categorize things and our brain tries to keep a log (remember) of where everything is. As we mature the volumes or information and the categories become immense and overwhelming at the same time that our brains become less flexible. It gets harder and harder for us to scan all these compartments. The need to get things organized seems to be a very important part of our evolved genetics (and sanity).

Furthermore, we know that genetics varies between individuals. Some of us inherit different personality traits. We may be predisposed to be more or less capable of divergent thinking and creativity.

How much of this loss of divergent thinking ability as we mature is only because of our inheritance and the result of getting older? How much is because education is built around the efficiency of imitation, thereby failing to encourage and teach us the ways and appropriate times to use our imaginations? We cannot say, but common sense tells us that education that requires us to continue to practice divergent thinking will be more beneficial than education that merely trains us to unquestionably acquire the knowledge of experts and believe it.

To the extent that the youthful brain is malleable, creating art is a perfect venue in which to practice and nurture the brain's imaginary powers to make choices and connections between experience and expression. Art is an ideal venue with which to practice imagining many scenarios that go beyond anything experienced in the past. When students write about art, describe it, have discussions about artistic quality, and create aesthetic descriptions of their surroundings they can be learning to make creative connections with their own experiences and they can imagine and speculate about lives they have have never actually observed or experienced. Like good science education that encourages observation and wonderment about how things work, art education also needs to build minds that observe, wonder, imagine, and create.

Imagination requires divergent thinking. Imagination can give us practice in the ability to hold a variety of different and conflicting notions in our minds simultaneously. On the other hand, once we are conditioned by our teachers to follow an example or an expert instead of finding joy in considering opposites and alternatives, we find it too frustrating to mess with all the options. We capitulate and follow the majority position, the fad, or whatever worked last time, or happens to be popular at the moment.

When we see education as merely producing experts at imitating experts, we fail to foster most of what is our human potential. Einstein who was very intelligent, cautioned us by saying the imagination is much more important than intelligence. Yet, schooling methods are often directed toward gaining knowledge and skills (not imagination) because the educational research easily shows how well the mirror neurons work. Very little educational effort goes into imagination training because studies to validate it are much harder to do and more expensive to design and administer.Little effort goes into assessing and testing imagination (divergent thinking). Our testing fails to evaluate how much of our minds are being left behind as the result of our teaching methods. If we want No Mind Left Behind, we need to change how and what we assess in order to design effective teaching/learning paradigms for the nurture of critical thinking, divergent thinking, and imagination.

As change accelerates, society needs fewer imitators and more innovators to survive and succeed. Our mirror neurons and imagination neurons do not evolve very fast, but education could evolve now. Imitative production is perfect training for a society based on dictatorship and on slave workers. Democracies and free societies fail unless citizens learn to think on their own, learn to select the best experts (not the evil regressive ones) when given a choice, and learn to generate good ideas when working in the field of their own expertise. This requires critical thinking about aesthetics, philosophy, and ethics. The prerequisite to all of this is the cultivation of divergent thinking that can imagine what has not yet existed--not imitation.

An Opposite Proposal

Typically, art teachers assign homework sketchbooks. Students are asked to turn in or show their sketchbooks periodically. The purposes are to get practice in drawing, to become more aware of their everyday surroundings, and to accumulate a collection of relevant ideas for artwork projects in class. These are such good goals that it would be better to bring them into the core of the course. Suppose we reverse the curriculum. Turn it upside down. Let them do the final projects as independent homework* and use the class time to learn how to become aware, to learn how to draw, and most importantly to learn how to generate ideas for artwork.		This may be too extreme for may teachers, but think about it. Many artists use sketchbooks as their idea journals. They expect ideas to come at unexpected times, so they use the sketchbook as a journal. This is too important to the life of an artist leave it chance and mere self-instruction. Our students need to see it as central to the life an artist--not optional--not merely homework. Suppose art lessons would stop being primarily concerned with the end product. What if class work would be primarily about the way artists generate ideas for their work? What if the end product became the homework. In this inside out curriculum proposal, the majority of class sessions are given to the development of ideas, preliminary sketches, etc. The majority of the end products are produced as homework.

Every grading period would require every student to make choices from many possible ideas and complete only one final product as homework. What could be more like the life of a real artist?

