Self-Reporting of Most Significant Change by Teachers and Students Employing Integrative Thinking in a Classroom Setting Christopher Federico Academic Administrator, University of Toronto Schools I am indebted to Newton Foundation for its generous support of this project. I have been an educator for the past 18 years, working with students and teachers from the elementary to post-secondary levels in separate, public, and independent schools. Currently, I hold the positions of Director of Problem-Based Learning and Academic Administrator responsible for Curriculum Design and Implementation, Research, and Partnerships at the University of Toronto Schools and serve as a Fellow of I-Think Initiative at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto.1 In all of these roles, my work has become increasingly focused on the professional learning of preand, especially, in-service teachers. My academic background, and thus my teaching field, comprises an eclectic mix of history, geography, economics, political science, war studies, leadership, and public policy. While the content of these disciplines is certainly disparate, what links them in my mind is their common emphasis on the solving of complex problems, asking how they have been solved, how they might be, or both. There are many dimensions to my fascination with problem-solving. As a leader I am in the first instance interested in understanding how individuals and groups do and ought to go about solving problems—especially “wicked” problems—in a world where doing so is becoming more and more important, but where we remain cognitively constrained by linear ways of thinking and a focus on yes-or-no answers. As an educator I am interested in understanding how best to teach problem-solving, which means determining not only the best ways to teach students to solve problems, but also the best ways to help teachers to teach (with) problems, and how classrooms and outcomes change when that is done. Put another way, there is no doubt that we are increasingly placing a premium on creativity in both the ‘real world’ and in education, but we are still unsure how that creativity is to be developed or how it might best be put to use. I am in pursuit of answers to both these questions.
1. The I-Think Initiative is a small cell within the Rotman School of Management that teaches and supports the application of Integrative Thinking in K-12 education. 75