Creative Teaching, Personal Growth, and the Brain Drain

Take one: One of our presenters in the Tech EDGE conference (coming next week for the third time) told me when we had a few  minutes that she was tired of how slowly her district was transforming. She felt that after 5+ years at the forefront of technology implementation she wanted to move to better and bigger things.
Take two: At the NETA conference last spring I came face to face with a sobering reality. Here was a crowd eager to learn, eager to grow and be creative in teaching. We heard exceptional speaker, learned new applications and had way too much coffee together. But conversations around the tables and the professional reality of many of the presenters (and I suspect participants as well) was in transition. Many were working at the district level, ESU (Educational Service Units), some even for technology companies.

The question is whether education or more specifically teaching is experiencing a "brain drain". Is it possible that  teachers leaving the profession after 5-20 years experience because they cannot be creative and innovative in large bureaucratic systems? The data I have is anecdotal (there is a dissertation in this I am sure) but still intriguing. It is possible that creative and innovative teachers seek out more education, professional development and new ideas. I have long held the belief that there is a point in a teacher's career that she feels that there must be something else out there beyond the district. That when teachers seek out professional development, graduate degrees and new projects. The irony is that the new knowledge and innovative ideas can be exactly the thing that starts distancing them from the classroom until they cannot see themselves going on and start looking for alternatives. When the opportunity is there they get a doctoral degree, become teacher educators, or perhaps go work for Apple.

Why now? I think that there are structural reasons in public education that may be encouraging the "brain drain". On the one hand the increased pressure on teachers to "perform" on high stakes standardized measures constrain curriculum and creativity leaving little to no room for experimentation. This is contrasted by the fast paced changes in technology and society. The difference in rate of change is staggering. Finally, it is more socially acceptable and often necessary to change careers at least once in adulthood.

While I understand the urge to make personal changes I wonder if the state of public education might be progressively hurt by this phenomenon. Are the best minds running in the other direction? It could be that this is "The new normal" for education. The challenge is not just having a younger less experienced teaching force, it is that a good portion of the veteran work force are exactly those who are less likely to innovate and lead positive change. Now, to be totally honest, I am not in the classroom anymore either. I made the same move. How, I wonder, can we create schools that will allow teachers like that to stay, grow, and innovate without leaving the profession? Should this even be a goal?

Back to Creativity- A Response

I find myself in a discussion on creativity with Kurt Knecht and Bob Woody. I come at creativity from the psychological research side and my experience conducting research on the integration of arts into the elementary curriculum for a decade. I did not measure creativity, in fact I resisted some of the pressures. I find that most measures of creativity are artificially focused on a small subset of tasks without extensive validity to back them up. I am not opposed though to the social science  endeavor studying the phenomena as Kurt has said. I come at it from the educational side and my understanding of how our political and educational leadership systems work.

It is widely perceived that America's advantage in the world is it's creativity. We once manufactured, engineered, were well funded and had a technology edge. As a society we feel that America has lost its edge and we are worried looking for our advantage over China and other threats. Our political system needs to manufacture a solution that will get them elected. The way things go the next logical step is to say: well if our advantage is creativity then how do we promote it from kindergarten and how do we really know children are creative? At this point the big testing companies will offer a test of creativity- a standardized one and we will create a generation of students "uniformly creative" then discover it didn't work and blame teachers and unions. My reluctance is really fear of a series of intended consequences that leads to less time for music and art in school because we have to teach creativity.

Finally a note about the nature of creativity. I believe that creativity is rooted in a deep understanding of a domain as a precursor. Lehrer describes the study of mopping to find a new solution. The key part of the story for me was that Continuum designers studied mopping for 6 months then learned from an expert who was years at the task, that is I believe he described the evidence that creative innovation is actually linked to doing! The second aspect the Lehrer highlights and I actually agree with is having the space to try, fail and retry. It is where schools have the hardest time creating the time and space to experiment. We have packed the curriculum with so much "stuff" so many standards and tests that teachers are hard pressed to find time for their students to experiment and wonder per Kurt Knecht or play per Margaret Latta. Without this space to be wrong creativity is a risk not worth taking.

This space for risk with the notions of Flow and Studio habits of mind are the best linkages to elementary education (my domain).
So in summary I do not think we should shy away from studying creativity, only that we should be very careful as both Kurt and Bob emphasized shy away from over generalizing. My suggestion is always to go back to the original studies and avoid the urge to read journalistic versions.