In this model each student selects any one class activity and idea developed in class since the beginning of the course for the one required final product per grading period. Students who want to increase their chances of a better grade could make more final products, but only the grade on their best one during each grading period would be counted. This is similar to an emerging artist working to produce a portfolio of superior work. Only the best examples are included in our portfolios, while many other practice works are never exhibited.

Teachers would find it less important to show examples of last year's best student examples. It would no longer feel important to flood the students with examples by great artists before the lesson starts. Students have class time and the benefit of instruction to produce a rich stash of ideas for their artwork.

Art History and the art world content becomes concept centered rather than product centered. Works are studied for why they were made and for how the artist strategized them. Teachers learn to teach this way by analyzing accomplished artists and how they each generate their ideas. Students study art history, but to avoid confusion, they would not study art history as a way to get an idea for their work. They would generate ideas, do artwork, and then the teacher would direct them to historical exemplars that also employed some aspect or concept similar to the the student's work.

Turning Grading Criteria Inside Out

The grading criteria is also turned upside down and inside out. This is not a rubric yet, but it is a list of ideas that might form the basis for the assessment rubric when the art course is directed toward getting ideas rather than getting preconceived end products.

The grade is based on:

Observable Behavioral Criteria team participation observed skepticism inquisitiveness class contributions affirmative art studio building contributions ability to promote creativity in others awareness of surroundings		Testable and Measurable Criteria knowledge of the standard creative processes ability to learn new strategic thinking abilities demonstrated creative thinking skills such as flexibility, fluency, skepticism, similarities catching, etc. employing unique and opposite ideas that work divergent thinking ability ability to phrase insightful questions ability to empathize with other student ideas ability to think critically with an open and inquisitive mind See art tests that give credit for creative responses

In addition to the above grading criteria, a standard artwork grading rubric is used to grade the artwork done as homework. Perhaps 25 percent of the grade could be based on homework.
Also see this essay on Grading in Art .

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Example class strategies to learn art by learning to generate original art ideas Please note that this is but a short list of teaching methods that do not rely on examples. Art teachers have many other good ideas. You should try your own ideas and assess them.

Please share what you learn. College courses alone do not make us into good teachers. College teachers have also learned to exploit our mirror neurons to the exclusion of imagination training. The best teachers are continually experimenting and assessing their own teaching experiments. When your experiment does not work, do not just drop it. First figure out what you forgot to do, or what else you need to add to make it work. Teaching is like making a painting--we learn by doing, assessing, and doing it again. I may paint over yesterday's painting, but yesterday's painting experience continues to inform today's artwork.

Un-drawn Realities
In this sketch search, all drawings must be of something in the art room that no student in the class has ever seen in a drawing before. What do we overlook? What does the art teacher not notice? What is hiding in plain view?

BUIILDING AWARENESS - Students are given five to ten minutes to walk around the room with viewfinders and small drawing boards, clipboards, or unlined sketch pads. A 2x2 slide frame can be used as a viewfinder. Each student makes three or more quick compositions in 4 x 6 inch pre drawn rectangles on their paper. One drawing per sheet on letter size computer paper. Drawings must fill the 4 x 6 space.

COMPOSITION - Before starting, students generate a set of compositional choices to make as they use their viewfinder. This is a list generated by the class in a discussion of what makes an "interesting, effective, compelling, dynamic, original, and evocative" composition. The teacher can find these kind of ideas in the composition chapter in most photography books, but the teacher should not tell the students the answers. Using questions, the teacher can get the students to think of good ideas about composition. These composition attributes are listed on the board and become criteria to use while using the viewfinders.

ASSESSING CHOICES - The first four students to finish meet with the teacher long enough for the teacher to make sure they know what to do next. They make sure every drawing meets the criteria of not having been drawn before. They then counsel each other on which of each student's ideas would make the best drawings or paintings. They state their reasons.

QUEST FOR QUALITY step 1 - In round two, the students repeat the process of making sketches, but this time they are allowed to steal anybody else's discoveries, but they have to find their own unique viewpoint and framing of the subject if they are using another student's subject.

QUEST FOR QUALITY step 2 - After another discussion of the results, each student develops one or two of their best 4 x 6 inch sketches into a value study by adding dark areas, and (if needed) erasing white areas until the drawing has a complete tonal range from white to black with all negative (background) area intentionally completed.

