ICOT Day 1 Keynote Ewan McIntosh

International Conference on Thinking 2013 

It does deliver

This is my first ICOT2013 conference and I am having a blast. The morning started with a very short line at registration, we took our seats and then waited - It was lovely to have the Maori language explained and and the waiata that erupted was beautiful. We then had an aptly named barbershop quartet 'Revelation' sing  several songs. This led us into our keynote Ewan McIntosh, talking to us about 'What makes ideas great'.

Really it came down to the commonality between educaion and creative services and this is what makes ideas great:

• All creative people know what they are doing

• They provoke 

• They have a process

• Live to perform

And he linked it to Guy Claxtons six pillars:

• Challenge
• Collaborate
• Responsibility
• Respect
• Real things
• Choice

But what I took away was that in secondary school we should not be duplicating the learning that takes place just because:
We can -We do it better-It is where we start-
We should be getting students to go beyond the Google questions, getting them to ask non Google questions and following a format that enables ideas to grow. The questioning technique Ewan shared with us was:
Questioning
Pose - pose the question
Pause - wait
Pounce - ask
Bounce - who else can add to this

It made complete sense to me and I encourage you to take a look at the website NoTosh, it will be time well spent.