Idea Generation

"There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together to make something new under the sun. Your job isn't to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up." -Stephen King in On Writing

This was one of my favorite lines while reading On Writing in my recent writing course. Recently I made the realization that this concept works so well when considered as it relates to teaching as well. A perfect example came up while reflecting on one of the weekends of the class.

One of the genres we studied was poetry. Our professor led us in a cinquain writing with feathers. Part of the exploration to gather ideas was a partner game where each pair had a feather. On alternating turns, one person blew the feather and the other person tried to catch it in different ways. After discussing the tone of the cinquains and writing our own rough drafts we had some time in between sessions to think about the presentation of our cinquains and any final changes we wanted to make.

The day before the class session where we were going to have a Poetry Slam and present our cinquains to the class, at my school we had a staff development day that included teaching each other what some of us learned at ITSC, a recent technology conference. Some of my co-workers were going to share what they had learned about Photo Story. While we were traveling, they were bubbling over with excitement about what they learned at their session. Even though I was glad that they found something they knew would be relevant to their classrooms, I thought to myself that I probably would not incorporate it in mine since I was planning on focusing on other integrations, such as blogging and iTouches (once we receive them for our students). Nonetheless, I had fun learning to use the super easy program.

Fast forward one day, and as I was sitting in our class' Poetry Slam it hit me that it just might be amazing to have students do cinquains and then share them via Photo Story. Just as King had said, "two previously unrelated ideas [came] together to make something new under the sun" for me. I loved the results, and I will post more about the actual outcome tomorrow. 

As a funny coincidence, after I came up with my idea I emailed one of the 2/3 teachers who had presented Photo Story to us that I was excited to try out my first Photo Story project, but I did not tell her anything about what I was doing. At our next teacher's meeting she said that she was going to do something with poetry, and I said that I was too. However, we did not go into any details. After we both completed our projects I was looking at hers and noticed her class did cloud cinquains because they have been studying weather. I guess that just goes to show that the idea of "previously unrelated" all depends on the perspective of the individual. Nonetheless, it was fun to see how the idea worked for 2/3, as well as 6/7 grades.