Wonder love

Keeping Time

This post was originally written for the Opal School Blog, but as a personal reflection, it made sense to post it here as well.

My desk these days is filled with calendars, lists, agendas, new files and binders. Somehow attempting to give form to the enthusiasm and the anticipation of all a new school year will bring.Trying to contain it. Organize it.

On Fresh Air last night, Terry Gross interviewed neuroscientist David Eagleman about his book Incognito. "All of our lives — our cognition, our thoughts, our beliefs — all of these are underpinned by these massive lightning storms of [electrical] activity [in our brains,] and yet we don't have any awareness of it," Eagleman says. "What we find is that our brains have colossal things happening in them all the time."

One of the most interesting snippets had to do with the relationship between time and memory. He described research that has been done on thousands of subjects willing to encounter a free fall of 150 feet, backwards into a net. What goes on in their minds while they are falling? Time slows. The brain floods with memories, moments, and the participants consistently marveled over how a second-long fall could feel like minutes.

Waiting for the school year to begin is a free fall of sorts. Memories, experiences, hopes and dreams all causing colossal action in our brains, and how we move to start just the tip of the conscious iceberg. 

But what happens for children? Children experience time like the numbers on a digital clock-- out of context with the winding hands of the analog. How do we support them with a sense of belonging to our adult world that can see the relationships of past to future? How do we develop enough wisdom ourselves to recognize the experience that has framed our cognition, our beliefs, our thoughts -- that the lightning storms firing in our brains are not the same that fire in our children's? How do we learn to value the wisdom in their experience while keeping them safe, keeping them engaged, keeping them on time?

This summer, my family worked with a wonderful specialist named Mary Dee Sklar, who has written a course called, Seeing What I Need To Do. She helped us learn to make abstract concepts of time visible and even tangible so that all of us can see and feel together what it means to move cooperatively through time.

Hours and minutes and days are the blocks we use to build our lives together. Tools such as analog clocks, wall calendars, visual schedules, and timers can become ways that we hold those blocks in our hands to play with our children so that they can learn to build with us and understand how to fit their needs and the needs of the lives of others together with beauty and mastery. In coming weeks, we'll share some of the strategies we are using. And we hope you will share as well the tools and routines you use.

When we pave this pathway of belonging for our children towards the world of adulthood, we alter the patterns of those lightning storms in their brains forever. And we leave a lasting trace on the hours and minutes and days that continue to build the lives of our loved ones long after we are gone.

The Creativity Crisis

Published almost 2 years ago, The Creativity Crisis re-surfaced on Twitter yesterday from @IDEA and I had a re-read. (If you want to listen to the embedded podcast, start at about 12:30 for the interview with Bronson and Merryman.) If anything, reading this article today, the problem feels more urgent.

Here's another article tweeted by @IDEA about the same time yesterday: Building Better Kids. Written a year ago, it shares research that confirms some of what the first article begins with. That is, that things that are happening for human beings before the age of 10 tend to predict quite well how they are doing when they are all grown up. The second article goes on to use this research to argue for increased improvements in early childhood interventions. (Yes, of course, let's do that!) The authors use the compelling research to make the case that nothing can be done to change anyone's lot in life after the age of 3.

But the Creativity article shares another piece of the research which would seem to conflict. They say that the research shows that creativity has been on the decrease since the 90's. Here's the paragraph that explains:

Kyung Hee Kim at the College of William & Mary discovered this in May, after analyzing almost 300,000 Torrance scores of children and adults. Kim found creativity scores had been steadily rising, just like IQ scores, until 1990. Since then, creativity scores have consistently inched downward. “It’s very clear, and the decrease is very significant,” Kim says. It is the scores of younger children in America—from kindergarten through sixth grade—for whom the decline is “most serious.”

It would seem that, despite the research that is so clear that we must do the best we can by children's brains by the time they are 3, that we can't do anything after that can't quite be true, because, clearly, we have been doing something.

