Notes from a recovering to-do list obsessive about the importance of imagination
By Luisa Gockel, Social Impact Partnerships Manager, Pearson
Describe the tongue of a woodpecker
Get hold of a skull
Find out how to measure the sun
I am a big fan of to-do lists. I credit my childhood experience in an outdated education system — one that centered on rote memorisation and conformity — as the main driver behind my task-oriented mindset. From the age of 4, I was taught to memorize facts, not ask questions, and, above all, pass the exams. I got the task, prioritised it, completed it, and moved to the next one. Oh, and obviously, crossed them from the list (you don’t want an outdated to-do list, seriously).
I went to study political science at one of the best state-funded universities in Brazil. There, I found myself thrown into a new kind of education system, one where I’d be expected to activate the dormant part of my brain in charge of critical thinking. I’ll never forget my first university class. The teacher’s opening sentence was, more or less, “You are not leaving this course with any answers, but by the time you finish it, you will have learned how to ask the right questions.” Learning felt right for the first time. Up to that point, I’d spent so many years in an education system where critical thinking, imagination, and creativity didn’t have a place in the front seat.
Having worked in education for over a decade now it is clear to me how damaging a dated school system can be to a child’s confidence, emotional intelligence, and creativity. Nearly ten years ago, I met an incredible entrepreneur named Iris Lapinski who told me she wanted to use apps and mobile phones to change the way technology was being taught in the UK school system. She then started Apps for Good and I embarked on a journey with her. It was one of the first organisations in the country to disrupt technology education through adding problem-solving, creativity, and collaboration to the IT curriculum.
Getting Apps for Good into schools wasn’t easy. We had to deal with headteachers who were not keen on getting rid of their “no phone policy” in the classrooms. However, we were also very lucky to meet a group of trailblazing teachers and headteachers who wanted to give a new meaning to STEM education. It was a daunting experience in many ways, and we could not have predicted that Apps for Good would go from impacting a handful of students in London in 2010 to having reached close to 150,000 young people worldwide.
The way technology is taught in schools in the UK has improved a great deal — STEM education is now being called STEAM, STEAMED, and all sorts of new cool acronyms. This is thanks to many fantastic organisations that joined the movement in the past few years and to the ingenuity of Apps for Good’s philosophy: technology can be used to teach so-called “soft skills” such as critical-thinking and collaboration and young people will use it passionately to solve problems that they care about. Forming passive consumers, rote memorisers of facts, or test-taking drones is not relevant anymore.
By expanding Apps for Good throughout the country and seeing the mind-blowing projects young people were working on (from creating a digital network dedicated to young carers to helping pupils who struggle to read), we realised very quickly that students should be makers, creators, and passionate problem-solvers. All of this can be done just by empowering them to ask questions and use their imaginations.
Da Vinci was curious throughout his life and kept asking questions.
When I finished reading Leonardo da Vinci’s biography the other day (I’ve been obsessed with him and to-do lists since I was 15), I was struck by how closely-related his way of thinking is to how I believe the school system should prepare pupils for the future of work. Fun fact: next year we’ll be celebrating 500 years of Da Vinci’s death and 10 years of Apps for Good. I like big milestones.
The to-do list at the beginning of this post comes from Da Vinci’s notebooks, which were filled with drawings, notes, and observations about people, arts, nature, science, and dragonflies (lots of references to dragonflies!). I find it hugely inspirational — not only because I think Da Vinci is the most important genius in history but also because part of his genius was the fact that he didn’t separate art and science. They were one and the same to him.
Da Vinci was curious throughout his life and kept asking questions. He wanted to know why the sky was blue, and was the first person to find an answer. He was an inventor, scientist, and fellow to-do list enthusiast who also happened to produce some of the most beautiful works of art in human history. By the way, have I mentioned that he didn’t have a formal education?
Working with Apps for Good’s students and learning about Da Vinci’s interdisciplinary way of thinking (and the way he used his imagination and “learned by doing”) have both taught me a lot and have had a big impact on the way I raise my kids. I recently took one of those personality tests for work, and I was faced with one of the toughest questions ever: “Would you rather your kids be kind or smart?” My answer was “kind,” but, to be honest, what I wanted to write down if I had only one option to choose was that I’d rather my kids always be curious.
This is a big breakthrough for me as I used to believe I was not creative because I wasn’t painting beautiful things or creating clever machines. But as the American anthropologist Agustín Fuentes rightly puts it, it doesn’t really matter how our brains are wired, we all creatively problem solve everyday. We do this by finding ways to convince our kids to go to bed early, thinking about alternative routes to get to work, or making sure we’re crossing things off of our lengthy to-do lists. What make us really special as humans is the capacity to use our imaginations.
It’s been three months since I created and updated a to-do list. I still find them incredibly helpful, but something has changed with the way my brain operates, creates, and solves problems. Recently, I learned from reading about neuroscience and brain plasticity that our brains can be rewired — but that’s something to explore in another post!
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