I didn't intend to take the summer off from blogging, but we went from one adventure or endeavor to another. My creative pursuit was building a pocket garden out of our bare patio. You can read my diary blog about this DIY project at http://pitifulgardener.wordpress.com. Here it is time for school to begin and we're still fiddling with the plants. Gardening is one big problem-solving experience, for sure! It's not my favorite thing to do, but when I finally get it right, I do enjoy the results.
At an educator's conference I attended in Chicago, two of the keynote speakers discussed creativity at school. It's a topic hitting the mainstream more and more. Wouldn't it be great if the people directly responsible for giving the green light at the school level could embrace it -- by understanding exactly what creativity is and why we have to teach the skills to develop it? What a revolution!
I spent the month of August preparing to teach in a brand new art room. Though we are in a recession, this private school just completed a fine arts building. It was time to move out of a dark 25-year-old modular -- and if you know anything about art teachers, they've got stuff stashed to the rafters since they can't bear to throw anything out. The new room is a bright space banked with windows overlooking fields and hills. Wow! How could creativity not flourish in such a space? Not only are the students ever so fortunate, but so is this teacher!
The summer art studio for kids -- teaming up with Reptacular Animals and all their kid-friendly critters -- begins tomorrow. That's Monday, August 24. The focus is on giving kids a chance to work on longer projects in different media, inspired by the animals doing the modeling. We're starting off meeting a pile of wriggly snakes -- long and short, pythons and boa constrictors, and several varieties I don't know. First the kids play with the snakes, then make a life-size papier mache snake. This week we'll also make a pond project, featuring frogs and fuzzy ducklings, and a painting of the rainforest featuring live parrots, and even a macaw. This is certainly the most unusual art class in the Los Angeles region...maybe anywhere! Kids get to look closely at a big array of animals. Observation always improves drawing.
Information is stored in our thinking as pictures. Drawing provides direct access to creative thinking. It's the "doing" that helps spark it. Even if you feel you're bad at drawing, do it anyway. It's the simplest, most effective tool at your disposal. It's not the product you're after, but the thinking that results from the activity. If you've got kids in the house, make sure they get to draw every day. Doodles count!
Showing posts with label teach creativity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label teach creativity. Show all posts
Sunday, August 23, 2009
Sunday, November 16, 2008
Is Art Academic?
As I was finishing up teaching an art lesson to a class of school kids, their teacher admonished them to, "Hurry up -- fun and games are over. Time to get back to real learning."
Ouch!
We were just finishing a lively session where 100 percent of the kids were 100 percent engaged for the entire period. Since this was said right in front of the kids, I piped up, "Actually, they have been learning the whole time. This was a right-brain activity. "
The teacher corrected me, "Real education is reading and math and that's what we do in my classroom."
Me: "This is educational also. It was open-ended to promote critical thinking and doing. Art is hands-on. The kids made choices and fixed problems along the way to end up with a finished project that they created."
Teacher: "Like I said, real education is what goes on in my classroom."
What do you think?
Here's my condensed version of why art and teaching creativity is academic and educational.
For those of you who haven't had formal teacher's training, there's a 50-year-old academic model that we've all been taught and supposedly use when planning lessons. It's called Bloom's Taxonomy. Essentially, it identifies how learning takes place on any topic.
There are seven levels of Bloom's Taxonomy:
The first four levels are learned in the "left-brain" modality
Knowledge: Remember - learn the basic facts
Comprehension: Understand
Application: Practice
Analysis: Examine
...........................................
Creative thinking begins here once students have mastered the subject. The highest levels of learning occur in the "right-brain" modality
Synthesis: Create
Evaluation: Assess
Creativity is "connectivity." It's the ability to take what you've learned and do something new with it. It's the realization that there are many ways to solve problems. And it's the ability to make choices from all the possibilities. That takes practice. What do you hear when kids haven't had practice at this? "I don't know what to do!" Creativity = doing!
If teachers don't extend lessons to get to the top two levels of Bloom's taxonomy, students remain stuck in analytical, "left-brain" thinking -- learning the rules of how to find the one correct answer. That is how they spend a good deal of their school day.
But creative thinking is exactly the opposite! The rules of "right-brain" thinking are expansive. To activate these, kids have to DO. What is art? DOING.
Filling out mounds of boring white worksheets is not academic.
Ouch!
We were just finishing a lively session where 100 percent of the kids were 100 percent engaged for the entire period. Since this was said right in front of the kids, I piped up, "Actually, they have been learning the whole time. This was a right-brain activity. "
The teacher corrected me, "Real education is reading and math and that's what we do in my classroom."
