Think Like a Teacher

It’s late on a Friday before a long weekend. I have been thinking off and on all day about John T Spencer’s post about Why We Paint Murals (thanks @ShellTerrell and Tweetdeck). Now those thoughts have turned a little surreal– or maybe not. If you are looking for a straightforward opinion piece, stop now. If willing, breathe deeply and dive into my mental swim.

Spencer got me thinking about the space where we learn and our drive to make that space our own. I, too, have shared butcher paper walls and seen students seize the space as finally theirs.  I love what they write and ask and draw when the paper goes up. I have also seen ideas in other classrooms: atypical ways of moving the furniture around a hub for learning, rooms where vertical space suddenly becomes part of the landscape, classrooms as environmental art pieces.  While it might be nice — at times — to remove classroom walls, there are positive aspects of walls, too. Walls are our surroundings and partially define who we are as a group of learners. Spencer’s video shows students making the space their own with brushes of paint and personality. If we could have it, what would a class Dream Space for learning and thinking look like?  Here is my stream of Dream Space ideas.

Surround:  verb to noun

The walls of the Dream Space hold nothing in. They surround us with experiences. The dreaded (and much reviled) IWB, if one has been put here,  can be part of this “surround” as a place for students to create and collaborate. Unlike butcher paper, this electronic surround can be saved, erased, sent, “finger painted” and edited, text-recognized, and used as a collection point for leaking ideas. What else should surround us? Walls of sound, perhaps? Walls of light or dark? Walls of images. I would love an IP addressable imagespace– floor to ceiling — to which we could “send” images any time, simply by knowing the address. The people we know could send us their back yard or their llama. The scientist we know could send us an amoeba. We could send things to ourselves from our phones or our weekends. We could bring in our worlds to wrap us in visual mind graffiti. The Dream Space for thinking is our surround.

Flip the walls

Just as we grow accustomed to the walls we create, take a day in our Dream Space to  Flip the Walls again. What is on the back of this wall? Erase it all and ask us to show the back of our thoughts, like the back of a web page.

Bring it ‘Round

For some reason, my mental images of the Dream Space persistently appear more like the stand-up omnimax theater spaces that have no corners. The Dream Space does not have places for learning to hide or get lost in an angular trap. Ideas in this Space can bounce freely and endlessly because they continue to deflect off the circular hug of thinking.

Then the door clunks open on sturdy school hinges, and the spell breaks.  A skeptical voice inquires, “Why is this teacher lady dreaming about a classroom that doesn’t exist? What is the point here?” In my Dream Space, even one that has suddenly morphed back to a regular classroom with rows of desks, a chorus of voices simply calls out, “Come on in!”

I spent some time exploring the Webby Award winners this week. Put away your iPad or iPhone (must have Flash) and open this on the biggest screen you can find. Turn up the speakers and turn off everyone and everything else around you.

Then tell me how any school anywhere can question the importance of having Art in every child’s life.

See the miracles of light and color.

Play the world through Monet’s eyes and your hand on the mouse/trackpad. Touch Art.

Whisper your amazement as you live Art, and tell us how the ripples in the water are not “necessary” to being  “productive citizen” or a thinking member of society.

Share this with a child of five or fifty. Then ask how we can cut the Arts from schools. They are no more frivolous or “extra” than light itself. Just ask Monet.

[I cannot include an image with this post. This experience is my image.]

I have enjoyed reading Shelly Blake-Plock’s 2009 predictions of 21 things that will be obsolete by 2020 and subsequent response to his naysayers (March, 2011). Although I have some doubts about the optimism of some of the predictions, I find myself singing along with several of the  ideas. Certainly most of us — even those who advocate for leveraging the power of technology for new ways of teaching and learning– have our doubts about whether education can change that much that fast, but the rhythm beating inside these predictions is that today’s technological change is not just gadgets:

we’re not talking about computers anymore. We’re talking about the way that we connect to one another as human beings.

We’re also talking about how we connect to our own creative, thoughtful selves. I recall a day in the early 1990s when one of our local school board members refused to enter the brand new computer lab at one of the elementary schools where I taught.  His boastfully stated reason: “I will not enter that room because no learning takes place there.” While I know there were many poor uses of that lab, it happened to be the place where I witnessed a remarkable transformation just weeks later. I watched a fourth grader (call him Randy) discover Hyperstudio (v.1 or 2, I think) and simply go crazy. For the next four months until school got out, Randy spent every moment he could weasel to sit at that computer ad create a Hyperstudio stack about … well, honestly, I don’t remember which animal it was. That stack lead to another and another. Teachers had to require Randy to go out for recess. The principal would stop by to suggest that sunshine was important. By the end of fifth grade, fed by a brand new, dial-up Internet connection at his home, Randy had taught himself HTML and was teaching others. By the end of ninth grade, he had taken all the cast-off, painfully slow PCs he could gather from trash cans and built his own supercomputer in a high school storage closet. The custodians rolled their carts down the hall past Randy in that warm, unventilated closet, stringing cat-5 cable he had snagged from who-knows-where. By the time he finished two years of undergrad, Randy was spending the summer at Los Alamos doing research.  All of this started from being able to create. I saw it happen.My favorite verse from Blake-Plock’s song, however, is this powerful charge to all of us. I want to sing this from electronic rooftops:

