I’m delighted to report that my latest book has just been published: Structure and Improvisation in Creative Teaching, by Cambridge University Press. I edited the book; each chapter is by a different scholar who is using improvisation to improve teaching. I first started working on this in about 2004, after I kept meeting teacher educators… Read More Structure and Improvisation in Creative Teaching
My keynote talk today closed out the Performance Studies Network International Conference. My title, “Creativity in Performance,” emphasized my own research on creativity, and my talk explored the parallels between verbal performance and music performance. (I’ve done studies on both: including Chicago improvised theater and small group jazz.) It’s been a highly stimulating conference and… Read More Improvisational Performance
I’m now at the University of Cambridge, on the third stop of my conference tour around the world. I’m here to deliver a lecture at the first annual conference of the Performance Studies Network, funded by a large grant from the UK government. For decades, music scholarship has focused almost exclusively on the composer and… Read More The Creativity of Musical Performance
I’m reporting this from Shanghai, where I gave the keynote talk this morning to a conference of educators at East China Normal University. I’ve just learned of the McKinsey report “How the world’s most improved school systems keep getting better.” After studying twenty countries, they identified eight key take-home messages: 1. A school system can… Read More How To Improve Schools
More and more people are realizing that schools will have to change to meet the new demands of the 21st century. In my own research and writings, I’ve emphasized the importance of creativity and innovation, and the need for schools to do a better job educating for creativity, rather than simple mastery of facts and… Read More Bringing Schools Into the Future
The Creativity Guru 