Progressive Education National Network

[Katy]

Teresa Amabile, a professor at Harvard Business School, has spent the last thirty years conducting research in the area of creativity. In her book, Growing Up Creative, Nurturing a Lifetime of Creativity, she states that the ingredients of creativity depend on three things: (1) skill in the domain, (2) creative working and thinking skills, and (3) intrinsic motivation. She says that some elements of creativity are inborn; some depend on learning and experience; and some depend on social environment.

Amabile says that children’s motivation and creativity can be destroyed if evaluation, reward, and competition are misused, or if choices are too restricted. Being intrinsically motivated to be creative has four main aspects: love (even obsession), dedication, a combination of work and play, and a concentration on the activity itself. She reminds us that the greatest challenge for adults in nurturing children’s creativity is to help children find their creativity intersection—the area where their talents, skills and interests overlap. Her suggestion for keeping creativity alive in school is teachers who believe that children should be active learners, with a sense of ownership and pride in their learning experience. She says teachers should give both guidance and autonomy, and use learning activities that are unstructured within structure.

Some people say that fostering creativity as Amabile describes it is pervasive in progressive education classrooms. On the other hand, some people say that progressive education classrooms do not teach the skills or the rigor required for education today.

As progressive educators, we know that some creative endeavors and academic pursuits such as handwriting, math, music, foreign language, and dance require instruction and practice to learn the basic skills. In some non-progressive schools, learning basic skills in these and other subjects are taught using only the methods of direct teaching, drill, and rigid discipline.

How do you organize your classroom to teach basic skills within the progressive education tenets of choice and experiential learning?

Is it possible to teach skills in a progressive education school or classroom? How do you do it?

[Sandra]

In classrooms that are progressive you can still teach the fundamental skill required for mastery in a subject. My classroom is not authoritarian and is very student-centered, but the students want to learn how to do things so that they can do better. Why do people think that progressive is all choice and chaos? I balance teaching skills in my art classes with lots of time for choice for free expression. The students learn how to use the materials, or learn something specific like perspective, and then I give them time to explore and develop thier own pieces.

[Bill]

How do I do it? It takes LOTS of planning to fit it all in. All of the choice doesn't just happen randomly. I think about the free choice time as much as I think about the direct teaching. If education is all direct teaching without the free choice, then the kids don't have an opportunity to apply the knowledge.

[Brianna]

I think kids don't master handwriting in today's classrooms because most teachers don't know how to teach the basic skills. They expect kids to learn handwriting by practicing on boring worksheets. Cursive is all about rhythms and the connections, the space between letters, and letter size realtionships. It is actually a lot like dance.

I love to teach cursive as a skill, not from boring worksheets. My kids love it too. Some of them go on to study calligraphy or other script forms. Once they understand the flow of the pen stroke, lots of them get really creative and study other forms of writing or spend lots of time developing their own style. In the beginning, big, almost whole body arm movements, help beginners understand the importance of rhythm. No one can develop their own unique, legible writing style without first learning the basic skills necessary to imagine adaptations.

[Wendy]

Bill, I found your statement about planning for free choice time to be an interesting one. What age students do you work with and what sort of planning do you do?

Also, I definately believe that it is possible to teach skills in a progressive classroom. But since my progressive classroom is located in a public school and there are some more traditional expectations put upon me... I also wanted to mention that it is possible to use progressive practices like "free choice time" if you disguise it as "snack break."

[liz]

One of my favorite lessons in math, is after our second graders learn about fractions using faction tiles and playing some games, I bring in our "boom-wackers" which are plastic tubes that when struck on your hand (or other object) give off the tones, C,D,F,G, and A. They are different colors (and of course different lengths). We use then as rhythm sticks. One group will set the rhythm of the whole notes, another group will be the half notes, and another the quarter notes, etc. We switch roles. I am the conductor to start with. After we play around with this as a whole class for a little bit, they then chose partners or threesomes and go off to make up a rhythm piece which they then perform for the class. Needless to say we have quite a few rhythmic sword fights. The kids are learning about half time and double time and putting their knowledge of fractions to FUN use.

[Bill]

Re: Bill, I found your statement about planning for free choice time to be an interesting one. What age students do you work with and what sort of planning do you do?