Funny, that these articles should both come by my Twitter feed yesterday just after I'd gotten back on the blogs and reset my intentions. Because they perfectly frame the dilemma. There are things we can do that increase creativity, innovation and engagement. The things we have been doing lately though, and only seem hell bent on doing more of, aren't working. They don't work. They take us backwards. Worst of all, they maintain the status quo -- who has and who hasn't -- secured for generations more. One might begin to think that part is by design... hmmm.

And we're so sure that what we know is all there is to do in school that the only thing we can do is build better brains before they get there? Really?

It is true that the creativity of children relies on the creativity of adults. Creativity is enhanced by collaboration. So why not start from the place that says we CAN turn this creativity crisis around and focus on new ideas instead of throwing up our hands over all the old things we've thought of so far? Countries all over the world are doing it. Schools and individuals all over this country are doing it. Let's focus our attention there. For example... click here.

And finally, some words of wisdom from Howard Gardner:

The Creative Mind:

 The Creative Mind is embodied by Einstein in the Sciences and by Virginia Woolf in the Arts. People who are creative are those who come up with new things which eventually get accepted. If an idea or product is too easily accepted, it is not creative; if it is never accepted, it is just a false example. And acceptance can happen quickly or it can take a long time.  

 I believe that you cannot be creative unless you have mastered at least one discipline, art or craft. And cognitive science teaches us that on the average, it takes about ten years to master a craft. So, Mozart was writing great music when he was fifteen and sixteen, but that is because he started when he was four or five. Same story, with the prodigious Picasso. Creativity is always called “thinking outside the box.”  But I order my quintet of minds in the way that I do because you can’t think outside of the box unless you have a box.

 As a psychologist, I thought that creativity was mostly an issue of how good your mental computers were. But my own studies and those of others have convinced me of two other things. First, personality and temperament are at least as important as cognitive powers. People who are judged creative take chances, take risks, are not afraid to fall down, and pick themselves up, they say “what can I learn from this?” and they go on.

 The other day I was giving a talk and the first question asked was “How do we make people creative”? And I answered that “It’s much easier to prevent it than to make it”. You prevent it by saying that there is only one right answer and by punishing the student if she offers the wrong answer. That never fosters creativity.

 Second: People think of creativity as a property of the individual and therefore they say “I am creative”, but that doesn’t work. The only way that creativity can be judged is, if over the long run, the creators works change how other people think and behave. That is the only criterion for creativity. Therefore, the bad news is that you could die without knowing that you are creative, but the good news is that you will never know for sure that you are not creative. 

 

Opal School Blog is Open!

The home page of the Opal School Blog is now open to the public! So that's where I've been for the past few months. I'm going to try and develop these two blogs as reflective of one another -- one personal, one professional -- and both in the collaborative spirit that is the most wonderful opportunity with blogs. In both, my hope is to explore possibilities for relationships between adults and children that recognize the vast resources in each.

What does it mean for adults to be in a productive relationship with children who we know to be competent protagonists of their own lives and learning? What does it mean to "teach" or "nurture" a child who arrives in the world with powerful natural learning strategies that are ready to be put to use? What tools and strategies support such competent children? What do we have to learn from the children themselves?

There is such tremendous untapped potential in what we currently understand about our relationship to children. This limitation impacts the decisions we make from our homes, to our childcare settings, to our children's museums, to our aftercare programs, to our public education policies, to our pediatrician's offices. It is time to push ourselves towards new visions, new possibilities for the choices we make that truly take us beyond our standard assumptions. 

But it is so very hard to take this leap of faith with the ones we love who are children now. How can we take risks with these precious ones we are responsible to care for right now and who only get this one chance for childhood? When we underestimate what children are capable of, we underestimate our own selves. Any new vision for how we want to be together in this world starts with them. 

We need stories and images of new possibilities and productive, encouraging outcomes to support us to try new things. We need to share our successes and our challenges, our questions and our discoveries, our worries and our dreams. We need to share information, too. So let's help each other have the courage to carefully, responsibly, creatively (and with great joy) chart new territory together. That's what Wonder love and Opal School Blog are for. So help us share them, and share with us, and let's get to work-- with curiosity, with forgiveness, with joy!

