A decade of NCLB has made an impact.

From: BestMastersInEducation.com

There’s a really useful article in  Education Week that reviews, summarizes and connects the basic thinking and research out there on what helps promote creativity and helps children incubate the curiosity that leads to innovation, discovery and invention.

There’s little here that is new and indeed I have written on all of these topics many times but it is encouraging to see the chorus of voices swell. At Poughkeepsie Day School we have always been listening.

The first key point in that creativity and ingenuity – not test scores-  are the competitive edge in a global economy. Education is about preparation for life not the workforce but is is mighty encouraging to know that the values, habits and skills we teach are the ones reckoned to help students earn a living.

But how is creativity to be taught? That’s the hot topic in education chatter from the National Academy of Education’s annual meeting in Washington to the Learning and the Brain conference in Boston. As researchers start to get their measuring tools around that one, it is clear that  that test-driven agendas can only serve to smother creativity.

I was delighted to see Shirley Brice Heath included in the usual round of suspects. Her ethnographic research  reported in Ways with Words and What No Bedtime Story Means: Narrative Skills at Home and School made a big impact on me after their publication in 1983.

She compared two working class communities – Tracton and Roadville – with a middle class community and uncovered wide differences in literate traditions and modes of communication. Children from the mainstream middle class community were prepared for a more seamless beginning to the literacy modes of school. Heath concluded that successful teaching and learning depend on the elimination of boundaries between school and community. Early literacy teachers, for example, can only be truly effective when armed with understanding of the community’s attitudes toward reading and the complex factors that get in the way of understanding reading as an activity at the heart of the learning

She is now able to draw on that 30-year longitudinal research in new ways.

Now an English professor emerita at Stanford University, Heath told members of National Academy of Education at its annual research meeting that highlighted creativity and innovation: “To study creativity of young people who are on the move, we can’t use our established habits.”

Heath’s phrasing echoes the title of Audre Lorde’s essay on feminism and racism: “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House”. It suggests that current education efforts are self-defeating dead ends. Her metaphor is both telling, and dire:

We can’t look under the streetlight to find any keys we think we may have lost with regard to creativity. After all, schools are where the light has always been; that’s not where the light is now with respect to creativity.

That light has been extinguished by the narrowing curriculum and the obsessions with what can be measured and tested.

The next big gun brought to the the battle is Howard E. Gardner, a professor of cognition and education at Harvard University. In Five Minds for the Future he  considers creativity one of five key ways of thinking—along with discipline, synthesis, respect, and ethics—that will be essential for young people to succeed in the future.

The Creating Mind – the capacity to uncover and clarify new problems, questions and phenomena – breaks new ground, puts forth new ideas, poses unfamiliar questions, conjures up fresh ways of thinking, arrives at unexpected answers.  

 And this is the scary part. When everything that can be has been automated and outsourced Gardner says:

Only individuals who can regularly go beyond the conventional wisdom will be valued.

If he is even close to right – and he is not alone in his thinking – then the pressure is on, the writing is on the wall and the urgency is now. And all the test taking ability in the world can only take you so far:

While cognitive capacities are obviously valuable for creating, only those of a robust, risk-taking personality and temperament are likely to pursue a creative path.

So what to do?

How do schools nurture, foster, grow. encourage, develop and incubate the essential survival skills of the creating mind defined as the  the capacity to uncover and clarify new problems, questions and phenomena.

More arts in the curriculum? Is that the answer? Well – surely they can’t hurt but we need to be wary about the unfounded claims of the transfer of skills.

I’ve written about Ellen Winner before in How the Arts Deepen Student Thinking She’s is a professor of psychology at Boston College and with Lois Hetland  associate professor of art education at the Massachusetts College of Art wrote
“Art for Art’s Sake”  in The Boston Globe, September 2, 2007.

Both are also researchers at Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

It is well established that intelligence and thinking ability are far more complex than what we choose to measure on standardized tests…. They reveal little about a student’s intellectual depth or desire to learn, and are poor predictors of eventual success and satisfaction in life.

