“Knowledge isn’t power. Knowledge is something you Google” – Danny Gregory

In order to include parents in crucial conversations about how schools are changing to meet the needs of today’s student, the International School of Prague engages parents in a regular series of thought-provoking workshops called, The Edge in Education. The Edge is an opportunity to discuss current and future trends in education and to engage parents in dialogue  about how to best support their children. Previous topics addressed in Edge workshops include:

• October 8, 2015: “The Power of Inquiry”
• April 24, 2015: “Skills required in today’s world of work”
• February 27, 2015 : “Design Thinking”
• January 16 2015: “Service Learning”
• November 28, 2014: “Experiential Learning”
• September 19, 2014: “The Relevance Gap”

Creative thinking with Danny Gregory

Artist, author, creative director, blogger, teacher and speaker, Danny Gregory, was our guest speaker for the latest edition of Edge in Education series.

Danny also spent a week at ISP as an “artist in residence”, working with students and teachers alike, helping them  sharpen their creativity skills and teaching them how to better understand the world around them through the lens of keen observation and sketching.

As an introduction to the topic of creativity before Danny’s presentation to parents, two quotes were highlighted:

“The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind – creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers and meaning makers. These people – artists, inventors, designers, storytellers, caregivers, consolers, big picture thinkers – will now reap society’s richest rewards and share its greatest joys.”                                                     Dan Pink

“Creativity is as important as literacy and numeracy, and I actually think people understand that creativity is important – they just don’t understand what it is.”                   Sir Ken Robinson

Through the lens of his own fascinating and, at times, tragic personal journey, Danny Gregory eloquently presented his strong point of view about how creativity is not a frill, but an essential part of our lives. Through it all Danny revealed to us the power of creativity; how it enabled him to bring greater clarity to his own life and reconnect to the world around him.

Danny’s message is that everyone can make art; that we can all be artists with “a small ‘a’.” Like cooking, art should not be reserved only for those with a professional skill.

“Imagine if we thought that to be able to cook you have to have a four-star restaurant, to be able to cook you have to go to a culinary institute and spend years as an apprentice working for a master chef and eventually you would be able to cook and open a restaurant. We don’t though; we think of cooking as I can make a grilled cheese sandwich, I can make an omelette, I can make a burger. Why can’t we think of art… being the equivalent of heating up a can of soup?”

So Danny challenges us to think of art as  an essentially innate human trait that we all have and can bring into our lives. It’s a skill like driving or cooking which we learn and do regularly until it becomes second nature. But more than that, as Danny points out, creativity is really an essential twenty first century skill.