Student Reflections on Dance Integration

Quick post to let you know I’ve tried my first YouTube upload, and here are the results. This video is large (35+ Mb) and there is an even larger one available if you want high-def, but you’ll need a fast connection.

The purpose of the slideshow is to illuminate the inner world of children as they participate in some of the endangered arts experiences that the Factory Education propagandists call “fluff.”

Please check it out if you can, and comment / discussion is, as ever, encouraged.

2011 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog. I shared last year’s report, so I thought I’d do likewise with this one. Note: I’m writing a post now that is a follow-up to the Multiple Intelligences and Dance essay I posted early on. There’s a lot going on in brain research, and there’s action research besides. More soon!

Here’s an excerpt:

Madison Square Garden can seat 20,000 people for a concert. This blog was viewed about 66,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Madison Square Garden, it would take about 3 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Many thanks to everyone who’s read this blog, even once!

Randy

Five Myths about Arts Integration

1. The arts are a messy, chaotic distraction from learning.

The common image of the artist is that of a fuzzy-thinking, disheveled, undisciplined “creative type.” Teachers assume that there is no structure or form to the arts, and that artistic creation depends on talent and inspiration.

Yet artists, especially performing artists like dancers, have to be extremely self-disciplined in order to practice their craft. Each art has its own forms, structures that create order out of chaos, and learning to stay within the forms is part of learning any art.

Harvard’s Project Zero researchers have identified eight Studio Habits of Mind that the arts help students develop. Check them out here: http://pzweb.harvard.edu/research/StudioThink/StudioThinkEight.htm

Creating in an art form also stimulates the natural curiosity of learners. By attempting to fit science ideas into choreography, or write poetry about history, or paint a mathematical idea, children delve deeper into both subjects.

The new common core standards that are sweeping the nation expand the definition of literacy to mean “critical and creative thinking.” Children who participate in arts integration experiences are developing vital thinking skills we will need to solve 21st century problems. What could be more relevant?

2. Arts integration takes too much time.

It is true that planning an arts-integrated unit of study is time-consuming — but so is planning a “traditional” unit, unless the teacher is simply following the publisher’s guide verbatim.

Creating an environment with conditions that are ideal for learning is the teacher’s job. If the planning time spent results in vastly deeper and more-lasting learning for the students, is that “too much time?”

Consider also the synergistic effect of arts integration strategies. One plus one, as my friend and colleague Sean Layne has said, is more than two.

The nature of creative thinking is to be divergent and holistic. In pursuing the best way to demonstrate in movement the processes that create metamorphic rock, we also venture into history, mathematics, geography, visual art, and even poetry.

The cumulative effect of trying to distill our learning into artistic form dwarfs the results of teaching to the test when it comes to lifelong learning skills and enduring understanding.

3. Creativity is impossible to teach or assess.

Another result of systematically eliminating public art instruction has been to completely obfuscate the creative process for most people. Creativity, contrary to popular belief, is not something you either have or don’t have. Everyone is born creative — it’s our human birthright, both blessing and curse. It takes school to train creativity out of most of us.

Graphic courtesy of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts

It turns out that there are common traits of “creative” people, and those traits are teachable. The old inspiration / perspiration saying is quite true: very little of the creative process involves being struck over the head by some Muse or another. Most of it is thoughtful, purposeful, intelligent, and persistent pursuit of the best way to realize that inspired idea in a form that speaks to others.

Becoming familiar with the ebb and flow of the different parts of the creative process will help teachers get comfortable with letting their students’ imaginations loose. When it comes to assessment, the job is easier than it looks at first.

Since there are clear expectations and rules for all the arts, we can use those expectations as the basis for assessing the products. Most often, a rubric is the tool of choice, since it allows room for judgement but is clear and quantifiable enough to result in a “grade.”

With a rubric, teachers and students together look at the expectations. Was the dance designed according to the rules and using the elements of the art form? Did the dance communicate a linked idea clearly and correctly? Did the performers show focus and concentration? Click here for a sample:  STIM Rubric.

Students then evaluate their dance constructions according to a multiple-point rubric, and teachers do likewise. Then, and this is crucial, students return to their creations and revise them, comparing the results with their first draft by using the same rubric. The goal is to move up the rubric, towards mastery.

These assessments become part of the student’s portfolio, along with a video recording of the dance. They provide clear evidence of learning and growth.