PEER CRITIQUE - Each student selects one sketch for a wall display and/or to take home and make it into a larger work. Each student randomly draws an name from a box and has to answer questions about one other student's drawing. Answer the questions: What do you see? Why do you notice it? What do you see next? Why? What could be a title? What is one question you have about it? Only positive or neutral comments and no negative written or verbal comments or questions are allowed about the work of peers.

Translation of art forms.
a. Paint what these sounds looks like. The teacher plays contrasting sounds, music, etc. Small paintings experimentally adapt to the different sounds. These sounds can be made acoustically in the class by hiding the action in order stress the sound instead of the visual experience.
b. Draw the visual textures to represent noises. Students fill small pre drawn rectangles with marks that produce the look of textures.
c. Draw the pictures that illustrate a story (as a comic strip). Students create examples of each of these ideas and similar ideas in their journals.

Use class time to practice these transformations and allow students to make final products as homework* based on one their best ideas. Ideally, homework is based on inspiration and is optional. This is the way art is done by artists. The daily routine is based on discipline and self-assignments, and the great works are the result of inspiration as the result of preparation.

Style variations. Have students do self-portrait sketches using mirrors. Have them make some surreal, some expressionistic, some formalistic, and some realistic. Use class time to do the mirror sketches. Allow students to make a homework painting based on one these. Allow them to take paint home in film canisters or baby food jars. This page gives ideas on getting enough mirrors for the classroom.

Attribute listing used to design something. One example that I have used is a clay soap dish design project. Students list soap attributes, ceramic attributes, person (the primary user) attributes, bathroom attributes, etc. In one case a student made a very creative elephant soap dish because her aunt was an elephant collector. Her user attributes were about her aunt. This produced a unique and creative idea. The bar of soap inserted in the mouth of the elephant. Big holes in the belly drained and dried the soap (soap attributes) The attribute listing would be the class activity. Teams of students would compete for the honors of generating the most complete and most unique lists of attributes for a product design. Class time is used to learn this. Allow students to make final products based on one of these ideas as homework. Last spring a gardener student made a clay wheelbarrow for his soap.

Capricious composition generation. Such as: activities that produce many accidents from which students have to make choices. i.e. drop five flat toothpicks and place a 35 mm slide frame over them to frame the best possible design. Hold it down tight and pencil in the negative spaces. Do this five times and rank them from best to worst designs. Use class time to do it and assign students to make final products based on one these ideas as homework.

Create a designs by creating transition. Students draw something from nature from observation like the cross-section of an onion with some greens still attached, or an apple cut open to show the inside, the stem, and an attached leaf. Overlay the first drawing with thin paper and trace it slightly abstract. Overlay the tracing and trace the tracing slightly abstract. Repeat ten times, each time trying to end up with the design for a piece of clay, wood carving, a coffee table, a lamp base, a sculpture, or other art or craft product. Use class time to do this design work and assign students to make final products based on one these ideas as homework.

Unlikely juxtapositions Students change normal expectations. Hard things are soft. Large is small. Smooth is rough. Down is up. Inside is outside. Brittle is flexible. Light is dark. Natural becomes geometric. Manufactured goods grow on the farm. Numbers become animals. Dream world ideas are developed. Each student does 10 sketches, selects three to improve. One is improved at least three times. Final project is an improvement made from the improved version.

Transformation What would a theme park look like if it is designed for house flies and maggots, or for butterflies, pupa, egg, and caterpillars? What would this classroom look like if it was made into apartments for homeless families? How our classroom look if was changed into a prison? What if the part of the school would be changed into a petting zoo, a garden, a water garden? What if our school building would be made into a shopping mall or a computer factory? I there is an old abandoned building nearby, what could it be used for? What would happen if the your city or town planted 1,000 trees, where should they be planted? What could be built on the roof of the school building?

Translation. Create several small non-objective collage compositions that are based on the relationships that exist in the family of each creator. These collages must depend on the relationships of of color, texture, shape, value, and so on. Allow no subject matter so that students learn to consider formal elements instead of images to communicate their content. Students are told that they are not required to share or tell about the basis for the composition so the they can confidentially use their real feelings. Use class time to do the collage experiments. Assign homework to make final paintings based on one these ideas.

Collaborate to Compete Many of today's jobs require creative and productive teamwork and leadership skills. Form several teams for the purpose of generating more and better art ideas. Set up competition between the teams for the number and quality of ideas that they develop for art that is based on their own deeply held interests, feeling, experiences, and beliefs. What and how could art make the world in which they live a better world?