A peek into Opal School

There is, actually, an official Opal School blog. Someday soon I hope to make it public -- but for now, I have to settle for sharing a post here and there, slurped from that blog over to this one -- just to give you a peek into the incredible work those children and teachers do together. This one is from our classroom of 8 - 10 year olds and their new teacher, Avery Hill. (Her blog is a public one: http://rootedingrowth.blogspot.com/.) It is Avery's first year teaching at Opal School and her first year teaching. She spent last year as Opal's apprentice teacher, studying the ways we work together. And this year she is supported by a part time mentor teacher, an experienced Opal teacher -- later referred to as MG.

In this classroom, as they were getting to know one another this year, some tinkering workshops gave way to some interest in bridges, and the metaphors spilled over as ways to describe and think about the learning community. The concrete bridge images provided tangible, visible, playful opportunities to hold the concept of community. And so what follows makes perfect, if magical, sense. And they are a starting place for the rest that will unfold over the year.

Post by Avery Hill:

Opal 3's work to compose and adopt agreements for our community has continued these past weeks. After brainstorming and refining, the children came to agreement on five ideas to guide the way we will strive to be together this school year. But it felt strange to call them "agreements" after all the discussion about and comparison of our community as a kind of bridge that we are building. How could we envision our agreements in the context of our work with bridges?

The children wrote this letter to our friend, occasional special guest, and founder of Opal School Judy Graves, to tell her about the work we had done:

Dear Judy,

We expect you know about the Opal agreements.  Well, they just took a trip to the trash can and they’re NOT coming back.  So, say goodbye!  We replaced them with guiding pillars… big GINORMOUS guiding pillars. 

Between the time when you last visited us and now, we came up with these guiding pillars.  When we were done with our bridge work with Steve, we started thinking about our community as a bridge.  The pillars are our agreements that guide us.  Our guiding pillars are:

·        Be safe.

·        Respect everyone.

·        Support everyone in our community.

·        Treat materials and surroundings like treasures.

·        Think before acting.

MG had an idea to create the pillars in the classroom.  So on the playground side of the classroom you can see five painted pillars that represent our guiding pillars. 

We’re using our guiding pillars to help us figure out what role we play in our community. 

We want to share this with you and hear the end of your story tomorrow.

Love,

Opal 3

   

  

    

    

    

As we continue working and learning together in the New Year, these pillars will provide constant guidance to our thinking and acting. Certainly, they will inspire questions and continue to spark our thinking about what it means to be a community together this school year.

Wishing everyone a lovely and restful Winter Break - see you in 2012!

 

 

No homework

I was just finishing an article for Opal School's newsletter about the wonder of learning. I looked up from my work to see Max and his dad fully engaged in the collaborative creation of a new comic strip series. Character development. Plot lines. Dialogue. The need to spell Vanquish just right. The illustrations. The incredible detail.

I am so glad Max didn't have any homework tonight. 

The Power of Oops

"I punch-ded Ruby today. It was an accident - ly. But it was an oopsie moment. I had an oopsie moment. Acause in my classroom we don't punch. We had to solve the problem. So I had to sit on the bench and my brain did something magical. I just thought 'there can be two mommies!' It just popped right in my brain. And everything just snapped together."

Stella, 4.1 years

This is the story I got to hear after school today, as Stella and I took a walk to the park. Her teacher had told me a little bit of what had happened and so when I asked Stella about it, this all tumbled out. A proud storyteller, all puffed up with her accomplishment. Beaming.

I had to laugh a little as I tried to imagine or remember how my own old stories of punching my friends in preschool might have gone.  I don't, in fact, have any memories I can trace to preschool. But if the trouble I got into for slugging my little sister is any indication, I think it's safe to say that no one ever helped me to see my actions as "oopsies". Or helped me to understand that my brain had the capacity to "magic" another way.

