I find myself feeling like I’m on the defensive after reading and watching this content on creativity and the creative mind. I feel like so much of what I do in the classroom is not asking kids to be creative, but presenting and practicing basic skills. I feel like as a school we are focused on the “wax on, wax off” part of the Karate Kid movie where the protagonist has to repeat over and over again a forced, rote skill practice.
I find myself thinking about what a professor said to us in a Native American Lit class in college. He stressed the importance for minorities, like Native Americans, to master correct grammar and writing conventions, or “the code”, if they are to ever be taken seriously by the establishment. I feel we are trying to do this with the minority language learners in our school. We are trying to get them “up to speed” on internalizing and mastering this new code they are confronted with. They do need these basic skill sets in order to thrive in our society. Don’t they? Then I think about technology’s role in this. Is anybody else being bombarded with Grammarly ads on YouTube? This program edits people’s writing. It looks like there is a big interest in this, judging by the number of ads that are being given. It would seem that many people are learning these kinds of grammar skills not as a precursor to producing creative works, but while they do them. My kids also get instant editing in Google Docs while they work on their creative writing. Maybe we should trust the technology to teach many of these skills this while we focus primarily on setting up the context in the classroom that leads to creative collaboration, and creative, pbl projects. The motivating activities create the desire for learning the skills, and the skills are learned “on the fly” as students do creative work. I’m wondering if I should scrap my grammar lessons. Do kids need to know what a subject and predicate are, explicitly? Could I be using our time more wisely if they learn what they are intuitively through their need to communicate their thinking? The technology will increasingly take care of the mistakes in writing. What technology can’t do is be creative in the human sense where we get into that synthesizing and creative mindset that Howard Gardener talks about. Our country has been such a leader in the world up to this point because we have inculcated irreverence in a creative sense. The tech is freeing us up, it would seem, to do even more of this creative work. The tech also cannot teach ethics. In fact, as the Enron and MIT examples show, people can hide behind technology to justify unethical behavior. So a big part of schools should be on teaching this, as well. I’m also glad to report that our school is attempting to do this through our focus on restorative justice and restorative circles. A big part of this ethical discussion revolves around respect. When we teach respect, we bolster self identity and individualism. Sir Ken Robinson talks about the importance of this in creating the kind of school environment that gets away from the “one size fits all” production line, industrial model of education. When kids feel like their voices are heard, they can better find their own particular strengths and focus on those. Perhaps a shift of balance is in order. We need to include into every day’s lessons the opportunity for kids to use their new skills to perform open ended, collaborative, and challenging tasks. This is like the kind of learning community that John Seely Brown talks about, I think. We can only create social constructs of knowledge, where learning can be exponential, if people’s passion and playfulness are involved in a collaborative, “deep tinkering” context. I love how he discusses the importance of making mistakes is to this kind of learning. Luckily, we have started doing this in our school through a new focus on growth mindset. Mistakes are encouraged and supported as indicators of learning and growth. Where I fall short in my teaching is on the intrinsic vs extrinsic rewards argument that Dan Pink discusses. I feel a lot of pressure in our school to provide extrinsic rewards. I have adopted these in two cases out of pressure from other teachers. We are using Class Dojo points to reinforce “positive classroom behaviors”. We have also started using “brag tags” to do this. Our school also uses “tickets” to reinforce behaviors. In addition, I use a “marble jar” to reward the whole class on “quick transitions” and “acceptable classroom behavior”. I feel like we are teaching kids through these extrinsic rewards that it is ok to do what you don’t love with the promise of getting a reward that has little to do with the actual behavior. I feel like we are teaching kids to do the jobs they are not interested in, so that they get a reward that is actually a bit meaningless. This teaches people to do the jobs they are unhappy in just to get a paycheck. Intrinsic motivation actually increases productivity and satisfaction. If we set up our classroom context where kids are motivated to work together through their own questions and passions, then the need for these extrinsic rewards disappears. This is also what the Mobley article gets at. Instead of focusing on lecturing and memorizing, we should be focusing on questioning in non-linear and creative ways. When kids don’t tap into their questions and individual passions, it’s easy to fall into Mobley’s final pitfall: “Don’t ever quit.” Our kids are quitting because they are not tapping into their strengths. This is why I love Ryan and Evrim’s topic on strength based learning for their continuation high school, which has a high dropout rate. But I think many of our topics are pointed in this direction in this class. I feel we are all focused on creating rich learning environments that can lead to greater creativity through student collaboration, questioning, and intrinsic motivation.
