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.

Why is it that some people can articulately describe and actually facilitate their personal creative process while others have no idea how they go about “making” things? You might think just “letting ideas happen,” sparks the highest level of creativity:  serendipitous fireworks that splash across our mental and aesthetic skyline. I would propose that those who pause to notice, name, and massage their personal creative process — a seemingly UNcreative thing to do– are the most prolific artists, writers, and thinkers.

Analyzing how a successful project evolves requires a very sophisticated level of metacognition, a true intrapersonal intelligence. Taking note of the circumstances that help you generate ideas or pluck the best from a messy pile of possibilities will help you “set up” similar circumstances the next time you seek to complete a project.It seems counterintuitive that those we call “creative” people actually do this. We think of artists and writers as somewhat random — or a little crazy. Artists, writers, and deep thinkers may not call it metacognition, but they pay attention, tuned in with a powerful intrapersonal awareness, to how they work. Their studios or workspaces may seem disorganized, but there is method to their madness, and they KNOW that method. Those less aware among us may founder when asked to “be creative,”  not because we lack ideas, but because we don’t know enough about how our own creative process works to move from inspiration to fruition.

In about two months, I have a presentation about creative process at ISTE2011. Right now, I am struggling with exactly the process I propose to speak about. I need to manage my own creative process, putting this presentation together on a deadline and subject to the accountability of my own presentation proposal.  I know that allowing subliminal incubation time with a looming deadline has always worked for me. Mulling questions in the background as I swim, walk, work, drive, and do other things has always helped me reach an AHA! moment when ideas explode to the forefront. At that moment, I know how to put the presentation or quilt or blog post or article together. But it is frightening to manage this need for a looming deadline and time for incubation when I have so many other tasks at hand, not the least of which involves relaunching a huge web site on exactly the same timeline as the presentation! And I wonder: Is it better to work up against pressure and a looming deadline or force ahead now to be overprepared and possibly stale? Which makes for the most creative, vital product? How much should my own messy creative process be shared as part of a preso on creative process? Obviously, I am still at the messy stage right now.  So I will step back to look for the learning that can come from this moment.

I think creative process matters for all of us, even those who call themselves “just teachers.” 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.  I wonder how many teachers experience teaching this way? I can’t imagine teaching any other way, but it is all I have ever known.

This week I watched an Oscar ceremony including Natalie Portman, followed livebloggers through the unveiling of iPad 2, and read a blog post at ASCD. They all had something in common: the confluence of technology and the humanities.

I had never known that Natalie Portman was a brilliant scientist in her own right until I read the NY Times article about her multifaceted talents. Instantly, I thought of A.M., S.R. and a handful of my other highly gifted former students  who also crossed over the perceived science/humanities “divide” as if it were a laughable piece of yellow, plastic police tape. Natalie Angier, who writes about Portman, focuses on Portman’s drive and on the odd contrast between the isolation of serious scientific researchers vs the public exhibitionism of the entertainment industry. Angier misses out, however, on the place of acting as artistic and personal expression, on film as a place where layered interpretation,visual imagery, and rich language can intrigue the mind and invite as much analysis and questioning as any science– perhaps with a bit more opportunity for ironic twist. I suspect that Portman could talk about the line between science and arts and dance along it quite well. I don’t know her work well enough to be sure, and I certainly have never talked to her. But I can envision my exceptionally gifted former students dancing the line with her, laughing.

Enter Steven Jobs.  His road sign icon for the role of Apple’s “DNA” (and its forward thinking people) marks the meeting point of liberal arts and technology. That meeting place “yields us the result that makes our hearts sing.” I know “Liberal Arts” is a dirty word (well– two) these days, and those of us who actually expended tuition dollars on them are ridiculed for our irrelevance in an era of competitiveness and the hard-driving skills needed in the 21st century. But I firmly believe that Jobs is right about technology’s place. Technology is not simply the test tube or tool we use for data, data, data. If you watch what people do with it, you quickly see today’s technology as a place to play, express, evaluate, compare, collage, question, write, answer, re-question, and enter into an iterative process of exploration and expression. Technologically-assisted exploration IS creative process if we allow it to be. Throw away User Manuals.

David J. Ferraro’s post on the ASCD blog, “Humanizing STEM: A Different Kind of Relevance,” says he “privately fret[s] over the way STEM advocacy, and current reform efforts in general, inadvertently devalue the humanistic and civic dimensions of a basic education.” He goes on to delineate the vital role that the humanities can play as a lens for viewing the intrinsic beauty of science and…

that math is beautiful, true, and good in its own way; that the development of the physical and natural sciences over the centuries has been motivated in part by a universal human desire to make sense of the world; and that technological innovations throughout history have been fueled not only by economic necessities but also by a basic human restlessness and the quest for mastery over nature.