What a gift to learn to see these mistakes as opportunities. To develop the confidence to know you can think of another way. To learn that you are responsible to do so.

Ellen Galinsky published this article in the Huffington Post today. It was written in response to this article published in the New York Times several days ago. As Galinsky points out, we've got the debate all wrong. We need a new framing of what could be, grounded in possibilities like those that Opal School preschoolers make visible every day. And as adults, we could stand to trust that our brains might have "magical" capacities as well. 

 

Summer Symposium (already)

We're gearing up for Opal School's 11th annual summer symposium and my anxiety is keeping me busy. This year, Lella Gandini will be with us for 3 days along with a group from Ochoa elementary school in Tucson, AZ. It will be a great opportunity to reflect on this journey of creating a Reggio Inspired school from a variety of perspectives. Local guest presenters from Rowanberry School and Mentor Graphics will be with us as well. 

If you haven't signed up yet, the seats are going really fast! Especially this week, I suppose, because the early bird registration discount ends on Friday.

Here's the link for registration.

We're also getting ready to release a few new publications -- one about story workshop that includes a DVD! Keep checking here for updates...

Hope to see you at symposium!

To Scream and To Sing

On the advice of Susan Ohanian, I took a look at this commentary by Stephen Krashen earlier today. He is pointed and convincing, as usual, but I wasn't particularly moved by what he had to say. 

 

And then I read snippets of articles here and there about the President's concerns that too much testing makes kids think school is boring... and so I end up not knowing what to think exactly.

That is, until I read this article, a few hours later, on the advice of my friend Matt Karlsen.

Keepers of the Second Throat by Patricia Smith

You should read it, but I'll give you a sample here:

So, like you and you and you, I’m a storyteller—and so are your children. I’ve realized that we only get one life, and I’ve decided to own mine completely, to celebrate and mourn and lash out and question and believe and argue and explore and love and dismiss and fight on the page, at the front of a classroom, on the stage. No one, no one is authorized to tell that story but you. And if there is shame in that story, you own that shame and you turn it into lesson. If there is darkness in your story, you write toward the light. If there are words you don’t want anyone else to hear, you hold those words close. On the other hand, if there is joy threaded throughout that story, you sing it loud enough to rock the rafters. If there is triumph, and there will always be, in some measure, you pull everyone within the sound of your voice, within shouting distance of the page, into that circle of light.

A teacher standing at the front of a classroom is a little bit of religion. It doesn’t matter if you are in Portland or Philadelphia or Kentucky or Indianapolis, whether you are overpaid or overlooked, whether your students soar thru their AP classes or stumble through single-syllable words, whether your school is five wings or five stories, it doesn’t matter if the buildings are drab and fallen and surrounded by a dying neighborhood or glittering and expansive enough to brag its own zip code, it doesn’t matter whether your students are colored like snow or sand or soil. For every minute you stand before them, you are the beacon, the whole of possibility, the keeper of the second throat. Like it or not, you are often the first chapter in the story they’re writing with their lives. Their parents taught them to speak. Now you must teach them to speak aloud, to keep on speaking, to scream and to sing. (Patricia Smith, Rethinking Schools, Spring 2011)

All that matters is that teachers help children know they have the right to scream and to sing their own stories into this world. In the end that is all that will have mattered.

 

Focus on Strengths

An Excerpt from Two Billion Dollars in Nickels: Reflections on the Entrepreneurial Life, by Paul Orfalea with Dean Zatkowsky (BookSurge: 2008):

Although society’s understanding of dyslexia and ADHD is improving, too many people still equate “difference” with “disability.” Every disability may be a difference, but not every difference is a disability. Children are sometimes branded “learning disabled,” even when it is their schools that actually lack ability. Schools that still treat education as a “one-size-fits-all” endeavor resent individualized instruction, which they consider inefficient. But our growing awareness of learning differences puts more enlightened schools in a difficult position: within the constraints of budgets and teaching skills, how can we best serve students with differences?

