What happens when you give creative people something uncreative to do...

My classmate, Sean, and I grew up within one block of each other. We went to high school and college together, and because we both loved theatre, we performed together many times. Eventually, we both wound up as high school English teachers at the same high school.

Test preparation was in high gear at this point, and administration decided that all teachers, no matter their individual discipline, were going to teach math and English for the state assessment test. Further, we were "paired" up with a fellow colleague for twenty minutes at the start of the day to complete a daily test prep exercise.

Quite fortuitously, Sean and I got thrown together. 

But "math"? Seriously?

Now, Sean was okay with it. I was a mess. Math really isn't my thing. So, he took over the Math stuff on Math days, and I did the English stuff on English days, and so it went.  For a while. But creative people just can't leave things so...orderly.

Having worked together onstage, we knew how to "pick up" on each other's cues. And one day, Sean spontaneously began to portray a student. He was all like, "Dude, why does the poet say that?" It was hysterically funny. He asked crazy questions about the exercise, and the students loved it.

And they were learning. He was coming across as "dumb", but they were learning the strategies because he was asking those questions.

We switched it up on Math days. I became the student, and the dumb questions (in my case) weren't so far off the mark. I really had a tough time with math! I really didn't understand. However, forcing him to explain why and how he was doing things obviously helped the other students, who would often chime in and share why and how the teacher was doing what he was doing.

It was so cool. Further, it made--what most of our peers considered to be-- the most boring part of the day enjoyable for everyone.

I remembered our creative approach while watching this training video on Teaching Critical Thinking, wherein college instructors and college students are sitting together in a class. Side by side, these two groups struggled through the same concepts and ideas. No doubt, the college students felt a bit awkward at first, but later, the groups became a learning community. Isn't this what we want to do?

Why don't we do this more often? Why don't we ask teachers to "sit in" on a colleague's class to learn something new? For example, have a PE teacher sit in on an Art Class, English teachers in Algebra, History teachers in Music. Maybe just for one week out of the school year.  Maybe just for one day?

What students would see would be a powerful model for learning, if not an incentive to do better than the teacher. More to the point, they would see how to learn. They could watch what the teachers do as far as note-taking, participation, and asking questions. All the stuff that we want them to do well but never have time to teach explicitly.

Just a thought.

We wouldn't want to do anything too crazy...

And now for something completely....cRe@tivE.

In a conversation on Twitter, a school administrator poses these questions:

                   How do we grade creativity? How do we measure the imagination?

He follows up with the idea that We can "attempt to evaluate [creativity], but we can't. Imagination is immeasurable, and we are fools for trying to quantify it."

In the recent push to incorporate creativity in the curriculum, we do run into trouble if we try to "grade" creativity if we define it as a product or an "end" or as a quality of being.  In that sense, he's absolutely right!

My guess is that some educators may think that by adding an artsy sort of something to a unit, then, they have successfully integrated a creative component in the curriculum. I'm not saying everyone is doing that, but unless everyone understands that creativity is not a what or a thing or a project or a product, then we do run that risk.

Thus, I disagree with his points, only because the working definition is flawed.

Creativity is a process. It is the "how". It is the decision-making process we undergo, from start to finish. It is not the "thing" itself.

With that in mind, can we authentically grade a process? Yes. If we get past the idea of evaluation as the means by which we grade this process or perhaps more specifically:  this way of doing something.

Rather, if the process of the class is one of considering aloud, postulating openly, pondering, making mistakes without fear, making decisions based on mistakes, trying something out, giving it a go, attempting, and seeking, followed by another series of attempts and decisions, then as an educator, you CAN see that happening or not happening in your class.  Of far greater value is the student's ability to "see" how to work through mistakes, changes, decisions, than the arbitrary evaluation of how "good" his or her final artifact is..

We CAN grade students' decision-making process. We CAN have them walk us through that process for the grade. Perhaps that's the crucial point:  we need to see them moving through the process, and if we see them moving through it, they should be rewarded points.

             Teacher! I made a mistake!  

          Awesome, Juanita! How do you want to handle that? 

         You offered up a solid idea, Mark! By thinking out loud, you help all of us learn!

         I saw how you worked through that problem in at least four  different ways, Xeng.  Way to go!

When a student walks into a creative classroom, he or she should feel immediately ready to play with ideas and thoughts and things without fear. Only then, can we honestly say that we've integrated creativity into our curriculum.

But, don't take my word for it! I base my definition of creativity on an individual who far exceeds my abilities! Here is his video, in which he provides not only a definition for creativity but also some solid strategies for educators to think about. It's well worth your time!

A Talk of Creativity

Mindy Keller-Kyriakides is the author of Transparent Teaching of Adolescents: Defining the Ideal Class for Students and Teachers.  Become part of the conversation!

Teaching with Passion (in spite of the echinoderms)

In a guest blogpost, a student compares her experience at a public school with her experience at a private school.  At the private school, the teacher pulls out all the stops with a beautiful, creative assignment in Classical Mythology. Compared to her English class at the public school, which focused on the taking of a test, the student obviously finds the former more compelling and ideal. Who wouldn’t? 

One teacher responded to the post with this comment:

“[Students] don't see that dedicated, engaged, passionate, eager-to-help teachers often hit a dead end and are forced to do what they know is not best for kids due to inane gov regs and requirements.”

I take issue with this statement, not because it doesn’t have a ring of truth to it, but because of the faulty correlation drawn. Teachers do hit dead ends, and sometimes, administration requires that they teach specifically to the test, which is in no way the best thing to do for students. Agreed.

 

But dead-ends and government regulations/requirements cannot squelch passion and dedication. They might suppress choices and to some degree, restrain originality, but they can’t disrupt my passion.  They won’t tarnish my dedication. I simply won’t let them.

Our school required us to teach a certain state test-based exercise every day. I don’t think they could have found more boring, less enticing reading passages. Two pages of hell per day. One of them, our infamous “Lifestyles of the Sea Cucumber” stood out, though.  

(For the record, I completely disagree with students being required to read something so out of context in an English class. It was just…jarring.) 

Our instructions were to have students: 1) read the passage and 2) answer the questions. Then, we were 3) to “go over” the answers. One inane, required assignment, coming up. If you’ve fallen asleep, wake up.

So, knowing that the passage was the most boring thing ever, and knowing that pretty much every test passage was going to be at least as boring if not more so, our class discussed strategies for reading boring passages BEFORE we tackled this one.

We talked about the voices in our heads. We talked about our favorite actors. We talked about having our favorite actors read this passage to us in our heads. Then, something wonderful happened.

One kid piped up, in this wonderful Steve Irwin (The Crocodile Hunter) accent:  “Crikey! Looka this beauty!” 

That’s all it took. Steve Irwin read the passage to us, in our heads.  I watched students giggle and chortle their way through the whole passage. I watched them gleefully answer the test questions. Then, we checked the answers. 

While they certainly didn’t get them all correct, they did quite well because they made it all the way through the darned thing. We enjoyed ourselves, learning a little bit about a sea creature, but learning more about how to read for comprehension, which was the goal. 

From then on, our strategy for reading any boring science-type passages was that they be read to us by the Steve Irwin in our heads. Students carried this strategy into the test, thanking me later for it.

When teachers hit that dead end, when we have to work through inane exercises, we must do all we can to retain the passion and dedication. It’s difficult but do-able.

Fight those political, regulation, government policy battles outside of the classroom with all you’ve got.

We need to end the inanity.   

However, while we wait for the system to catch up and catch on, inside the classroom, we must fight with creativity--the strongest weapon of passion and dedication.