Creators...A keystone!

“Creators” is the title of chapter 10, from Innovate Inside the Box.  This chapter speaks to my heart as an educator.  The notion of people as creators inspired me to teach, empowered me as a mom, and has driven my work and my return to the fields of both education and artistic creations.   However, I try to never assume that others will understand the importance of creation for our students, because even during two years of graduate work on integrating the arts in education, which was basically a masters degree on connecting kids through creation to the curriculum, there were still folks who struggled to make the leap from projects or activities that were mainly consumption based, to work that connected kids, the curriculum and creation in meaningful and powerful ways.  When I first began blogging, I wrote a post about my experience as a second grader and I still see shadows of this kind of teaching many years later:

Back in second grade I was grilled by my teacher for producing an actual original poem from my heart, ( she assumed I plagiarized it!) while another girl received endless stars on the board (second grade accolades) for her infinite list of Green things (back when green was just a color) Green is a frog, Green is a leaf, Green is the mold on my brother’s socks.- OK you got me I made that part up about the socks, I may still be a tad bitter, but you get the idea.

I also wrote a post called Writing, Teaching, and Parenting poetry which speaks to the understanding that often our kids are generally subject to school as a place that is ‘killing the creativity’  ( ref to Ted Talk, Sir Ken Robinson) they are born with due to compliance based, consumption based teaching that persists within our educational system.  More so it touches on some things I was trying to do, even as a very new teacher, and then as a mom of young children, to counter the killing of creativity.

As I read chapter 10 of IITB, I realize that I am still working on this goal both personally and professionally.  I am still writing and blogging, because I want more than anything for all educators to understand the importance of understanding our kids to be creators, and designing teaching that will allow them to grow, because as the quote from Thomas Friedman on pg. 179 states,

“The world only cares about and pays off on what you can do with what you know.”

So how do we as educators start to make that leap from worksheets or even projects, to meaningful creations. . .from compliance to empowerment?  Katie Novak hits the nail on the head when she notes, “Options and choices are often used interchangeably, but they are not always synonymous”   Right now lots of educators are providing options to students, but the real choices are still in the teacher’s hands.  She goes on to describe how clearly identifying the goal, what students need to learn, can free us teachers to allow, or better yet encourage, students to choose what they want to create in order to show their learning, set a goal, and make a plan to get there.



The teacher role remains important, yet shifts away from setting a goal ourselves then spending hours gathering resources and tools to help every student to reach the same goal in the same way.   

• The role shifts toward understanding that our students are variable.  
• Our role shifts toward guiding students on how they will reach that goal in a way that is meaningful to them and meets them where they are at. 
• Our goal shifts from suppling endless resources, to implementing the “rule of five” to help our students to narrow down the options, (and avoid brain freeze!- as noted, too many choices is not a good thing either!)  
• Our goal is to help them focus their efforts rather than direct every step.  

This to me feels more sustainable than being the sole provider of multiple options for a classroom of students, lesson after lesson.  I keep coming back to: “If you ( the teacher) are doing the work, who is doing the learning?”

If we begin to scaffold student learning in this way, we will begin to shift the responsibility of learning, planning, goal setting to our students.  Similarly, my colleague, an amazing SLP, Liz Cole recently described how to scaffold students planning abilities by using the “get ready, do, done” model used commonly in her work.

The importance of this model?

• It is necessary to teach our students explicitly how to plan for learning, rather than outsourcing the planning work to the teacher who then must drag the student through the assignment that they care nothing about. 
• Fact:  The CDC estimates 10% of our kids have adhd and we know now that many other factors can affect attention and working memory of our students.  Many of our students will not learn these skills unless they are explicitly taught.  (similar to reading research!) 
• Involving students in choices connected to goals moves our teaching and student learning from consumption to creation, from compliance to empowerment, from teacher driven to student driven.

My Do Monday...  (Inspired by InnovateInside the Box ch 9 Observant)... Ask my kids to observe what helps them, observe their surroundings their tools, what works... (example in action:  What helps you to be able to understand the math in school?  When home trying to do homework...what is missing?  What do you need to succeed?)

My Do Someday...  Look at one or two of our traditional LES projects and think about the discreet skills, for planning, for researching, that students need to be able to do in order to create meaningful understanding/learning for themselves.