Peg Tyre is a veteran education journalist who is currently tracking the path of education reform in Japan. She reminds me of something that I learned when I visited schools in other countries. Education officials and teachers wonder how Americans are able to teach their students creativity, critical thinking, imagination. While we obsess over test scores, other nations are awed by our students’ inquisitiveness, their ability to speak out and ask questions instead of regurgitating facts.
Teaching Japanese Students To Be Curious and Creative.
“I see that all this time they have kept this inside. Now it is pouring out.”
I recently spent the day at a seminar in Tokyo where about 50 teachers from public, private and after-school programs gathered to learn how to bring curiosity and creativity in their classrooms.
Unlike the usual government-run teacher-training programs, the participants are paying for this course out-of -pocket (and on their day off) because they are under pressure. The government, which determines what knowledge and skills are taught, is changing the national curriculum to stress creativity, critical thinking, and self-expression. That’s on top of a detailed subject knowledge of history, Japanese, science, math, and English. Next year, the all-important college entrance exam (the “Center Test”) will be changing, too. The goal? To spark a new generation of Japanese innovators.
Teachers in Japan say they need to learn new ways to teach in order to meet the new standards.
So they signed up for this seven-month course offered by a nonprofit group called Learning Creator’s Lab, which brings together corporations and individuals in creative fields to help guide the teachers. Today, a representative from the Japanese advertising giant Dentsu is addressing the group. Dentsu has opened a lucrative side-business promoting creativity to corporate clients and is hoping to gain traction in schools. Later, a filmmaker will address the teachers, too.
The big idea this morning, explains Sato Fujiwara, who founded the program, is that humans acquire knowledge better, faster and more deeply when they are interested and connected to the material. In education jargon, and in the U.S. context, this is sometimes called “project-based learning” since it is usually shaped around a project of a student’s choice. This kind of teaching/learning is perceived as less teacher-driven, less top-down, less about memorizing atomized facts and more about integrated knowledge.
“But teachers don’t know what that is, or how to implement it in the classroom,” says Sato Fujiwara. As the standards are overhauled and updated, this course, she says, “will be more and more popular.”
The challenge, say the teachers I interviewed, is that their students aren’t used to learning this way. If a teacher asks a student to come up with a project,  teachers say the students can’t or won’t take the lead. Instead, students will wait for the teacher to come up with a list of projects the teacherwants them to do. Which kind of defeats the point.
So today, the instructors are walking teachers through a worksheet (linked here and also pictured below) that purports to help students understand how to articulate and harness their own curiosity for a research project. And how to use that curiosity as a tool for creativity and ultimately, a deeper form of learning.
It guides the teachers to ask open-ended questions so students can locate “seeds of interest. For example: What do you wonder about? What did you find strange? How does that work? What have you thought was delicious?
In the Japanese context, this is something very new.
Rieko Akiyoshi, a fourth grade teacher in a Catholic school outside of Tokyo, has taken this course before. She says enrollment is up at her school since they shifted to this more active and engaged form of pedagogy. Parents think it will better prepare their children for a global economy. But they also push back. For example, the parents of Akiyoshi’s students learned 30 key figures in Japanese history by fifth grade. Although Rieko Akiyoshi’s students learned about historic figures like Himiko and Oda Nobunaga, they didn’t do a deep dive on Tokugawa Yoshinobu, the 15th shogun. (A more minor figure, says Akiyoshi.) And parents, who learned plenty about Tokugawa Yoshinobu, were concerned that gap might hurt their kids’ chances to test into an elite high school or hurt their score on the ‘Center Test” which evaluates a student on their recall of knowledge accumulated from primary school right through high school.
“We tell parents that we want our children to learn more than history, we want them to learn from history,” says Rieko Akiyoshi.
Enrollment at a good public university, though, remains the narrow conveyor belt to a decent corporate job. And getting accepted at a good university does not depend on curiosity, creativity or understanding history but on tests which rely on memorizing historical facts, says fifth grade teacher public school teacher, Minote Shogo. And while the “Center Test” is changing and will change even more in five years, the speculation is that it won’t change that much. Japanese public education is built on tradition, says Minote Shogo, who teaches in Koganei near Tokyo. “I think a lot of teachers, too, think traditional is better. There is a set lesson and set ways for how you carry that out. The classroom is set up in a certain way. If I don’t follow the textbook, and give a test after 11 hours of math instruction, there is concern from parents and other teachers.”
For his part, Minote Shogo is convinced that teaching to spark curiosity and creativity is better for his students. “In the beginning, it was very difficult,” says Minote Shogo. “I would ask a question, and they would stop and couldn’t respond. But now they are getting accustomed to it. Gradually, they are speaking about their ideas. And I see that all this time, they have kept this inside, and now it is pouring out.”
NEXT UP: A showcase school and a visit with “The First Penguin” of education reform. (He jumps in the water and the others follow.) Then, a look at how traditional political figures and big business are rallying behind progressive education. And why.
Interested in what I’ve discovered so far?
You can take an active role in shaping this project. Please send me questions, observations, research, history and personal reflections about your own teaching and learning, thoughts about rote learning and your ideas about what makes an innovator. Tell me what you want to know from my reporting. Twitter: @pegtyre or email: pegtyre1@gmail.com
Also, if you know of someone who might be interested in being part of this project, kindly send me their email and I’ll add them to the mailing list.
My trip is made possible by a generous Abe Fellowship for Journalists (administered by the Social Science Research Council.) I retain full editorial control. I also appreciate the moral support of my colleagues at the EGF Accelerator, an incubator for education-related nonprofits.