The whole mental image of a vortex includes all those TV news photographs of hurricanes and cyclones. There is also that kid’s toy which allows you to create a vortex inside a plastic bottle. We get so distracted by the shape and flow that we forget that the vortex is made up of material flowing through it – whether it is air or water or flames in a major bushfire storm.

So the vortex is created by turbulence. Does that suggest anything to anyone else, or is it just me? I look around me at this moment in time, and change seems to wash over me from every direction. The turbulence is swirling around me.

With enough turbulence – and there is surely enough happening in education across the world – Chaos Theory suggests that we reach the point where creativity is stimulated and the vortex begins to take shape. People who engage in that creativity are those who have a different attitude to taking chances and measuring failure. They are resilient enough to persist within the vortex until their perception shifts and “the chaos begins to self organize – moments of AHA!” This bifurcation and amplification is the picture I get inside my head when I think about what change looks like at the moment. It’s like we are all being swept up into a vortex so that the most creative individuals are given the opportunity to realise their potential. I think I have met a few of those individuals online!

All this results in open flow as those creative individuals, caught up in the vortex of change, immersed in the chaos, are rewarded with truly creative moments.

Where to from here? Chaos Theory suggests that creativity is not necessarily about inventing something new or different or first, but rather it is achieving the sense of newness. Being caught up in the vortex, and achieving the open flow that puts you in touch with your own creativity leading inexorably to…

the ability to take notice.

This set of ideas hit me between the eyes! What a gift to yourself – to immerse yourself in the chaos and come out the other side with your eyes open wide to the creative possibilities around you; and more than that – the ability to encourage others and take note of their creative possibilities! Surely this is the role of a teacher in a classroom!

…and this was only Lesson 1!

Which leads me to the question: have you stepped into the vortex?

Now for Lesson 2…