4. Teachers do not know enough about the arts to integrate them.

The truth in this myth is that very few teachers receive even rudimentary basic training in the arts, though that is changing in many schools of education now. That means that it is up to teachers themselves to seek out artistic experiences and professional development in the arts. Without a doubt, the more classroom teachers know about the arts, the easier and more effective their planning will become.

Trying it Out

However, every single teacher who is competent to lead a classroom is also able to lead authentic arts integration experiences. It starts with “baby steps,” such as skill-building to help students lay a foundation for further learning and creativity. In dance, that might be something like the kinesphere activity, which helps students visualize and experience their own personal space without interfering with others’.

Those beginning steps lead to confidence in both teacher and students, and they assume co-learner roles as they go deeper into how dance might help them in their other studies. Once teachers see that their students can help them design and facilitate these lessons, the whole process becomes one of discovery and invention, rather than something scary and chaotic.

5. The arts are not for every child.

There is a persistent belief that some children have artistic “talent,” and others do not. There is another, related belief, that arts experiences are for those who can afford them. The centuries of European influence on art were not kind to those not born to nobility or money. They left the impression that, to enjoy art, you must wear evening clothes and eat caviar. For the masses, there are ruder entertainments.

Yet there is not one child on the face of this earth who would not benefit in head, heart, and health from an artistic education. There is no one who cannot create something of beauty and value if they are given the opportunity.

For every child whose creative voice we silence, we deprive the world of what could have been, if not a world-class leader or thinker, at the very least a happy and well-adjusted citizen.

Everyone has the power to create and to imagine. It’s time to honor that in our schools.

Revolution, Not Reform

A recent education blog post pointed out that teachers who survive their first two years in the profession mostly still leave teaching by their fifth year.  The author, Debra Vladero, notes that these teachers grow in effectiveness, as measured by various criteria including student test scores, for their first three years, then level off. Their performance actually declines in their final year of teaching, as if they are giving up before they actually quit. And teachers who start later in the school year are less effective than those hired before it begins.

I have been pondering this information, and thinking about its relationship to Daniel Pink’s book, “Drive.” Then I heard a song by Jeffrey Lewis and all the parts began to come together.

The song is Time Trades, and the gist is that we don’t get our life’s satisfaction from working for money or for other people’s satisfaction. Lewis suggests that, in addition to whatever we do to survive economically, we also need to “try something you can get smarter at, something you might just be a starter at. It could be poetry, it could be chemistry, it could be trying to make a new happy family.”

The point is that we get deep satisfaction from deep learning – lifelong learning. So, you trade time for mastery. As Lewis puts it, then “when you get old you blow some whippersnapper’s mind.”

Autonomy, Mastery, Purpose

This hits directly at the same point Pink makes about our three, overarching psychological needs: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. The movement for school “accountability,” as put into practice through laws like “No Child Left Behind,” has removed all three of these from the grasp of teachers. Is it any wonder that good teachers are leaving in droves?

Our model of education does not treat learning as a dynamic, lifelong pursuit. The politicians and bureaucrats who operate the factory system of public education treat learning as a fixed-outcome, limited-time-only necessity before people can get on with the business of being good, cheap labor.

This means that, just like educator Edward Cubberly suggested in the early 20th century, teachers should be considered workers who are turning raw materials (children) into finished products (workforce-ready laborers). Just like in factories, you offer bonuses to the more “productive” workers and punishments and layoffs go to the laggards.
In a factory, there is no chance to master anything more than a simple, repetitive task that offers no challenge to an adult mind. No one pursues additional classes in hole-punching or screw-driving. Any challenges for the intellect and the whole person are left for “leisure” time; hence the idea of “hobbies,” which grew up to help 9-to-5-ers keep from going insane from the mind-crunching monotony at work.

So, in our system, we don’t treat teachers like respected professionals. We treat them like replaceable components. We grind them up and spit them out by denying them access to any of the three human needs that motivate us.

Look at autonomy. It doesn’t exist for many teachers. They are shoehorned into overcrowded classrooms. Then they have to deliver literally scripted curriculum in which every teacher in that grade level must be at the same point in the same lesson at the same time on the same day. These scripts are written by private companies and purchased with taxpayer dollars. These same companies then develop and sell the standardized tests that schools are to use to evaluate student learning as well as teacher “effectiveness.”