Exploration, whether it is the how and why of science and technology or the what-if of changing a musical key or  shifting the composition of a photograph, is the common ground of the techmanities. Jobs gets it. I think Portman gets it. I know the people who dance across the yellow tape get it. I just hope that people who plan for education get it soon, before we lose the next Jobs or Portman or Ferraro… or your neighbor’s kid.

There is a place where creativity and professional risk meet, and technology has brought that place to our fingertips.

Why is it that “professionals” or adults in general balk at admitting their own creative play? Why do “responsible adults”  think that creativity belongs only to  the very young or the juried, respectable, credentialed, or reviewed?  Yes, there is a place for “Artsworld” and New York Times Arts section, but none of us should be afraid to admit that we play with creative toys and concoct things that may or may not qualify for juried shows or concerts. We share and laugh at the anonymous anomalies of the amateurish and absurd on YouTube — often the products of an exhibitionist style of creative play — but few of us allow our own creative play to show,  for fear it will undermine our professional image or bore our constituents.

There is a place where arts and the personal meet, and technology has brought that place to our fingertips.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the pinnacle of “Artworld,” is embracing creative accessibility with its Connections project. Met staffers select “Connections” from the Met collection and share their own interactions and narrations about the works in videos on wildly varied themes, even “Date Night.” More importantly, the Met invites anyone to create their own Connections project. Art becomes personal, and producing a Connection to share it is both creative and public. Even from the high plateau of the Met as an institution of the Arts (capital A),  this project invites creative thinking and “play” from people outside the Artworld. I wonder whether a professional from education or any other field outside the Arts would risk it. Probably not, unless it somehow fits their credentials.

There is a place where personal creativity and learning meet, and technology has brought that place to our fingertips.

David Warlick, quinteesential education consultant and speaker, admits he has spent hours on airplanes making music with a creative iPad app, but he apologizes for talking about it on his blog. Teachers balk at admitting their own creative attempts, too. When was the last time you allowed a student or fellow teacher to see what you tried to make as part of creative “play” with Prezi or Photoshop or GlogsterEDU? More importantly, how can we ask children and the young adults of the next generation to respect their own creative endeavors when we don’t even take our own creative play seriously enough to let anyone see it? Let’s move beyond YouTube-silly to admitting we actually try making something creative. No one said it had to be “good.” Let them see you play.

There is a place where creativity meets importance, and technology has brought that place to our fingertips.

The China trip continues to be of high interest to my friends and colleagues, and the six weeks since our return have given me greater perspective. I am no politician or policy maker. I am a teacher. So I am going to stick to teaching and leave the more delicate issues of U.S.-Chinese relations, human rights violations, and Nobel laureates to the pundits (who likely will spin faster than the top I haggled down to 10 yuan at the Pearl market in Beijing).

One of the topics that came up in discussions with educational technology leaders in China was creativity. The Director of the Shanghai Distance Education Group (SDEG) commented frankly in his opening remarks to our group of American educators (roughly translated here from my notes):

“The Chinese model [of education] is: Everything students do is for exams. We want students to learn beyond textbooks. I feel the U.S. education model is very different from ours, especially in creativity. We need to learn from the U.S.”

I will resist the temptation here to launch into discussion on high stakes testing(!) and look at the even greater challenge posed here. As an astute colleague asked me— on hearing of the director’s statement above, “Well, if you were going to teach the Chinese how to teach creativity, how would you do that? It’s not part of their culture.”

On my grouchier days, I wonder whether creativity is part of our culture, either. These are the days when I read about yet another bean-counting way people are trying to overanalyze, categorize, or prepackage the things that make life enjoyable: things like learning for the creative joy of it. I question how the Chinese can implement creativity in their usual systemic way, since they do not celebrate the joy of learning for the sake of the good feeling it gives. But I wonder whether we do either anymore. I think we have two places: The World and My World.

In The World, we look at long term trends of what the global economy will demand in the next 20 years. We break it up into little pieces and make sure we measure them. We tell everyone that these are the answers to success. We pass legislation, write media articles about them, and make parents feel guilty if their kids are not progressing toward these goals.

In My World (“My” meaning the world that each of us has individually), I have time for solitary wonder. I don’t even report in on Facebook or Twitter unless I feel like it. I can play with a toy (often a web tool or some silly thing my laptop can do or a montage I can make from photos and sounds). I can forget what time it is. I can savor the joy and keep it secret. Later, when the joy has made me feel less grouchy,  I can discover that one of my friends was experimenting with the same toy and found a whole other way to create with it. In My World, it’s OK not to have a goal in mind. We can wander a bit and simply feel the joy.