Me: "This is educational also. It was open-ended to promote critical thinking and doing. Art is hands-on. The kids made choices and fixed problems along the way to end up with a finished project that they created."
Teacher: "Like I said, real education is what goes on in my classroom."
What do you think?
Here's my condensed version of why art and teaching creativity is academic and educational.
For those of you who haven't had formal teacher's training, there's a 50-year-old academic model that we've all been taught and supposedly use when planning lessons. It's called Bloom's Taxonomy. Essentially, it identifies how learning takes place on any topic.
There are seven levels of Bloom's Taxonomy:
The first four levels are learned in the "left-brain" modality
Knowledge: Remember - learn the basic facts
Comprehension: Understand
Application: Practice
Analysis: Examine
...........................................
Creative thinking begins here once students have mastered the subject. The highest levels of learning occur in the "right-brain" modality
Synthesis: Create
Evaluation: Assess
Creativity is "connectivity." It's the ability to take what you've learned and do something new with it. It's the realization that there are many ways to solve problems. And it's the ability to make choices from all the possibilities. That takes practice. What do you hear when kids haven't had practice at this? "I don't know what to do!" Creativity = doing!
If teachers don't extend lessons to get to the top two levels of Bloom's taxonomy, students remain stuck in analytical, "left-brain" thinking -- learning the rules of how to find the one correct answer. That is how they spend a good deal of their school day.
But creative thinking is exactly the opposite! The rules of "right-brain" thinking are expansive. To activate these, kids have to DO. What is art? DOING.
Filling out mounds of boring white worksheets is not academic.
Saturday, November 15, 2008
Elementary Classrooms Devoid of Childrens' Presence
As often happens in education, we veer from one extreme to another when forced to follow the pressures of current demands while making honest efforts to increase student learning. Since I first began teaching third grade in 1978, and covered education on local public radio for close to five years, you bet I've seen a lot of pendulum-swinging. With the opportunity to spend time in various classrooms and watch trends develop and then be interpreted over time, I've now seen the next extreme. It has wiped out the presence of the child altogether on the walls and bulletin boards of more and more classrooms in one district.
There simply is no original or student-generated work on display anywhere in some of these rooms! Hallway bulletin boards are sterile. It feels like the child's presence has been obliterated. I think sometimes I might as well be in a community college setting, as these buildings don't feel like elementary schools which should be brimming with lively, vibrant, creative, authentic work that only young children can produce. Instead it's adult computer-produced, adult-directed, and boringly similar. It's "instructional."
When I first began noticing this, at first I thought I was only seeing evidence of lazy or tired or disinterested teachers. Okay, that definitely exists and has for years -- as evidenced on many high school classroom bulletin boards! But not so much in elementary schools. Now it seems to have come down from the top not to display student work that isn't "educational." The interpretation seems to be expressed only as writing and endless word strip banks, and homogeneous look-alike prepacked projects.
Now, I have nothing against word banks. I thought they were a great idea when they first appeared and still do. I used them myself in the art room with art vocabulary or when listing the big variety of art-related jobs, etc. However, it's become the all-consuming and only "decoration" in too many classrooms.
The brain continually needs new visual stimuli to connect all those synapses. It needs interesting imagery to contemplate. But these classroom walls and white boards covered with sterile word strips have become visual deserts, void of intellectual life! It's definitely visual clutter. The words aren't even printed by the children. There's nothing of the child.
I know the intention is to make it look like education is going on. To make it uniform. To ensure teacher compliance. But once it's registered with a child, these word lists are ignored - maybe referred to now and then with the teacher's guidance. But those that don't change them are doing nothing to stimulate the growing brain. The brain's smart - it got it the first time and skips over what it's already learned. And so nothing is being offered on those classroom walls to provide new, exciting stimulus.
I think it's become a crutch for some -- see, I've put up everything in the reading kit and there's no room for anything else. It's easy to staple up the district-purchased materials -- and in a teacher's best interest to do so. As one teacher told me, "I'd never teach this way. But I'm forced to." What can we say of a system where teachers trained in child development are reluctant to put up child-generated projects because their supervisors will criticize them -- or worse, affect their evaluations negatively!
Although I am a trained teacher evaluator, in my capacity as an art consultant I don't advise teachers to go against directives issued by their district supervisors. However, if it was up to me, I'd be cutting out much of this basic knowledge clutter once it was learned. I'd be looking for student-generated projects as direct evidence that the highest levels of instruction was taking place in that classroom. Only then is real learning taking place. The student must take the basic knowledge and use it or transform it in some way. That's what creativity and divergent thinking are all about. Unless teachers take the kids to that point, they're just pursuing a round and round loop at the lowest levels of the learning cycle.
