Teaching Creativity Even When You Suck: The First Year Teaching Chronicles

The lovely staff at my school, in our lovely courtyard.

Three months since my last post…surprised?

Ah, first-year teaching. Wonder of wonders.

Never before have I regularly found myself asking things like “has anyone seen the Mongolian dictionary?” and “what is the word for hiccup in Tigrinya?” Or I’ll be shouting “no you may not skateboard in here!” in English first, then pidgin Spanish, then, in desperation, Chinese. The students translate notes about who-likes-who to each other on their cellphones from Burmese to Arabic and back during class. Read: monstrously complex EL extravaganza/debacle/pain-to-end-all-(beautiful) pain.

Yes, I suffer from first-year-teacher suckage. How can I teach creativity to these kids if I haven’t even figured out comprehensibility of directions?

I guess I just wanted to share with any other first year teachers feeling the suckage out there that despite all of the challenges, you are still in a fantastic place to teach kids what being creative looks like. Unless you walk on water, you are most likely an ever-present model of living, breathless, painfully wrought creativity in your classroom. With the spitballs flying and the bells clanging in your ears, creative perseverance is the thing keeping you in the classroom, the thing that is somehow making you get better at this even though you may not realize it yet.

Model your struggles openly, the kids are watching.

My students can tell that I’m new, anyway. They could tell that my classroom management plan was not completely classroom-management worthy the first day I walked in. They could tell that I still hadn’t figured out all of the important Spanish cuss words, that I
often talked too fast for them to understand, and that I hadn’t noticed that they would need to be assessed for even the most basic speaking activities if we were going do anything other than talk about FC Barcelona’s soccer match the night before. I was so nervous that I would drop things constantly – dry erase markers, pens, sheets of paper. I looked like a one-legged wind up doll, wheeling about in wayward directions with my arms chopping up and down through the air.

But every week, whether or not I realize it, I’m learning something new that my students get to see. I realized they needed visual classroom management cues because language was a barrier to verbal comprehension, so I designed a system based on images. I realized that I could teach vocabulary or the schema behind something like persuasion by playing a movie clip that has minimal language in it and then asking students to observe.

I’ve tried to make the process as transparent as possible. Some days I’ll walk in and say something like “Hey, this lesson is about teaching you why writing paragraphs matters…and it’s experimental. You’re going to be persuading me to give you an A+. Let’s see if we learn, you tell me at the end of the day if it worked.”

Now I can’t say I’ve assessed this for validity and that sixteen different teachers say it is a sound method of instruction, obviously not. But I do think that it would be a boon to first year teachers everywhere to try to use how green they are to some kind of advantage in the cultural community of their classroom.

Show students what creativity means. It means coming back to teach after that period where they all started dancing on the tables instead of taking a test, it means coming up with a new scheme to have socratic seminars with newly arrived Ethiopian students that may or (most likely) may not work but is nonetheless valuable.

In time, as students, maybe they will follow the lead, and do the same.

Finding Creativity in “No English”: The Trials of a First Year Teacher with Immigrants and Refugees

Students at our school, working on a garden project. Our school rocks!

Since finding out that I would be teaching 9th grade English at a school exclusively for recent immigrants, many of whom are refugees from places like Burma and Congo, I’ve been struggling to figure out how I can keep talking about teaching creativity in the context of this blog. On the first day of school yesterday, after all, many of my students needed a buddy to translate “who do you live with here in the US?” One lovely young woman in a full Burka had her mother come in and tell me it was the girl’s first day of school in her life, and that she had been told to be a “strong, smart woman.” While yesterday the girl and I managed to laugh quite a lot together for two people who don’t understand each other, I was teaching her the words mother, father, brother, and sister. We cover Romeo and Juliet in the spring.

Despite the challenges, I think the fact that these students are learning a language and coming to a new country is a potential wellspring for creative thinking and teaching. Here’s three reasons why.

Reason One – 40+ languages in one school is a boon for perspective-taking: There is something very special about a tough looking Guatemalan kid coming up to me and shouting “Miss! I speak Arabic! Salaam!” Students in a school with this level of multiculturalism are constantly bombarded with each others’ differences. I hope to play off of this as a way to help increase student creativity as we go along. One early example was in creative language use. Burmese doesn’t have adjectives! Students were stunned. They began to realize that language is not always following the same rules.