The move to a national set of “common core standards” is yet another way these companies are working to swallow the bulk of public education funding in the name of “reform.” Fewer and fewer local choices in what and how to teach will mean a further dumbing down of our population while swelling the coffers of the biggest publishers. Don’t forget how laws are made, in that old saying about gold and rules.

Not only does the system reject and thwart teacher autonomy, this same straitjacket approach removes any opportunity for teachers to develop true mastery. It takes very little skill to read from a prepared script every day and to follow a carefully-prescribed set of steps to someone else’s goals and objectives. By making teaching a factory-like job that extends without variation into a gray, bleak future, we all but put up a big “KEEP AWAY” sign for our best and brightest.

Last on the hit parade is purpose. If a teacher’s purpose is to train parrots, and if the measure of that teacher’s success is how many parrots learned 100 percent of their lines — well, I don’t see that as motivating too many gifted individuals to the profession.

Add now the disrespect for teachers that political candidates have stirred up, the constant demands for “pay for performance” (a proven counterproductive strategy), and the increasing requirements that teachers pursue advanced degrees and national board certification at their own expense. It’s a wonder that anyone studies to become a teacher any more. So many other jobs are lots more fun, and many of them pay better in the bargain.

All of which begs the question: Who will be the ones left teaching when nearly all passionate and skilled professionals have fled this prescribed and punitive environment?

No More “Reform” — Please!

Wave after wave of “reform” has swept American public education since the mid-20th century. I can personally remember things like New Math, Phonics, and Whole Language taking over the curriculum for a while, then fading into the background.

Lately, “reform” has taken on a new, more political meaning. American corporations, seeing the huge gobs of money spent on public education in the US every year, determined to take as much of that money as possible. They set their legislative minions to work crafting a law that would create the illusion of accountability while actually breaking the back of public education.

The goal: eventual privatization, meaning profits, of the “broken” system. And in the meantime, sell as many new productis (textbooks, materials, tests, remedial systems, etc.) as possible to lock up the marketplace for the big boys. (My thinking here is not sexist; the system is.)

So now “reform” was driven by one measure alone: test scores. Everything done to improve public education would be focused on driving test scores higher. And because we are a simple-minded folk, we would only pay attention to reading and math. And maybe science later on. Things like geography, art, history, dance, literature, music, philosophy, theater — who needs ‘em? They just muddy up the waters. People can’t pay attention to all that.

It was brilliant, really. Define success in stark and simple terms, and then make success impossible. In the end, ride in to the rescue on a wave of free market rhetoric and rake in all the bucks. Run education like a business, goes the refrain.

The strategy is working like a Swiss-made timepiece. Around 50 percent of American public schools are now labeled as “failing” under No Child Left Behind. As the standard moves toward 100 percent proficiency, that number will only go up. Hand-wringing and teacher-bashing dominates the conversation. Profiteers are poised to pounce.

Like a Business? Really?

Doesn’t it sound great when politicians promise to run some governmental function “like a business?” Sounds all down-to-earth and hard-nosed and unsentimental. Harrumph.

But do we really want that? I mean, businesses go out of business all the time. Wouldn’t that be a bad thing for an essential service? And since the purpose of business is to make a profit for the owners or investors, wouldn’t that lower the quality of the service? If the company could make a better profit by squeezing more kids into the classrooms and firing more teachers, they would not think for long before pulling that switch.

If the business was better off as a result, would you mind your children doing without textbooks, or computers, or desks for that matter? If profit’s the goal, why put students together in “schools” at all? Why not have all teaching delivered to the student’s portable device, wherever they are?All for only a few hundred dollars a month subscription fee. Per child of course.

It has never been possible to just pour knowledge into children and have them magically transform into thoughtful adult members of society. That is a fable we have told ourselves. And it has never been possible to create a cadre of workers who can reliably teach every child to pass every question on every test invented by people who probably couldn’t pass the tests themselves.

The Arts Should Be First

What the arts offer us is not just an elegant, memorable, and powerful way to communicate our understanding of the universe around us. Though that should be enough right there, don’t you think?

The arts offer us a way of thinking that is completely aligned with our need to solve difficult global and local problems of all types. Thinking as an artist means being able to think creatively and in new ways about complex or stubborn challenges, and finding enduring ways to express those solutions. It means being persistent, able to look at situations from a variety of perspectives, and willing to find the humor in a tough spot. It means being empathetic yet playful, organized but willing to yield to inspiration, and always remaining open to new possibilities.