Gaining the facts is only the beginning of the learning process. It's not the be all and end all. But getting beyond that these days seems to be a very fearful proposition. I understand the reasons why. It will take some strong leadership at the top to make the transition and give assurances that it's vital to provide creativity in education if our US economy is to remain on top this century. Other countries are getting that message and spending mucho $$$ to revamp their education systems to embrace the teaching of creativity.
There simply is no original or student-generated work on display anywhere in some of these rooms! Hallway bulletin boards are sterile. It feels like the child's presence has been obliterated. I think sometimes I might as well be in a community college setting, as these buildings don't feel like elementary schools which should be brimming with lively, vibrant, creative, authentic work that only young children can produce. Instead it's adult computer-produced, adult-directed, and boringly similar. It's "instructional."
When I first began noticing this, at first I thought I was only seeing evidence of lazy or tired or disinterested teachers. Okay, that definitely exists and has for years -- as evidenced on many high school classroom bulletin boards! But not so much in elementary schools. Now it seems to have come down from the top not to display student work that isn't "educational." The interpretation seems to be expressed only as writing and endless word strip banks, and homogeneous look-alike prepacked projects.
Now, I have nothing against word banks. I thought they were a great idea when they first appeared and still do. I used them myself in the art room with art vocabulary or when listing the big variety of art-related jobs, etc. However, it's become the all-consuming and only "decoration" in too many classrooms.
The brain continually needs new visual stimuli to connect all those synapses. It needs interesting imagery to contemplate. But these classroom walls and white boards covered with sterile word strips have become visual deserts, void of intellectual life! It's definitely visual clutter. The words aren't even printed by the children. There's nothing of the child.
I know the intention is to make it look like education is going on. To make it uniform. To ensure teacher compliance. But once it's registered with a child, these word lists are ignored - maybe referred to now and then with the teacher's guidance. But those that don't change them are doing nothing to stimulate the growing brain. The brain's smart - it got it the first time and skips over what it's already learned. And so nothing is being offered on those classroom walls to provide new, exciting stimulus.
I think it's become a crutch for some -- see, I've put up everything in the reading kit and there's no room for anything else. It's easy to staple up the district-purchased materials -- and in a teacher's best interest to do so. As one teacher told me, "I'd never teach this way. But I'm forced to." What can we say of a system where teachers trained in child development are reluctant to put up child-generated projects because their supervisors will criticize them -- or worse, affect their evaluations negatively!
Although I am a trained teacher evaluator, in my capacity as an art consultant I don't advise teachers to go against directives issued by their district supervisors. However, if it was up to me, I'd be cutting out much of this basic knowledge clutter once it was learned. I'd be looking for student-generated projects as direct evidence that the highest levels of instruction was taking place in that classroom. Only then is real learning taking place. The student must take the basic knowledge and use it or transform it in some way. That's what creativity and divergent thinking are all about. Unless teachers take the kids to that point, they're just pursuing a round and round loop at the lowest levels of the learning cycle.
Gaining the facts is only the beginning of the learning process. It's not the be all and end all. But getting beyond that these days seems to be a very fearful proposition. I understand the reasons why. It will take some strong leadership at the top to make the transition and give assurances that it's vital to provide creativity in education if our US economy is to remain on top this century. Other countries are getting that message and spending mucho $$$ to revamp their education systems to embrace the teaching of creativity.
Saturday, November 1, 2008
Listen to an Expert on Teaching Creativity in the Schools
I felt very vindicated when I first stumbled upon Sir Ken Robinson's talks about creativity and education and human development. He's now living in Santa Monica, and has done consulting work with the Getty. You'd think I'd have plenty of opportunity to hear him in person. My guess is, he'll probably become more prominent on the US education stage with an administration change.
Robinson's thrust is that creativity and the arts were shunted aside due to the education system's hierarchy of math, science, and literacy teaching as the main ingredients of the industrial revolution of the 19th century. We at the bottom of the hierarchy already know that. But that old model is failing before our eyes as degrees become useless for promising job security. Robinson's definition of creativity is "original ideas that have value." Might there be room for such a concept in our children's school day?
I have had a dickens of a time trying to get the link to this talk working. This is the correct address, but in case it doesn't work, try pasting the address into your browser. Excerpts are on You Tube and TED, so you can also go through Google to find Sir Ken Robinson's talks.