After a year studying five visual-arts classrooms, videotaping and photographing classes, analyzing what they saw, and interviewing teachers and their students they found that the skills taught in arts classes taught “a remarkable array of mental habits not emphasized elsewhere in school.” These skills include visual-spatial abilities, reflection, self-criticism, and the willingness to experiment and learn from mistakes. 

We don’t need the arts in our schools to raise mathematical and verbal skills. We already target these in math and language arts. We need the arts because in addition to introducing students to aesthetic appreciation, they teach other modes of thinking we value.

At the  Learning and the Brain conference Winner said that in a continuing series of studies on arts education and creativity, she had found “very little evidence that studying the arts improves grades or test scores, or that studying the arts improves creativity.”

Shirley Brice Heath’s decades long ethnographic research is useful here. She and her colleagues have found positive risk-taking common among the most creative students:

Risk we tend to think of in negative terms, but high risk in play is so endorphin-loading and high-energy, so it’s part of what keeps kids engaged in creativity. 

The ones that emerged as most creative, … they used their play as work. They were very difficult to disengage from play.

To a person, they disliked, avoided, subverted education if it was not related to what they saw as their interests. They never seemed to think about whether they were supposed to be learning or doing what it was that they were learning and doing.

Schools of course – even the very best of them – are not generally structured to support that kind of risk-taking. And they certainly don’t usually appreciate or value subversive thinking. They are, understandably,  structured for more conventional routes of success that inadvertently often stifle students willingness to take risks. Here’s Robert J. Sternberg – intelligence and creativity expert – now provost and senior vice president of Oklahoma State University in Stillwater on the topic

Risk is essential to creativity, … but if you want to get into the good college and the good graduate school and the good job, you don’t want to take too big a risk. Schools often encourage you to do the opposite of what you’d need to be creative.

Teaching Play

Ms. Winner made the distinction between disruptive, “revolutionary” creativity—for example, a Pablo Picasso who develops a new style of painting—and more general creativity, such as someone painting in the Cubist style that Picasso helped pioneer.

It’s not at all clear to me that this [revolutionary] kind of creativity can be cultivated, though perhaps it can be asphyxiated.

Even without knowing the secret sauce and magic formula it is not impossible to imagine how schools can help students go beyond test prep, mastering content knowledge and teaching how to perform specific skills.

I see the school-based recipe as starting with teachers: space to imagine, room to create, time to play, colleagues to play with, encouragement to stretch and experiment, and permission to fail.

And the trouble often is: Too much, too much stuff, to do. And it gets in the way.

But the research is clear: We need to help kids learn to fail, seek alternatives, work through obstacles as ways to incubate the potential for creative problem solving.

And of course: There is no alternative to hard work and perseverance when it comes to the route to discovery and unique creativity. We have to teach that too. The obstacle along the way, the mistake, the failure the accident – it may be just what we need.

Wonderful pictures of what looks like a creative classroom in a pre-Plowden primary school. Look at the desk arrangements. From the Imperial War Museum collection.

A is for Algebra, Anthropology, Arts and Athletics. We teach them all.

People often refer to the STEM curriculum (It’s an acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering, Math). Our program however, is fully SEARCHED (Science, Engineering, Arts, Recess, Community Service, Humanities, Exercise, Design.

No T because technology is everywhere – from paint brushes and  blocks to the ubiquitous laptops.)

And given the project-based and interdisciplinary approach maybe VICED would work (Values, Imagination, Collaboration, Empathy, Design.) Maybe not. But the possibilities are legion. So for now I’ll settle for working on the right acronym to include SHERPA: Service, Humanities, Exercise, Recess, Play and Arts.

A is for All-School Activities: Throughout the year students meet in small mixed-age groups led by high school students. These activities include Halloween pumpkin carving, Thanksgiving, Earth Day celebrations and campus clean-up and events focused on fun and collaborative problem solving.

This is a picture of the recent Thanksgiving all-school activity that included eating lunch together.

This year we are anticipating a student-led Chinese New Year Spring Festival celebration.

A is for Amy in the lower school, Anita at the front desk, Anna who teaches ESL in the high school and Andrea in the business office.

A is for Accord, Arlington. Our families come from all-over

And A is for Active Learning, Authentic Assessment (one thing A is not is a grade) and  Advising. 