If we were to train all children as artists, then everyone would bring that set of skills to every profession. (Can you imagine how much more intelligent debates in Congress would be?)

Revolution, Not Reform

There is no way to save this system by re-forming it. The parts of it that don’t work have been shored up and entrenched and buttressed, while the parts that used to work a little have been dismantled or allowed to crumble away. We need revolution.

• We need to re-use the factories we used to call schools in some appropriate, business-oriented way. Let them be incubators for new small businesses, whatever.

• We need to find places for our new schools that are in the hearts of communities, visible to all, and part of the world around them.

• We need to be sure those new schools have places for learning in all modalities, places for celebration, and places for interaction with experts and learners from everywhere in the world.

• We need to expect more of teachers, to demand that they be dynamic, creative, and inspiring lifelong learners that children will want to be like.

• And, most of all, we need to restore the foundational place of the arts in the learning process, for they embody everything we know about speaking to one another of the complexity and wonder of the universe.

Making Time for Arts Integration

At a recent dance and science integration workshop that I led in mid-Ohio, a participating teacher raised the sixty-four-dollar question that teachers always have when dipping into these waters: How are we going to have time to do this?

With the intense focus on teaching to the standardized test in every classroom, from preschool on up through high school, and with all the other roles that teachers must play in the classroom, how can they possibly add being an artist to the list?

I have a small answer to that, and a big one as well. Let’s start small.

A philosopher might respond that none of us ever “has” time, but that we exist (and disappear) in time, very much like dances do. But that isn’t the real question. It’s what we do with the time we have.

Teachers have been bearing the brunt of the blunt-force trauma inflicted by politicians’ general aversion to deep and searching thought and their preference for easy answers. Merit pay for “good” teachers and re-assignment or layoff for “bad” teachers, all based on how students do on those very few days a year when they are actually tested for how much retrievable information has been stuffed into them.

So it’s no wonder that teachers begin to feel as if they have no choices left, least of all in how they spend their instructional and planning time. Some districts even have scripted, timed curriculum that teachers must deliver like parrots to a dulled and uncomprehending audience of formerly curious children.

Thanks to: http://sammygpp.blogspot.com/2010_07_01_archive.html

This is a clash of ideas that are by no means equal. The lesser idea, that of creating a system that produces learners of nothing more than knowledge, is the one that politicians are pushing. “Accountability” is a code word for measuring teacher effectiveness with an instrument that does not work and then punishing or rewarding people based on those flawed assessments.

The results of this “reform” initiative? Disaffection, plummeting morale, high turnover, student resistance, widespread cheating, and a pervading sense of failure. Setting impossible standards to achieve, in something that is ultimately not very important, is a horrible way to run an educational system.

A small answer to the question, then, “How are we going to find time?”: You stop doing some of the things that are not helping your students, and you use that time to move into an approach to teaching and learning that you know will be effective.

Stephen Covey says that there are four time quadrants:

1. Urgent And Important – these tasks you need to do right away.
2. Not Urgent But Important – these you must make time for, but not necessarily at the moment.
3. Urgent But Not Important – these are tasks that other people think are urgent and want you to do right away, but are low on your list of priorities.
4. Not Urgent And Not Important – also known as time-wasting. And by the way, these do not include Important things like wool-gathering, creative play, and satisfying hobbies or interests. Those go under Quadrant 2.

Not all meetings are Quadrant 1, by the way. That is only for your high priorities. Many meetings are Quadrant 3.

In general, Covey says, we want to concentrate our choices on the first two quadrants, knowing that some Quadrant 3 tasks are unavoidable if we want to work and live with others.

As guerrilla educators of a sort, teachers who want to engage their students in the processes of discovery and creation that arts integration brings must jettison something from their already-over-full daily schedules. I would suggest that many things district and school administrators demand from teachers fall within Quadrant 3: they want them done not only right now but yesterday, yet way too often they are things that are only related to classroom instruction by interfering with it.

In other words, teachers, Just Say No to Stupid Instructions.

Make the time in your planning day and your instructional day to help students uncover the universe, instead of “covering” curriculum by drill and by rote. My money is on the children. They will do just fine when testing rolls around, if they truly understand the world through the hands-on experience and meaning-making that comes from creative play.