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Most definitely Richard Louv's book entitled Last Child in the Woods, Saving Our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder is a frequently cited and quoted author in the research articles I have been reading. The book has strengthened the international campaign to get kids back to nature. But the resource I find myself going back to the most is Kevin J. Coyle's study called Digital Technology’s Role in Connecting Children and Adults to Nature and the Outdoors. I'm using many of the resources he lists to learn more about the topic. If you are interested in taking a look, it's available on the Web. It contains many of Louv's ideas, but goes on to discuss how educators can best develop nature apps that actually do help connect kids to nature and give them more powerful, direct experiences there. A lot about what I read this weekend has been about the ontological and epistemological, (I had to look these terms up), questions that revolve around the direct experience of nature vs a technology mediated experience. Phillip G. Payne's study called The technics of environmental education goes deeply into this. It was a difficult read. Here's his abstract:
"An ambivalent, sometimes destructive, relationship between modern humanity, technology and `outer' or external nature has historically attracted the critical attention of scholars and commentators from a wide variety of backgrounds. The effects of technology on postmodern `inner' nature warrants similar scrutiny. This article examines how technology structures human experience and is structuring education for sustainable development. Propositions about the `technics of experience' and questions for environmental education are posed so as to invite more earnest discussion about the inroads technologies and `vicarious' learning experiences are making into the equally unproblematic ontological treatment of postmodern learners/subjects. Consideration must be given to the question of what users of the technological medium `become'—an ontological issue of crucial relevance to the ongoing aspirations and legitimacy of environmental education." Coyle's work seems to resolve these deep questions through his presentation of thoughtful guidelines for nature app development. These guidelines address the need for apps to support children's direct experience of nature. Linda Darling-Hammond’s The Flat World and Education is an excellent guide to create the kind of paradigm shifts we need in this country that might improve our quality of education for ALL students.
Her key areas to focus on are:
For me, her key point is that by emphasizing equity for ALL students, we bring up all students. It is very shortsighted to allow a system that favors investment in the rich over the poor. What the rich don’t get is that they will be even better off if they try to help everybody to improve. A good example is Finland, where by ensuring equitable funding in all schools, all students benefited. The John Dewey quote shows how our founding forefathers knew this. When we know the vision of the original architects of our educational system, and can see how other countries have benefited from these ideas, why can’t we get it together to advance a national plan? What has happened? Education has been de funded. Darling-Hammond repeats over and over again in her book how increased investment is needed in order to implement the changes she proposes. But the national trend has been in the opposite direction. Prop 13 favors businesses and homeowners over education, for example. Not only that, but our national head of education, Betsy DeVos, is interested in turning schools into a for profit, privatized system. Here is a direct quote from the NEA website on Betsy DeVos: “As President Donald Trump’s secretary of education, Betsy DeVos has worked to subvert public education. She has promoted the privatization of public schools through vouchers, called for deep cuts to federal funding, rolled back protections for vulnerable children, and shilled for the for-profit college industry that has defrauded countless students.” Rather than investing in kids and teachers, our leaders seem more interested in how they might profit from them. To me it feel Machiavellian when I think that our nation’s education secretary, who wants to privatize education, is the sister of Eric Prince, the owner of the infamous Blackwater private mercenary group that fought in Iraq and got into a lot of trouble there for killing civilians. The school to prison pipeline could also turn into a for profit school to for profit mercenary group pipeline. Could it? Has it? We are a nation divided. In my opinion, the small minority with most of the money does not seem to feel identified with the increasing number of minority students in our schools. Rather than trying to help them, they ignore them or see them as another opportunity to profit. When I see our cohort’s thoughts and comments, I see us as really struggling to find meaning and direction in this broken system we have been working in. It’s so frustrating to see that the ideas are there and a way forward is clear, but that we are at the same time so far from reaching these goals. It has always seemed to me that I am not teaching the way I should be. I’ve always been trying to do my best with limited training and support in semi-cohesive programs. It feels like the collective political will has not fermented long enough for people to finally say “Enough!” There has to be some kind of “wake up” experience or renaissance in education and in a broader sense for us to refocus our values away from profiting off of each other, which brings everybody down, and back to investing into each other, which brings everyone up. I like the idea of 21st Century learning objectives, which revolve around critical thinking, problem solving, and technology. We are learning so much about the brain and what kind of “brainsets” we need for creative learning to occur. We have the technological tools that can help all voices be heard and level the playing field for minority students. But it also scares me to think how easy it is to allow this tool in schools to become what it has become in the social media world. Facebook started as a great platform to communicate with friends. It’s become another way to direct advertisements at people. I had to stop using it because I was getting more ads than news about my friends. Are there laws that prevent digital educational curriculum to contain advertisements? |
AuthorJeremy Smith teaches third grade at Calistoga Elementary School. Archives
July 2020
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