Compelling ideas must come from student creation

Teaching students how to compellingly express their ideas will require educators to allow their students to create.  

This means students need to write about what they have a lot of knowledge or emotion.  Having students write about themselves or their families includes both.  

Nothing is more compelling for a student than to create something about which they care.  It is the highest level of Blooms Revised Taxonomy of Higher Order Thinking.  

We bore kids in school because we are assigning homework without purpose and demand they comply.  We are squeezing kids of all sizes, shapes, and colors into molds that only a few can fit.  Those who fit, have little trouble in school, but those who stick out of the mold in all directions are very uncomfortable in standard classrooms.  By the time they exit the schooling system, they are all models of conformity or crushed under it's weight.  Sir Robinson points out that students who are perfectly willing to risk creative thinking lose that ability by the time they graduate.

If we want our students to succeed in the world into which they will graduate, many jobs for whom haven't been invented yet, we need to teach them to be creative, adaptive, and collaborative.  

• They need the self-learning skills that will help them adapt to a rapidly changing world.  
• Most menial jobs will be performed by technology, but someone will still need to create designs for the technology.  Technology cannot replace creativity, so it will become the human niche.
• Humans interact much more easily with each other than machines do.  So the greatest human dynamic will be humans working together, collaboratively.

Writers are readers.  Movie makers are movie watchers.  Photographers are photo admirers.  Podcasters are listeners.  Inspiration builds off others ideas.  To produce productive citizens, students need to be inspired.  Rather than be molded, students need to be allowed to mold their inspirations into something new.