What if teams pass around their drawings, collages or, or assemblages as they work. They work on each other's work to develop enough ideas so that each team member can then redo one of outcomes to make it into a personal cohesive composition that incorporates new ideas contributed by others on the team.

Teamwork rubrics are used to encourage and assess the quality of each team member's abilities to work well in a collaborative simulation. These would assess things like listening ability, tolerance for diverse ideas, ability to contribute unusual ideas, ability to see and find good relationships between very different ideas, ability to ask good questions, ability to encourage seek ideas from those who are not contributing, and the ability to summarize and synthesize well. These rubrics apply to both discussion and visual rendition of their work. The rubrics are used by each team member to help assess each of the other team members. The teacher provides each student with a feedback rubric that is based on the teacher's judgment as observed by the teacher and as it has been informed by teammate rubrics.

Teams would give themselves names, develop identities, working strategies, and compete with other teams for art honors. Art students in other art classes are asked to predict the outcome of the judging (as a learning experience). If possible, two other art teachers or a community artist or two are called in. Judging students would not be told the identities of the artists on the teams they are judging.

Synectics. Assess each student's special interests and hobbies. Form diverse teams made up of very unlike interests and hobbies and ask each group to create unified collages and/or 3-d assemblage sculptures made up of a combination of their interests without using any words and without ready-made pictures. Explain metaphor and analogy. Have them list metaphors and analogies for their interests and hobbies. Have them use visual metaphor and analogies to represent their interests in the collages and assemblages. Ask them to negotiate emphasis, repetition, and unity. After the teams develop joint ideas, individuals are permitted to redesign individual final projects as homework.

Conceptual art. Students write and illustrate the imaginary history of a mysterious still life object (comic book style). What if a Granny Smith apple is drawn as a portrait of what Granny Smith must have looked like and what she wore the day she discovered the Granny Smith apple. Can a piece of driftwood be explained then drawn in terms of its life in a castle or some imaginary unrecorded prehistory. Design a still life that is represented by the molecular diagrams of the materials (molecules) present in the still life. What is the story of a stone age tool if it is illustrated at the moment of its invention? Can good and bad art be created and shown with a halo and devil or some other symbolic designation?

Other ideas. a. When you see other art teachers, ask them how they teach idea generation. Ask writing teachers how they do it. Ask science teachers how they teach students to get ideas for experiments.
b. Ask your own students to give you their ideas for how to get new ideas. Let everybody know how important it is to learn this.

*Homework alternatives

Many art teachers can legitimately argue that art homework would not get done in their communities. Others will argue that only some families in their communities would support and encourage their children to do art homework. I agree that this feels unfair to some children. If this is a serious issue, consider in-class alternatives, but continue to do whatever is possible to cultivate other kinds of homework culture. This link is a proposal for homework that is not homework in the traditional sense. It is "thinkwork".

Realistic Options
If expecting students to make projects at home is unrealistic, plan the class sequence to provide a similar curriculum without the homework component. Use three sessions when students work at three different ways of finding good ideas for artwork. The next two sessions could be used to produce one art work based the experiences of the first three sessions. Students are required make choices that grow out of their first three sessions. This can go way beyond simply making a selection, although it may start with a selection process. Once a selection is made, the mind keeps working to improve the ideas. It may be better to instruct the students to hide (put away) their selections of their own planning in order to get them to creatively respond to the work itself (not the plan) as they work. Ask them how they can continue what was done in the first three sessions as they work on the choices made by working on the final project. There could be many variations on this.

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End Notes :

1--http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_neuron
2--Land, George. and Jarman, Beth. Breakpoint and Beyond: Mastering the Future Today, ©1992 Harper Business edition. page 153. In this reference related to divergent thinking, Land and Jarman are referring to studies reported by Calvin W. Taylor in Creativity: Progress and Potential, 1964, New York, McGraw Hill, chapters 2 - 4. This was work done during the early days of the Head Start program.

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RELATED LINKS:
Conversation Game to generate creative ideas for artwork and to foster social skills

A lesson on getting ideas from the Conversation Game.

A lesson on getting ideas by attending directly to the work as it happens

A lesson that uses the art material's own qualities to find ideas

The Incredible Art Department page on generating ideas for art.

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