Teaching Art Online

A prospective graduate student came by a few weeks ago. His goal as he stated it is to minimize damage to rural students by providing quality arts instruction online or through distance education in other means. I worry.
I told him that I worried, arts education is a field that requires demonstratin, proximity and more than anything else mentoring. This kind of mentoring is extremely hard to reproduce at a distance. I think that the ability to look at the dancers moves from multiple perspectives, the painters brush strokes or the guitarist hands are crucial elements that cannot be done at a distance. I teach distance courses and Ithink some of


them are great- but not in arts education or arts integration.
My second concern was that by creating online replacements we urge districts that have stuck by their specialists and invested in them to stop. If the quality is there, they might say, why not save a bundle. So what can be done instead?
Here are some ideas:
1. Train classroom teachers in arts integration and enhance their understanding through studio experiences with local artists and museum resources.
2. If online lessons are created integrate them with rich artist in residence programs- mandated not just as an option. The experieneces must be bundled and truly integrated.
3. Educate school boards and administrators about the importance of the arts.

Do not let rural schools do without arts....

Composition- Teaching Creativity and Problem Solving

A few weekends ago Kurt and I found ourselves in a Uhaul truck moving furniture. Kurt as is his habit levels a multi-layered question in a matter of fact way. This is in no way a direct quote but the essence of the question was How do you teach and evaluate [musical] composition at the graduate level? What I love about Kurt is that he asks this just as if he was asking "Should we make a right here?" That is while the question is complex it is also very concrete in his mind (and mine I think).
Anyway this post are some of my thoughts about the topic that applies directly to creativity in other domains and has clear parallels in the writing process and in visual arts. I borrow here from Ken Robinson and define creativity as the process of having original ideas that have value. In the context of education as a process I think that most often creativity is about finding novel solutions to meaningful problems. The problems themselves can be defined by an educator or the learner. When teaching composition, writing or visual arts this definition holds, and one can see how we can ask students to create in a familiar style or form (say painting a still life picture or writing a Haiku) making it uniquely our own by identifying the problem and providing a solution to it. In a sense teaching writing is very much just that. Lucy Calkins coined the phrase "Teach the writer not the writing" (I am actually borrowing it from Evi who is one of the best teachers of writing I know) which I take to mean there is no one uniform way to go through a program, instead as educators we must allow room for learners to define their own problems and find solutions to them. In a way teaching creativity is about teaching our students to identify problems, learn how others solved similar ones and then coming up with their own solution.
This is exactly the reason that I believe there is no universal creativity factor but instead expertise leading to creativity in a specific domain. The process in broad strokes has parallels but the details are often too different. For example I have no capacity to identify problems  in [music] composition , but I am extremely capable of doing that in educational research (it is a strange field to be creative in I know).
The area that has the most to offer I think for educators interested  in developing the ability to compose is Teaching Writing. You must decipher the parallels of course and the elements that are uniquely linked to writing but I still believe that it is useful.
A place to start might be:
The work of Lucy Calkins, Linda Flower, and unl's own Robert Brooke.

And What about Architecture?

Yesterday I happened to go to the Joslyn in Omaha. I was struck by the collection and the superb way it was displayed but more than anything I was struck by the architecture. I admit to having a soft spot for architecture and everyday design, but I have not payed enough attention to the potential in education. Architecture is inherently interdisciplinary part engineering, part technology, part art, part social science. It is all around us, yet we do not spend much time teaching or learning it...
In early education the urge to build is always evident. Young children often build in blocks, Lego and assortments of other toys. As they get older these urges to build and create seem to be channeled to the world of play, while school becomes the serious place of thinking and being academic using our heads but not our hands, solving all problems in the abstract giving up on the trial and error process. Yes I am channeling a bit of Sir Ken Robinson here. While I do not think he is right about everything we definitely can find common ground here!

So my thought for the day is that with some thought we can integrate design process and architecture into our curricula- enhancing them while opening new avenues of creativity and thought for our students and for ourselves!

Another Denver Airport post: Creative Teachers

We had our end of the year meetings in both sites over the last 10 days, Nebraska and California. As Monique, Nancy and I discussed the energy and immense productivity we saw in the meeting we started recognizing how uniquely creative and collaborative our teachers are. Our approach focuses on key ideas while letting teachers create their units and variations. The idea is that fidelity is to core ideas and not a prescribed lesson. Our principles are about process, thinking and integration. Our teachers have become amazing at using this platform to be creative. Even though grades have created units together the products were often different in meaningful ways. For example all second grades created a stamp as one assignment- but those were not uniform in the classes- showing that kids are creative, not between classroom showing that teachers are creative. More than that they UNDERSTAND what are the key ideas and where they can be creative and create variations that reflect their classrooms, individuality and skill/ comfort level.
As a researcher this has cost me much- and they are constantly aware of the research asking " we don't want to screw up the data". But the results are exactly what we wanted- implementation that is powered by teachers, sustainable, meaningful. For a second there I thought - if I had to retire right now, I would have retired happy.
If we want a creative generation we need to let teachers be creative! For that to happen professional development must provide the space for teacher creativity to emerge.

