I hope that you never tell kids something to the effect of “that’s not a good idea” (unless it relates to their behavior or something that could be physically harmful to them). I don’t think there is any way to kill people’s ability to be innovative or unique than to chastise them for poor ideas at a young age.
Now before everyone runs to the comment box let me do the whole thing where I say “we don’t even know if there is such a thing as a bad idea and how are we assessing this” and blah blah blah. For the sake of the point, let’s just assume we are working with ideas that are underdeveloped. We can tackle good vs. bad and what that means in a later post.
Why is this? Because there is no person on the face of the Earth who has ever had more good ideas than bad ideas. You read that correctly. If we are truly pushing ourselves and pushing our kids to think beyond what they currently know then it is impossible to generate more good ideas than bad ideas.
What we need to start doing is teaching kids to link their ideas with each other so that they can collaborate to integrate their thoughts with another student. Teaching kids how to think this way is much better than traditional attempts at squashing ideas that they come up with. It’s also much tougher to do as a teacher. It means knowing what types of projects your kids are working on all the time. I would even go so far as to suggest a wall (virtual or physical) that kids can post recent thoughts and ruminations.
That shifts the thinking from “that’s not a good idea” to “let’s see if we can link your idea in with someone else’s as well”.
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I think the whole point is that the teachers isn’t a critiquer of bad ideas, but that they should be the pertinent questioner. Asking them to explain how an idea might work in reality or asking what impacts their ideas might have encourages them to explore the implications of their thinking and can transfer an idea from creative fantasy to innovative reality. When there is an intersection of creative, critical and ethical thinking, prompted by a teacher’s questioning, truly powerful thinking occurs.