What if we reframe the question? What if every student learns in a different way and at a different pace? That’s right: what if everyone has a learning difference? Some may fit more neatly into traditional teaching templates, but does that make others “disabled?”

We hire specialists to identify and label disabilities, but we should be learning to recognize and support hidden abilities. To be successful in school, you must be good at everything, but to be successful in life, you only have to be good at one or two things. I recognize the importance of a well-rounded education, but some people take a roundabout path to get there. For them, school should be a part of the journey paved with small victories, not an impassable mountain of accumulated failures and dismissive labels.

Many of my Kinko’s coworkers attended the Management Action Program. Among other things, the workshop requires attendees to face a stark – and often harsh – appraisal of their professional strengths and weaknesses. But rather than dwell on weaknesses, as most people do, the program teaches attendees how to focus more attention on their strengths. Unless they are dangerous, weaknesses are to be ignored or marginalized.

Instead of obsessing over what a student cannot do, we should help each student make the most of his or her individual strengths, because you don’t make a difference in this world by trying to be the same as everyone else. That’s true in business and in the pursuit of happiness.

Opal School teachers are currently in the process of writing winter reports for each student, preschool - 5th grade. As they always do, these reports will focus on strengths, which is natural, because each child has an abundance of them.

It is true, of course, that each child also has challenges. But, when achievement and learning are the goal, there is simply no advantage to dwelling on them. Because our brains are complex systems, human beings are most successful in environments that build on strengths. Such environments provide inherent support for challenges, and tend to do the work of focused remediation without interrupting the motivation of the learner.

Take a look at Daniel Pink's TED talk about the science of motivation:

  

But I know, I know, parents want to know what their kids are struggling with! They want to know what they can do at home to help them struggle less in school... and in life. And then there's that maybe a little less generous but no less genuine, nagging concern: If everyone's strengths are being celebrated, then how will I know if my kid is the best at anything?

We push all kids to be their best selves by focusing squarely upon the things they are good at and allowing the engagement and motivation gained within that stance to lighten the parts of themselves that might otherwise get awfully heavy to carry. Because, in the end, if everyone is really the best they can be, what a difference it will make in this world-- and to the lives of each person living in it. 

 

Getting Somewhere

Oh, I know it's been a long time.

But I'm inspired tonight to return.

Yesterday, I saw the new documentary Race to Nowhere and, of course, I cried. Tears of sadness for the experiences that we have come to accept as normal for children in school these days. Tears of gratitude for the experiences my own children are having.

 

Sophie is a 13 year old seventh grader who regularly has no homework. For the past week or so, her school has been hosting some kind of Geo-bee-- you know, the spelling bee kind of thing only for geography trivia. And, over the week, I've noticed in her a mild but growing discontent with her own lack of knowledge of these facts. You see, she has been losing. And what's possibly worse, she's been noticing that some other kids have an account in this bank of geography information that are quite a bit more flush than her own.

No homework has meant that she's had time to nurture some deposits in her new account. We've turned an orange into the Earth and a lemon into the sun and talked about hemispheres, poles, direction, the equator, climate and weather. (Oh, and I only had to ask if she was paying attention once!) She's pulled out puzzles and put the United States together. And tonight she poured over The New Comparative World Atlas considering land mass and population, literacy rates and infant mortality. She matched photos in our old DK First Atlas with the maps in the World Atlas, making connections with articles she's read in her New York Times Upfront magazine, and future travel plans.

She knew when she wanted the information, and she knew how to get it.

We got home late tonight, after a long day and violin lesson. We ate dinner together, dreamed a little about a trip to Ashland to see a play, listened to Stella's school story, and Max's, too. And Sophie still had time to play a game, help clean up, and read for an hour before she closed her eyes for a full night's sleep. She'll get up in the morning looking forward to another day at school.

I'm so grateful that we were able to navigate this evening on our own terms. I hope Sophie will find the company of adult friends when she grows up who have had this kind of time as well.

Will she find company that know how to be happy?