And A is for all our alumni who are out there in the world and of whom we are so proud.

Here are four we have seen recently:

Dylan Murphy ’11 visiting on a break from Bennington.

Sean Kelley ’01 who came by with a friend.

Kira Seligman ’89 at Fall Festival Reimagined and

Ellie Rubin Charwat ’53 who, together with her husband Martin, was  honored for her work by the Community Foundation of Dutchess County at their garden party this October. Ellie is wonderful to talk with and she has such vivid memories of life at PDS – the people, the program and the purpose.

   And A is for Aristotle who said:

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.

All right then – what is Absent from this list?

We received a wonderful letter yesterday and here it is:

Dear Ms Holford:

I volunteer at The Queens Galley in Kingston on Tuesdays. I had the pleasure of working with your students, who volunteered yesterday at the soup kitchen.

They were enthusiastic, helpful, industrious and all around fantastic. The teacher who accompanied them was so supportive and positive with the children.

What a wonderful reflection on Poughkeepsie Day School! While I am just a volunteer, with no authority to speak for The Queens Galley, I did want you to know that from my perspective and several other volunteers and clients whom I spoke with, the PDS students were tops.

It’s great to get such message from someone who went out of her way to send a message endorsing what we already know about our students. Thank-you so much.

The Queens Galley does such important work so well that it’s a privilege to be able to help out. Our middle school and high school students have volunteered for years; this particular group was from the middle school and accompanied by Laura Graceffa.

There’s more about The Queens Galley on their website and Facebook page.

I just tried to take a look at Central Hudson’s Storm Central page and in particular the Outage Map. But it seems our utility company is down and out right now. I was hoping to see all the triangles gone indicating that now everyone is fully powered up.

Last week was certainly a challenge for all of us particularly for those with no power and no school open for their kids. (We had some dramatic exclamations of parental relief on the Facebook page when we finally were able re-open the lower and middle school for Thursday.) Everyone was pleased to be back.

I hope by now everyone is back on the grid and fully recovered.

This time the dire weather predictions were accurate and with the snow (21 inches in Millbrook) came with the crack of riven tree limbs and the bang of transformers blowing.

Beware the Green Triangle!

Communication was a challenge. Some of us had no internet, landline, or cell phone for a while.  On Sunday folks used up their battery life to plan for the week. In the end we did a fair job of getting the word out about what was closed when and keeping people as up-to-date as possible. At one point facilities manager Steve Mallet – who had driven back from Boston to take care of things – drove to my house to deliver information. High school teachers without power at home came to work anyway. They brought their children with them and lower and middle school teachers helped out with supervision.

We used everything short of smoke signals to get the information out – the website and the school answering machine (when we could), Facebook, Twitter, the radio stations and cancellations.com.  The problem here was the patchwork of connectivity and the difficulty that admin had communicating with each other let alone the whole community. We welcome any magic solutions for doing a better job next time around.

When all means of communication short of carrier pigeons are down it’s a problem.

Steve found the cause of the problem

And checking on the state of the power meant a 5am visit to both Kenyon and Gilkeson (thank-you Steve) and then the round of calls to activate the announcement.

In the end it was Steve who tracked down the source of our Gilkeson problem when he identified a downed tree across Boardman Road. Once alerted, Central Hudson got the tree crew to work and – Fiat Lux! – power was on and school could open on Thursday

I am grateful for all the efforts people made to help us get through the impact of the storm. And I thank all of you for your patience and support.

My own power was restored on Thursday night but I was at the NYSAIS conference for heads of school at Mohonk for part of the week. So other than tree work to be done and the freezer contents I had to throw away (all that home-made tomato sauce, butternut soup and curried eggplant) I had it easy.  And when it comes to long-term disruption I hope our teacher made homeless by Hurricane Irene is finally back in her house. Many in our community lost more than power in that storm.

The storm also meant we had to postpone the traditional Halloween prek and kindergarten parade and the all-school pumpkin carving and dress-your-senior-as-a-monster fashion show. But they happened anyway.

And I have a clean refrigerator.

See you at Fall Festival Reimagined on Saturday November 19^th.