I teach 6th grade at a progressive school. Many of my lessons are project based learning. During the project, I pay attention to student engagement with the information. While the kids are doing the project, I pay attention, and plan small lesson to help them learn new things. These lessons are based on what the kids need, and what is happening in the project. It is planning in response to the kids, not inflexible long term planning before the project starts. Peer interaction during the project is important to me too. This is the opportunity for me to help kids with social and emotional growth.

I do not prescribe the end of the project or the process of it. That is the learning part for the kids. Paying attention and responding as a teacher or coach is my work. It takes lots of thinking and planning so I don't get in the way of the learning process for the kids. It is their learning, not mine that is important in the class. I am never diasppointed with their creativity, and I always learn from them.

[Alexis]

I teach in a public school in California. I do not have time to even think about the creative side of my students. I spend all my time thinking about standards and test scores. My evaluation depends on it.

I would like to hear from public school teachers who have to teach the kids about the standards so that the kids can know which standard they are learning. It seems wrong to me, and I wonder if anyone else thinks the public schools system has gone crazy.

[Peggy M.]

To Alexis: I think the public school system has gone crazy. That is why I am in a private school. I may not have a good retirement system, but I get to teach children and think about things like creativity.

I think creativity grows for children during the process of doing a project. Originality is most likely to be evident where the product has been chnaged, modified, reassessed and continuously developed by the child. I am very careful with assignments. A fixed end-product, especially when it is predetermined by the teacher, is actually a form of copying.

Concentrating on the fixed and predetermined product leaves too little room for flexibility and decision-making whereas the emerging and changing end-product allows for considerable experimentation. In experimental or adventurous thinking, children are not working towards something which is already 'there'. They are in the position of developing an idea which is not yet finished and adapting their first thoughts.

There is a high standard for excellence in my class. Kids want to work on things and make them better. The hard work teaches them skills that they use to develop their next project.

Read Ron Berger's book: An Ethic of Excellence, Building a Culture of Craftsmanship with Students. It really helped me help kids with the process part of doing a project.

[Guest]

Alexis, public schools are absolutely crazed systems!
If things keep up this way, I may also be driven out, but for now I'm committed to doing what I can for my kids within the system.

Personally, I too think that posting the standards in my room so that kids know what standard we're working on is nuts. When those children become adults we want them to keep learning-- life long learners, right???-- but they won't have standards neatly identified for them at every learning opportunity... learning is and should be a messy process of personal meaning-making.

Nonetheless, I think that standards can be useful for teachers when it comes to planning and developing curriculum.

Like Peggy, I am interested in giving children opportunities to be creative... but I am not terribly offended by products which have clear expectations. I am very committed to a writing workshop approach in which children are given freedom within structure. One of the key tenents of this approach is allowing children to study models of good writing to improve their own. As a teacher, I try to study models of good teaching to improve my own. I'm a better teacher for attempting to approximate others' good practice and am not at all disappointed in myself for copying others' ideas.

[Alexis]

To Guest on 4/14--

I agree with you on the freedom within structure part. I think the lack of creativity comes when there is no freedom to develop an idea, or do new and different thngs with assignments. Assignments should not describe how to get to the end. They should allow lots of room for revision, changing, editing and room for risks.

I see education getting really good at the structured standards part and the freedom, risk-taking part is getting squeezed out.

[Anne]

On March 12, 2006, the San Francisco Chronicle printed an article titled: Leaving Creativity Behind, by Jamie O'Neill. The subtitle was: Drilling for Tests Kills Curiosity and Imagination. I thought it was a thoughtful and well-written article. I cut it out to save, but I imagine you can find in online.

[Guest]

The link to Leaving Creativity Behind is:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/03/12/ING2DHLDO01.DTL

[gsherif]

Science Leadership Academy (SLA) is a new small high school that is opening up in Fall, 2006 with approx. 125 students. Incoming faculty are presently working with the school's principal, Chris Lehmann, to map curriculum around three essential questions that will guide student inquiry during grade 9:

1) Who am I?
2) What influences my identity?
3) How do I interact with the world?

Chris says "The notion of the essential questions is that they should guide us as we write our curriculum, and the essential questions should be at the heart of our idea of having a unified, thematic curriculum. The students should be able to interact with these questions across the disciplines, so that they use these questions as the jumping off point for inquity and exploration in English, History, Science, Advisory, Foreign Language... and maybe even Math."
_________________
Gamal D. Sherif
www.ProgressEd.org

[Jose]

Science Leadership Academy sounds interesting. Is the curriculum based on student choice or mandated subjects?

If it is choice, how do you teach foreign language in a choice based curriculum?