Reason Two – Students facing a new language and country have all the more reason to collaborate: Students learning English have one major thing in common…they are learning English! It forces students to come together and work as a whole. In the last two weeks, we have set up a norm of having classroom helpers, students who finish their work and know to immediately go help students who don’t have the language skills yet to understand the content of class. Sometimes I look up and there is a whole table of tenth graders huddled over a group of ninth graders explaining sequence words in six different languages using makeshift flashcards. This leads to creativity, as students are trying to be teachers themselves and are also learning to work together to solve the problem of understanding school.

Reason Three – The inevitable struggles with culture and language are full of opportunities to help students deal with the possibility of failure: Language is a place where it is easy to fail at school. Grammar, pronunciation, the works. Perhaps more so than for “mainstream,” non-EL students, these students must learn to work with the feeling of failure related to language. There are so many potential ways to help students use that failure to propel them to take risks.

I’m so excited about working at an EL school. I’ll be sharing a ton more as time goes on.

Creativity and Students with Special Needs: Phil Hansen’s Story

An old classmate from high school sent me this talk about a man who learned to use his special needs to his advantage in art. The man has a physical disability which keeps him from drawing straight lines, and he learned to use his strengths to create art that is innovative and unique despite his “shortcomings.” Check it out:

Phil Hansen on His Art

I think this speaks mountains as to how we must stop pathologizing “otherness.” If we could find student strengths beyond the things that challenge them, whether its a physical disability or dyslexia, and learn to help students embrace and cultivate what they are good at, the current system of treating students with “special needs” as pariahs would be well on its way to ending. If we could reach beyond to teach students to turn whatever difficulty they face into an interesting and different creative force, as Phil Hansen does, the world would be a much more accepting and creative place.

What are some ways students with special needs can be encouraged in a classroom that encourages creativity?

Here’s one way, more to come: Develop a variety of activities for your classroom that showcase multiple abilities. If a student gets the chance to shine during a drawing-related or musical assignment, it will be more likely that they will feel confident that even if they are not strong in traditional academic subjects they still have some strength. Find out what students are good at and design curriculum to encourage it.

We are Our Own Narrative Story: Bronwyn Lamay on Making School Personal

What does it take to get reticent students actively engaged in personally relating to learning, and how is activating personal reflection inherently tied to the creative mind?

If anyone in my world knows, its Bronwyn Lamay, veteran educator and passionate proponent of seeing teaching as inseparable from social work. As a teacher, she has had a stellar record of success, demonstrated by the authentic quality of her students’ writing, by the testimonials from students who have been fundamentally moved by the experience of learning from her, and her students’ standardized test scores.

Ms. Lamay, center, chilling on a roof top with some of her students                                                  (the kid in front rocks my world)

I had the good fortune to sit down with Bronwyn and pick her brain about how she builds truly authentic relationships to get even the most anti-doing-school students in her class engaged in literature and history, and how it ties to creativity. Here is what Bronwyn had to say:

The World and the Word are Interrelated Concepts: One of the first things Bronwyn taught me about reading, via education thinker Paolo Friere, is that the word and the world are not separate. The entire state of existence is a gigantic interwoven text that we spend our entire lives reading, making sense of. Our memories are the back chapters, constantly being revised, and today we are working on the first draft of a new page. The consequence of thinking in terms of the word-world as a teacher is that the act of reading a book is suddenly just one integral part of the overall experience of life, an experience that can be deeply related to a more general understanding of who we are and what our lives mean. Bronwyn stresses to her students that reading is not an isolated academic skill that you need to learn how to do with tricks and strategies, but an integral part in understanding your own life. By extension, literature becomes not just a gatekeeper to school but a vital means for each student to search for their own identity.

We are Our Own Story: As a literature teacher, from the beginning of the year Bronwyn strives to impress upon her students that they, too, are a type of story, with narrative structures and underlying themes. Only by helping students understand how narrative structures guide their lives, the underlying stories of who they are, how they build relationships, and how they behave, does Bronwyn believe she can truly help students engage authentically in more “academic” work. In doing so, in a way she retools English education in the framework of social work, helping students move on and grow in their lives.

How does this connect to creativity? 

Empathy is often a buzzword associated with creativity – if we can understand the plight of others we can diversify our worldly understanding and increase our divergent thinking. But what about self-empathy, or self-understanding? We often assume that we understand ourselves well enough when we talk about building student empathy, but I wonder…is the other-focus enough?

If students learn to connect the story of their own lives to texts of all kinds, seeing themselves in historical scenarios, literary figures, narrative themes, motifs, etc, hasn’t their capacity to make novel, creative connections between different things drastically increased? Curricula on this to come.