Teachers: you are the most amazing people on the planet. You are gifted with a fine mind and great compassion. You handle adversity and trauma and you inspire the future. You are going to have to be the ones to figure this out. You can’t rely on your administrators to do this for you. They are busy. They don’t always see what’s going on or what’s available. So you’ve got to make it happen.

My optimistic prediction by 2020: Creative School. Creative in the same three ways Randy modeled:

1. Creative for students. The impulse to create is closely followed by the impulse to share. With technology changing “the way that we connect to one another as human beings” and facilitating creative process, school becomes a place where learning IS creating. Randy wanted to share via Hyperstudio, and share he did!
2. Creative in making do with whatever you can find. If you don’t have a lot of technology, use what you do have. Kids are very good at that, if given permission to put things together, problem-solve, and experiment. My one caveat is that there needs to be an Internet connection in there somewhere. If they have to schedule ways to share it or find ways to network it, they will, especially if teachers band together to do the same (we did it in the early days of Internet). As Blake-Plock says, “You are going to have to be the ones to figure this out.” Luckily, kids like Randy are on the team.
3. Creative in looking at things another way. If we think we have delineated the “replicable model” for “21st century learning,”  anyone who really gets it laugh at us. The whole point is that things change too fast. The dream model needs to be built upon creative flexibility. Randy saw throw-away computers as new opportunities. If kids don’t learn one way or the learning they need to survive changes, we immediately change routes. All of us need to be nimble thinkers.

I am often accused of being idealistic. I figure after 27 years in classrooms, I can be as idealistic as I want to be. I have earned it through years of seeing it all. I hope I am seeing clearly as I look to 2020: the era of Creative School.

Creating is very personal — close to the soul and perilously self-revealing. Those who are moderately successful at creating, people like published writers, performance musicians, and visual artists who are not starving, are generally articulate when asked how they go about their work. I have found some marvelous videos and interviews where people talk about how they go about painting or writing. Artist Kimberly Brooks spells out 8 stages to her painting process, concluding with:

(8) Resolution. Very elusive. The composer Aaron Copland said he didn’t finish compositions so much as abandon them. When it’s finally over, it feels like a whole relationship has ended. And then the anticipated rush of doing it all over begins again. [I love the concept of “abandoning” works at the end. Though cruel, it also implies that the work has a separate life of its own by this time.]

My bookshelves and Diigo account house an ever-growing collection of writers’ and artists’ discussions on how they create. I even have a few scientific analyses from adventurous experimenters explaining how innovations occurred in their lab.  What I notice is that those who are willing to bare their process are already successful and therefore can talk about creating from behind a safe curtain  labeled “success.”

If I were to ask, say — a teacher– how he/she creates things, I  wouldn’t expect to hear as much. Most adults will pooh-pooh the idea that they are ever creative, much less open up about how it happens (if it happens). Having lived for decades in a culture where someone else defines creative success, usually by some sort of juried process, we adults assume the jury knows what they are talking about. So we only talk about our own creativity after receiving the jury’s blessing.

Enter the world of YouTube, web 2.0 tools, and public commenting. Enter a generation (or two or three) willing to spill their guts and show their mental underwear on Facebook. Will this generation be more willing to talk about their own creative process after the “success” of publishing/performing/exhibiting wherever and whenever they want?  Do they even view their electronically facilitated play as creative process? Are they/we driven to carry creative work through the stages that Kimberly Brooks and others describe? Or is a dropping left on the surface of the web just that:  an abandoned, stillborn product? Are those who create with the toys of the web driven to return again and again, refining, remixing, even storehousing their discarded scraps for use another time? Can these tools be as powerful as any paint, word, or engineering lab? I think so.  But I believe we need the creators to be aware of and talk about their process to reach a higher level, a sort of creative self-actualization (ugh, another old theory, you say…)

I would love to work with some teachers and their students to find out more about creative process among today’s middle and high school kids. But first we need the teachers to recognize creative process in themselves. As I said in a recent post,

Teaching is a blessedly creative process, if we allow it to be. We sculpt a product — a plan for learning. We try it, revise it, tear it apart, remix its pieces, and try it again.

Talk about it. I dare you to ask your colleagues in the faculty room about their latest creative accomplishment.