I suspect that the gentleman at SDEG actually believed that we in the U.S. have packaged creativity for The World and that China simply needs to copy it through their system of deployed change. What he doesn’t realize is that creativity lives in the My World(s) of Americans, not necessarily in our schools. I will keep working on that, but today– while I am feeling grouchy– I will seek some time alone with some toys and wait for some friends to stop by later.

What brings the joy of creativity to Your World? Do you share it?

I am no longer spending day to day life in a classroom with kids, but I continue to learn from my job. My connection with kids may be more vicarious than it was before, but I continue to learn as part of education world. So for the New year, I stop to share my top learning moments of 2010.

Things I learned this year:

It’s worth asking.
In the spring I received a letter inviting me to join a group of professionals involved with technology in education on a trip to China. If I had not formulated a plan delineating how TeachersFirst could benefit from my participation in this trip and then had the nerve to ask whether The Source for Learning would share in the cost, I would have assumed that such a trip was simply not possible. Many months and many thousand miles of travel to China later, I am very glad I took the risk to ask.

Laryngitis does not mean the absence of a voice.
In June, I gave my first full hour “lecture” format presentation at ISTE in Denver. Twenty-four hours beforehand, laryngitis completely erased my ability to speak. Over the next day, I communicated silently with pencil and paper, pantomime, nod, and smile. I discovered the kindness of many complete strangers and the willingness of others to do anything they could to help promote healing of my voice. You can read more about the experience in my post. The bottom line: my “voice” came through in far more ways than simply from that presentation. Not only did the sound re-emerge from my mouth amid the presentation; my passionate interest in creativity and facilitating it as essential to learning (and often with technology tools) echoes in upcoming articles and presentations — and my desire to refine the voice of creativity together with other articulate professionals.

Comparison can hinder vision.
The China trip showed me so much about how people on the other side of the Pacific view learning, how they “teach,” and how Chinese parents and society expect education to look. The easy way to talk about everything I saw in China is to explain it in comparison to what we know in the U.S. The skies are more polluted than ours. The level of laws concerning health and safety is far less than in our litigious society, etc. But I find myself stopping mid-paragraph as I continue this comparison. What is important is not the side by side comparison of “them” and “us.” In fact, the very comparison to us blinds me to nuance and sounds, thoughts, philosophies too different for comparison. There is no one-to-one, force-fit, side-by-side way to understand China. If we focus on competition and comparison, we will never hear the intellectual phonemes the Chinese articulate that simply are not part of our thinking language. We will learn far more from dialog.

Watching learning is learning, too.
I am lucky enough to have two grandsons, one born in 2010. Watching them learn reminds me of what classroom teachers do every day. We watch learning, and in the process we learn, too. That experience never stops. At the end of every day, each of us– even those in no way involved in education– should ask, “What did you see someone learn today?”  If everyone pondered this, society might find a whole new approach to what education is and should be.

Zero technology days are a good idea.
Although I had perhaps 3 of these during 2010, the days when I do not touch my iPhone, listen to MP3s or Pandora, check in on Facebook, watch the news, connect to the Internet, or answer email are precious indeed.  Not only do I focus entirely on people and places. I also return to the  grid with new perspective and energy. Lithium ion is not the only kind of recharge.

To all who care to stop by and read here, Happy New Year. What did you see someone learn this year?

During my stay in China, I received notification that my two proposals for the ISTE conference in June, 2011 had BOTH been accepted. I am flabbergasted, excited, and a bit daunted by the challenge of putting together two very different presentations to be given within the same morning. What an opportunity!

One is on the cyclical nature of creativity and how that can be respected and fostered in an education world of linear, point-A-to-point-B accountability. The second is on taking the control of IWBs (interactive whiteboards) out of the hands of teachers and making them student centered for learning. While I will be sure that both presentations have practical, learning-friendly strategies that teachers can envision and implement, they begin from very different directions. One springs from a deep philosophical discussion about the nature of creativity (born of my interests in the humanities and listening/reading/teaching about creative process). The other bounces defiantly out of the back alleys of argument that began with Bill Ferriter’s blog post almost a year ago, “Why I Hate Interactive Whiteboards” and the unfortunate practice of distributing technology hardware as a teacher-centered panacea for student achievement.

So I have a lot of work to do between now and the spring to piece and quilt two separate presentations.  In the meantime, I will enjoy “collecting things” for both. Sometimes the pre-presentation, messy time is the highlight of my own creative process as ideas, images, and examples collect like scraps for a quilter. The virtual floor of my office (a.k.a. my MacBook) is going to be deep in material.