Big Experiments: The Sublime One-ness of Improv, Design, and Teaching

If we are going to build a pedagogy of creativity, one place to start is in identifying the ways diverse creative pursuits are ultimately grounded in similar principles so that they can all be integrated into one place. In my experience, I have learned that teaching, improvising, and design thinking are secretly made up of the same ingredients.

Here’s how I got there:

It started with improv. As a beginning improv student at Improv Boston, I can still remember the first fidgety moment getting up for a scene when I smiled and thought “I’m tired of trying to be clever! Who cares! Whatever comes out comes out!” The next thing I knew I was comfortably pretending to be a woman with a thick Russian accent named Mistress Pain, and I have never looked back. It might sound counterintuitive, but in improv it’s actually important to try not to be funny, to embrace being completely uninteresting, so that you are open to taking risks and trying wild ideas. Over the years, my initial spark of embracing improvisational playfulness evolved into learning how to give and take on stage, to celebrate group togetherness, and to fail forward with a laugh and “Ewoks on roller skates?!” In improv, the theater is just a creative laboratory, and scenes, as my friend Tom once described it, are toilet paper.

The longer I teach, the more I realize my educational practice is guided by the same philosophies I discovered as an improviser, and that educating teachers as improvisers can have a strong impact on empowering creative teachers.

Philosophy one: it is all one big experiment.

Perfect teaching is a complete impossibility, so you have to open up to vulnerability to grow into an excellent educator who inspires kids. Laugh off the tough scenarios, see lessons that didn’t go as well as first drafts, and continually try wild new strategies that broaden your realm of possibility and invigorate your love of the job. That’s why I’ve been dreaming up and incorporating design thinking activities into my History classroom as has never been done before, trying to find effective ways to help my students empathize, discover creativity, hone group work skills, and learn history at the same time (worry not, I’ll be sharing my curricula in later posts).

Philosophy two: make your partner look amazing. See from their perspective.

In teaching, what would be my scene partners in improv are my students: the core purpose of my job is to examine deeply what they need to grow into curious and dedicated adults and figure out how to make it happen. Each lesson has a larger objective, and each piece of feedback I get on what works in a lesson adds more nuance for the next time.

This is where design thinking comes in. Why don’t I just call my students users, my lesson plans ideations, and their daily execution prototype testing? After each iteration I present to my users as a  teacher-designer, I go back to the drawing board and reiterate based on my users’ reactions so that when it next reaches the prototype testing phase it will be that much closer to meeting my students’ needs.

…So you see! Teaching, improv, and design really are the same thing when you think about it.

If we can find the connections between seemingly divergent modes of creative thinking, our curriculum will benefit from a toolbox of strategies instead of just one mode of creativity education, resonating and building off of one another instead of existing in isolation.

 

First Week of Class Edition: An Activity to Bring Improv to School

It might seem like the middle of summer vacation, but for many teachers the first week of school is swiftly approaching. That means that now is the time to start thinking about how those vital first few days of instruction will be designed to set the tone for your class, solidify expectations, and introduce major mindsets that students will need to succeed in your course. In other words, it is the perfect time to introduce some of the building block mindsets of creativity, including an openness to risk and failure, empathy, and an ability to put together diverse strands of thought into interesting new combinations.

Awesome Possum, my favorite improv family!

If you are searching for an answer for how to teach these mindsets up front while also encouraging community, energy, and interpersonal interactions in your class…search no more! The answer is quite simple: start off by teaching improv exercises.

If you are reading this post, it is a toss up as to whether you are entirely new to the discipline, or are already familiar with performing yourself. If you have done improv before, you know that the act of getting on stage involves enormous quantities of chutzpah, and that once you are up there you must take huge risks as you allow yourself to make up a scene with a partner off the top of your collective heads. Accepting failure is the first step. As improv educator Keith Johnstone, author of the seminal book Impro, explained once to a group of improv students, “The first thing is to learn how to fail and be happy, and then we can teach you this stuff.”

“This stuff,” the building blocks of improv, includes everything from accepting offers and being non-judgemental of yourself to allowing new and novel ideas to bubble up to the surface without actually trying to be interesting, learning how to be slightly surprising without losing control of a scene.  ”The creative process is the product that you’re watching” in improv explained Mick Napier, one of the founders of Chicago’s Annoyance Theater, in a fantastic talk for Chicago Ideas Week before a demonstration of scenes. If you are not already familiar with the cognitive and interpersonal processes that go into an improv scene and would like a whirlwind tour of the machinery, this video of Mick’s talk is amazing:

Odds are, your students are not studying to be performers. With that in mind, how can you use improv within a classroom to at least open students up to the creative process?