It's worth hearing what Robinson has to say on the topic of creativity teaching in the schools. Not only is he quite a humorous speaker, but he's got some substantial credibility. He's responsible for helping England, Singapore, South Korea, and now China reinvent their education systems for the 21st century. He has plenty to say about the ailing US system as well.
http://www.ted.org/index.php/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html
Robinson's thrust is that creativity and the arts were shunted aside due to the education system's hierarchy of math, science, and literacy teaching as the main ingredients of the industrial revolution of the 19th century. We at the bottom of the hierarchy already know that. But that old model is failing before our eyes as degrees become useless for promising job security. Robinson's definition of creativity is "original ideas that have value." Might there be room for such a concept in our children's school day?
I have had a dickens of a time trying to get the link to this talk working. This is the correct address, but in case it doesn't work, try pasting the address into your browser. Excerpts are on You Tube and TED, so you can also go through Google to find Sir Ken Robinson's talks.
It's worth hearing what Robinson has to say on the topic of creativity teaching in the schools. Not only is he quite a humorous speaker, but he's got some substantial credibility. He's responsible for helping England, Singapore, South Korea, and now China reinvent their education systems for the 21st century. He has plenty to say about the ailing US system as well.
http://www.ted.org/index.php/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Creativity in the Age of Accountability
Here's a link to a published article I wrote that parents and educators should find helpful. If you're interested in ways to increase the teaching of creativity in school, I included several that aren't expensive or difficult to do. We just need to redefine exactly what a balanced education looks like!
http://www.caisca.org
When you get to the site, click on Publications. Go to Faculty. My article is found in the Late Spring 2008 edition. Look for "Creativity in the Age of Accountability," which begins on page 6. As it's in a PDF file, you can't download just my article alone. But there's wonderfully creative applications written by other educators as well. This is a publication authored by teachers who gave workshops for their peers.
If this link isn't working when you click on it directly, copy and paste it into the browser above. I can't access the publications through Firefox. However, I can read them in Explorer.
If you'd like me to send you the publication directly, please email me at twcheney@gmail. com.
http://www.caisca.org
When you get to the site, click on Publications. Go to Faculty. My article is found in the Late Spring 2008 edition. Look for "Creativity in the Age of Accountability," which begins on page 6. As it's in a PDF file, you can't download just my article alone. But there's wonderfully creative applications written by other educators as well. This is a publication authored by teachers who gave workshops for their peers.
If this link isn't working when you click on it directly, copy and paste it into the browser above. I can't access the publications through Firefox. However, I can read them in Explorer.
If you'd like me to send you the publication directly, please email me at twcheney@gmail. com.
Sunday, September 28, 2008
Want Better Test Scores in Low-Performing Schools? Double the Art-Making
I want to continue sharing my insights into kindergarten-age students from my last post.
When children enter kindergarten, they should have had two or three years of drawing experience already (progressing from scribbling to being able to make a representational person). That doesn't mean filling in coloring books that are adult-drawn! Kids are naturally inclined to start making marks between age two and three. You can't teach them to draw better. Just providing paper and crayon for making big movements, and lots of opportunity to create their own imagery, promotes the natural development of large and small motor skills. Kids draw first, then read, then write. That's the progression.
However, the schools are filled with kids coming to school without any practice. Too many homes don't have basic art supplies like paper, crayons, and scissors. Parents don't realize the value of providing this practice to help their children be school-ready, and this applies to affluent families as well as low income. So the kids simply aren't ready. But the kindergarten curriculum now starts at the point where this development should have taken place. There is no time provided in many kindergarten classes to make up for this lack.
If we recognize this and want to improve test scores, kindergarten -- as well as the early elementary grades -- needs to provide double the amount of time spent on art and creativity, not reduce it. The remedial work must be done through art. That's where the gap begins. Kids will then be more ready to take on the accelerated curriculum. Yet at schools where the students score low, the tendency is to cut out the art and"play" to concentrate on writing. Educators, who are trained in child development, are in such a bind. They know they can't leapfrog children's development, no matter how much the state regulators think it can be done.
Kids move through predictable stages of development. It's like learning to walk -- kids spend a lot of time crawling first, figuring it out on their own. It doesn't matter what the adult wants. Children develop on their own timetable to progress to the next level. If the state wants kindergartners to perform beyond their readiness, everybody's time, effort, and money is being wasted. Talk about a creative disconnect! School becomes an endless frustrating fog for these kids. On the other hand, engaging the kids in lots of art to address their developmental needs will do more to improve their abilities faster than giving them piles of worksheets to fill out.
