Addressing creativity

I had a chance to see Dr. Jose Salgado, who is the principal at Umana Middle School Academy in Boston,  at our annual state wellness conference this past week and came away very impressed with the great strides he and his staff have made in helping disadvantaged students.  Click here for a summary of what’s being done.

I want to focus on one aspect of of the extended day program that he talked about, that of offering a variety of after school activities such as music, visual arts, theater, sports, cooking, hip hop dancing, kickboxing, and tai chi.  The point he made about offering these activities was that these students were never going to get the opportunity to do these types of things otherwise, and that our focus on continuous test result improvement because of No Child Left Behind is driving creativity right out of the classroom.  As a result, kids are stressed out, not having any fun, and are not being given enough physical fitness time during the day.

I love the idea of trying to incorporate this extended day model into Maine schools as many of students also have limited access to the activities listed above.  My question is are we courageous enough to try and do it knowing that funding is tight and will our teachers buy into this type of program?  Can we afford not to do this type of thing??

More questions to ponder

A friend of mine posted these on Facebook and I wanted to share them here as well – very good questions…

1. Why do children learn the fastest and most efficiently from ages birth to 5 years, and everything slows down dramatically when they enter school?

2. For those students who don’t learn best with traditional methods, why do we spend 13 years of their lives using terms like “remedial,” “disabled,” “below grade level,” and “below average” and wonder why they have low self-esteem?

3. By rewarding the students who follow the rules and learn in traditional ways, are we stifling creativity and initiative?

4. Is it right to expect that all students should achieve at grade-level or above in reading, writing, and mathematics, or should we be recognizing intelligence in other areas such as music, art, mechanics, or social ability?

5. Why is it that most self-made millionaires in the United States were not honor-roll students?

6. Conversely, why is it that most honor-roll students do not become independently wealthy?

7. Most teachers with whom I have had the pleasure of working were excellent students themselves. Can they truly understand the needs and frustrations of those students for whom traditional learning does not come naturally or easily?

8. By stressing success in school as it presently exists, are we actually holding our children back from achieving their true potential?

9. Do standardized tests, End of Grade Tests, SAT’s, GRE’s, etc. truly measure how successful the students have been at learning? How successful we have been at teaching? Or are they just a bunch of accumulated facts that we expect students to know, but have little correlation to their success in life?

10. Why is it, if we are not actually “teaching to the test,” that we spend so much time preparing for End of Grade tests, worrying about the results of the tests, retesting, and wasting 3 weeks of instruction time every year to try to get our students to pass?

Innovative ways to get students engaged

I saw this blog entry this morning – good food for thought in using technology to engage students…

http://theinnovativeeducator.blogspot.com/2009/06/ideas-for-enhancing-teaching-and.html

Welcome to our new blog!

Hi Everyone.  John Armentrout (Director of Technology at SAD #16) and I are co-authoring this new blog to generate discussions about creativity and innovation in using technology in Maine classrooms.  John and I were fortunate to attend an Apple sponsored Education Leadership Summit in April 2008 whose focus was on 21st century learning in our schools.  You can find a link to the summit on the right-side of this page, and a link to Sir Ken Robinson’s web site.  Sir Ken was one of the keynote speakers and gave a very powerful talk on creativity in students and how  should be nurturing it (instead of squelching it like we are now).  Here’s a short piece from John’s blog about Sir Ken:

As Sir Ken Robinson articulates: Young people “are not frightened of being wrong.  If you are not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original….  Kids will take a chance.”   It’s these creative chances and the results that will drive the new world beyond our generation.  A world we cannot predict.  The growth of these technologies and their uses are exponential.  Our lack of understanding of the future is therefore also exponential.  The 21st century is here and we as educators need to lead our children into their future.

In light of the current changes that are coming with the new 1-1 initiative, I think now is a great time to take a look at innovation and creativity!