More Thoughts about Creativity

Before I start I'd like to send a hello to Regina Murphy of Ireland, and invite her to contribute to the blog (let me know and I'll set this up). I never intended this blog to be a one person act and what Regine is doing I find extremely interesting (I'll let her tell about it...).

In my last post I focused on skill as a part of creativity and potentially a filter for measuring "higher order" processes.
The question stays- what is creativity? My understanding is still evolving and this blog seems to be one of the places I do my thinking, so here goes:
Creativity has a strong creative domain component- like expertise in any field it is highly contextualized. If you are a sculptor a painter or a mathematician your deep understanding of your field is part of being creative or it at least a necessary but not sufficient condition. Such domain knowledge is what enables the artist (and I use this term to include anyone attempting to create an art product) to translate a vision, intent to a product. As Mike Jackson explained to me [I am paraphrasing] For me creativity is when I can translate what I see in my mind on the paper, then it is a good product. I care about the process the most, once it is done I stop being engaged.
Yet, people who describe themselves (or by others) as creative seem to be able to carry some of their creativity with them into new domains explore them and finally be engaged with them in full. Looking at the Universal Learning Model that my colleagues and I are focusing on- creativity becomes a multi-dimensional construct that combines several aspects of learning. The first is knowledge of the domain, most important is procedural knowledge that drives the creative process itself. Second is focus- single minded focus of attentional resources (i.e. working memory) to the task at hand. It is the experience of Flow or just extreme focus on the work that is often romantically portrayed. Finally and maybe the characteristic that most often helps the artist transcend a creative genre and learn a new one- Motivation.
The most universal feature of creativity is motivation. Motivation directs attention and allows the focus described above, which in turn leads to learning of new knowledge of the domain and most importantly the process. In motivation I think the most important features are slef-concept, seeing one's self as an artist or creative person. The second is the longing for complete engagement or flow. I think that once you develop Flow, you constantly search for it. And if you cannot find it you look for new domains in which you can re-experience it. Oliver Sacks describes such a case in "The Case of the Colorblind Painter". A desperate search by the artist for the way to rediscover flow probably the experience that ancient artists used to describe as the presence of a muse.
More later

On Being Skillful

We often disregard the skills. We want kids to think (adults too for that matter). As we try to measure things like creativity, we try to avoid the skill threshold or work around it.
I am like that too to a certain degree. But, as I think about these constructs I strongly believe that creativity, intelligence, and learning are all deeply embedded in domain knowledge and a threshold of skills that allow you to engage meaningfully with the the subject matter.
In other words, Tiger Woods that cannot putt well is just a golf bum who thinks a lot about the game, Einstein without his knowledge of math is just a crazy dude sleeping on a park bench. Before we disregard skills in favor of other "higher order" thinking we must remember that when Bloom created his taxonomy he did not mean that knowledge is not as important as any other level in his hierarchy.
Sooooo, my point is that teaching skills and measuring them should not be disregarded. Moreover, if we intend to measure any higher order thinking about these things- creativity, interpretation. We must also measure skills- to make sure that skills are not the filter that mediates what we measure. If we do not, what we claim is creativity may just be a proxy to skill level and out of school experiences.
In fact, I would argue that the only way to reliably measure creativity is a dynamic assessment in which students are first provided a meaningful context to work in and provide content knowledge and then their actions with these building blocks are measured.

Art Cognition and Meta Cognition

Monique and I have been thinking about our theoretical foundations as we explore the benefits of arts integration (we are writing a paper really). We came up with two distinct categories linked to learning. The first was cognitive. In this category we included the use of intertwined symbol systems in young children's' writing development as in Anne Dyson's work. The overlap between mental categories are also common to all academic domains e.g. careful observation unites science and visual art. Also the emphasis on motivation, engagement, and emotions as Burger and Winner claim. The work of social constructivists transfers us from the cognitive to higher order thinking and metacognition. Our claim that the process that Vygotsky identified as developmental carries over into mental operations in new domains- that is when we enter a domain we know very little about we have to rely on a semi-developmental progression from concrete to abstract ideas. Here enter Elliot Eisner and his emphasis on the mental operations connected to creativity, appreciation and complex processing. Efland and his focus on Metaphor as a key mental process fits the scheme here too.
I know this is a little heavy for a blog but these are the ideas we're exploring now.