Without further ado, here is one basic improv activity that you could use to begin the process of setting norms related to failure. This activity would take no more than 15 to 20 minutes. I’d love to hear how it goes in your class!

Anti-Competitive Beach Ball: An Improv Game to Reframe Failure

This was the initial activity I learned at a level one class, and I think it does a good job of sending a message that “failure” is something to laugh at without asking students to be openly theatrical (I know asking students to be dramatic very early on may shut some students down unless they are warmed up).

The game is very simple. With the class standing in a circle, students will be lightly passing a large beach ball through the air. The object of the game is to have the students pass the ball as many times as possible. The ball cannot touch the ground, and a person can only touch it once before another person touches it. With each pass of the ball, the whole class shouts how many times the ball has successfully transfered from one student to another.

Sound boring? Here’s the interesting bit: If the ball ever drops, students are absolutely forbidden from expressing a negative reaction. Instead, everyone has to break out into a huge belly laugh whenever the ball falls. At first, this feels really odd, with your emotions veering one way and your laughter yanking back at you. Over time, I have noticed that more students seem to genuinely laugh as the ball drops, accepting the failure as they continue. One of the students in my BATS class who worked for Facebook, admitted to having played volleyball in college, and started off the activity clearly unhappy when we dropped the ball, was smiling and just a little bit less vexed towards the end.

At the end of the activity, you can explain to students that failure can be turned into a positive in many situations in life, even more grave ones than the dropping of a beach ball.

How did it go? I’d love your feedback.

I will be introducing more games as the posts go on, so stay tuned!

Chilling at the Epicenter (or…how I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Creative Engineers)

This last Tuesday, I had the pleasure to sit down with Matt Harvey of Epicenter, a new initiative to integrate creativity and innovation into first-year undergraduate engineering education at universities across the United States.  As a completely unabashed neophyte in the world of engineering, or anything else that smacks of hard sciences at the university level for that matter, I came in really interested to figure out why first-year engineers were being singled out for a creative jolt.

And so, without further ado…

Reason One to Love Creative Engineers: 

Engineering, after all, is much more than hard calculations. As Humboldt State Environmental Engineer Lonny Grafman shared about how engineering is a fundamentally innovative practice in an interview with Epicenter, “Hard math and hard sciences…those are the tools we [engineers] use, much like writing isn’t about grammar. You just need those tools to actually write.” From my angle as a humanities teacher, I know that research has shown that grammar taught in isolation is not effective, so why are we educating engineers with isolated problem sets when they could be working on real world projects that demand creative, outside-the-box thinking (the engineer’s equivalent of a writing piece)?

 

Reason Two to Love Creative Engineers: Because of the nature of their future jobs, engineers are uniquely suited to hugely benefit society at large if they develop creative and entrepreneurial mindsets. By entrepreneurial, I don’t entirely mean what you are probably thinking. One distinction Matt made as he was explaining the potential of engineers was between the definition of entrepreneurial in the modern cultural climate of Silicon Valley and in the Oxford English Dictionary: while we often associate the word with starting companies, it is actually a much broader term that can encompass any venture that is dynamic, adaptive, risky, and forward-thinking. Even if an engineer is not out living the start-up dream, there is incredible potential for catalyzing innovation wherever they go, whether its a major corporation or small band of outsiders living on Ramen in an airstream trailer.

As natural problem solvers, educating first year engineers, who are just starting their journey, to go beyond calculations and embrace their creative sides may well be the best bang for the buck in higher education. When engineers go on to the work world, in either entrepreneurial positions or in big behemoths, Epicenter believes that engineers are in a unique position, as the people who are actually tinkering with designs, to enact true and lasting innovation wherever they go.

Reason Three to Love Creative Engineers:  They are people, and the world can always benefit from more creative people, eh? Matt described people who can combine their expertise with creativity “T-shaped individuals,” basically people who look like this: 

Not only are T-shaped individuals dynamic in the work world, Matt argued, they are also more resilient and entrepreneurial in their own lives. With know how and divergent thinking, these engineers (and people) won’t freak out when they lose their jobs but catalyze their failure into a new, perhaps undiscovered, direction. In a sense, Epicenter is aiming to transform not just engineers but the people who become engineers, to build creativity into to the profession, as Matt put it, not just to improve economic metrics but also societal metrics.

I’m really excited to see what they do to make this a reality!

If you’d like to learn more about Epicenter, check them out. Here is a great video about Epicenter’s mission on their website:

Epicenter’s Mission