I once received some state grant money to tutor very low kindergartners who were not school-ready. I knew from their backgrounds that they had not had regular access to crayons and paper. Our tutoring sessions involved art-making, not trying to make them to write sentences or sound out words. Scribbling, coloring, and painting worked towards fluidity of movement, teaching their fingers to grasp a pencil as they gained some control to make shapes. Cutting and playing with clay built up strength; gluing helped them focus. They were better able to process their own ideas. When children haven't built up the motor skills schools take for granted, and depend on for success, it's pretty difficult to prod them forward.
Providing art education would transform the kindergarten struggle into a more positive, forward-moving experience. We cannot leapfrog kids over their developmental stages, no matter how dire their test scores. Of course, the panic over scores results in a consequence to the principal who bears the brunt of low scores. It explains the unrelenting push to get kids to perform on subjects that aren't of natural interest to them .
One of the things making me the angriest is that these kids will struggle all through school. Lots of resources and interventions will miss the mark. We have to address the first lack -- no art-making. It only compounds as they get older and the curriculum gets harder. Schools have inadvertently become so one-sided -- lop-sided -- because they must teach only the left-brain type of thinking. The right-brain subjects need to be instructed, too. That's where kids are taught how to problem-solve and work with ambiguity.
Low-income schools with the best principals and fantastically dedicated teachers still can't get the results until we teach the whole mind. Business will continue to experience the "creativity gap" because workers coming from our schools have been taught there's one right answer instead of being able to think expansively. That's what extreme testing and accountability has produced.
When children enter kindergarten, they should have had two or three years of drawing experience already (progressing from scribbling to being able to make a representational person). That doesn't mean filling in coloring books that are adult-drawn! Kids are naturally inclined to start making marks between age two and three. You can't teach them to draw better. Just providing paper and crayon for making big movements, and lots of opportunity to create their own imagery, promotes the natural development of large and small motor skills. Kids draw first, then read, then write. That's the progression.
However, the schools are filled with kids coming to school without any practice. Too many homes don't have basic art supplies like paper, crayons, and scissors. Parents don't realize the value of providing this practice to help their children be school-ready, and this applies to affluent families as well as low income. So the kids simply aren't ready. But the kindergarten curriculum now starts at the point where this development should have taken place. There is no time provided in many kindergarten classes to make up for this lack.
If we recognize this and want to improve test scores, kindergarten -- as well as the early elementary grades -- needs to provide double the amount of time spent on art and creativity, not reduce it. The remedial work must be done through art. That's where the gap begins. Kids will then be more ready to take on the accelerated curriculum. Yet at schools where the students score low, the tendency is to cut out the art and"play" to concentrate on writing. Educators, who are trained in child development, are in such a bind. They know they can't leapfrog children's development, no matter how much the state regulators think it can be done.
Kids move through predictable stages of development. It's like learning to walk -- kids spend a lot of time crawling first, figuring it out on their own. It doesn't matter what the adult wants. Children develop on their own timetable to progress to the next level. If the state wants kindergartners to perform beyond their readiness, everybody's time, effort, and money is being wasted. Talk about a creative disconnect! School becomes an endless frustrating fog for these kids. On the other hand, engaging the kids in lots of art to address their developmental needs will do more to improve their abilities faster than giving them piles of worksheets to fill out.
I once received some state grant money to tutor very low kindergartners who were not school-ready. I knew from their backgrounds that they had not had regular access to crayons and paper. Our tutoring sessions involved art-making, not trying to make them to write sentences or sound out words. Scribbling, coloring, and painting worked towards fluidity of movement, teaching their fingers to grasp a pencil as they gained some control to make shapes. Cutting and playing with clay built up strength; gluing helped them focus. They were better able to process their own ideas. When children haven't built up the motor skills schools take for granted, and depend on for success, it's pretty difficult to prod them forward.
Providing art education would transform the kindergarten struggle into a more positive, forward-moving experience. We cannot leapfrog kids over their developmental stages, no matter how dire their test scores. Of course, the panic over scores results in a consequence to the principal who bears the brunt of low scores. It explains the unrelenting push to get kids to perform on subjects that aren't of natural interest to them .
One of the things making me the angriest is that these kids will struggle all through school. Lots of resources and interventions will miss the mark. We have to address the first lack -- no art-making. It only compounds as they get older and the curriculum gets harder. Schools have inadvertently become so one-sided -- lop-sided -- because they must teach only the left-brain type of thinking. The right-brain subjects need to be instructed, too. That's where kids are taught how to problem-solve and work with ambiguity.
Low-income schools with the best principals and fantastically dedicated teachers still can't get the results until we teach the whole mind. Business will continue to experience the "creativity gap" because workers coming from our schools have been taught there's one right answer instead of being able to think expansively. That's what extreme testing and accountability has produced.
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