Sound like a “big” answer instead of a small one? I’m thinking here that it’s small acts of civil disobedience that will add up to a huge wave of transformation. It doesn’t require a Herculean effort of will to take little steps toward a far-off goal. But it does take a sense of self-efficacy and a willingness to stick one’s neck out a bit. Personally, I’d rather go down fighting than to be worn into some sort of teaching Willy Loman. Every day is a series of choices, unless you trick yourself into thinking like a sheep.

By “big,” though, I mean that beginning to think like an artist actually opens up time like a flower. The teacher who begins to trust her or his own innate creativity, and that of the other learners in the room, also begins to bring life back into balance. Our American culture has narrowed our thinking down so much that we see everything in terms of competition, of win and loss. We have forgotten that we are part of an interdependent ecosystem that operates by laws we ignore at our literal peril.

The teacher who is willing to enter the world of arts integration with students is a teacher who finds that time is malleable. We learn that the shared joy of making meaning in the classroom is a way to begin reconnecting us with our birthrights of play, discovery, invention, and community. As students begin to construct their own unique and exciting understandings of the universe, they also build their own strong and unique characters, and grow to appreciate the the diverse strengths of others.

Creating dances as meaningful play.

There are those in places of power and authority who do not want our children to know too much. They want to keep all of us ignorant, distracted and hopeless, so we don’t threaten their rapacious ways. But the rest of us, I believe, are strong enough to reverse the tide and find ways bring the secrets of happiness — purpose, autonomy, and mastery — back into the light for all who will come after. We can make the time. And that’s a truly big idea.

Poorly Educated – And Now We Pay

A modest proposition: We can trace the entire, swelling crisis of leadership and governance in the United States to the systematic removal of the arts, and artistic thinking processes, from mainstream education.

By the way, you don’t get consistently poor leadership in a democracy unless you have a poorly educated citizenry as well. That’s how those guys got to the halls of power in the first place. But since the people in the spotlight mirror those who put them there, let’s focus on them for a while.

Unfortunately, they DO represent us --- all too well.

Think about the spectacle just past, when contradictory, inflammatory, and disrespectful debate won out in Washington over creative, collaborative thinking. The entire country is disgusted with the results, as shown by record low poll numbers for Congress. But no one has taken time to look at the causes of the atmosphere of combat in what is supposed to be an inclusive, democratic process.

Yes, there are lots of proximate causes for this unsustainable and counterproductive behavior, but there is a root cause that everyone has overlooked. The arts, since time unrecorded, have been the language of wholeness, understanding, and community. Humans began teaching each other their vision of the universe by dancing, singing, painting, storytelling, sculpting, and acting like the world around them. The arts also became a telling part of each community’s unique cultural identity.

"We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once." — Frierich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Many competing theories of education tangled during the early part of the 20th century as the United States grappled with becoming an industrial and military power. Because the capitalist system as practiced here needed large quantities of relatively unskilled labor and the captains of industry were able to get pretty much anything they wanted, the factory model of education won the day.

From that point forward, the business drive for efficiency, productivity, and profit dictated that schools eliminate the “soft” curriculum (arts & humanities) in favor of the “hard:” Readin’, Ritin’, and ‘Rithmetic. That these subjects were and remain almost universally known as “The Three R’s” tells you something about the mindset of the times — then and now.

"It looks like the school board is having another back-to-basics drive."

As a result, we have a system of education that values knowledge over reasoning, volume over clarity, and form over function. We even instituted a national law that requires children to memorize endless strings of facts, but never asks them to apply their knowledge in constructive ways. We require students to have a lot of information without asking them to do anything important with it, and then we wonder why kids are turned off to school by the time they are in 4th or 5th grade.

Here’s the thing: solving complex problems, like those the entire globe faces today, requires higher-order thinking skills. In another post, I applied Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences to dance, as a way of showing how education theory and the arts reinforce one another. Here is a version of another model of human thinking, known as Bloom’s Taxonomy:

NCLB Says "Remembering is All"

Notice where facts and information (Remembering) are located on the ladder. Now let your eye scan upward. Don’t those thinking skills look pretty important? Do you wonder why we don’t teach or assess those skills in school?

Also notice what is at the top: Creating. When we take facts and apply them to real-world situations, we look at the parts, evaluate our approaches, and create a new solution. No matter where you stand on the political spectrum, this is how a whole mind is designed to work. Creating in the arts means making new and surprising connections between facts, putting them into a context, and executing the idea with a high level of craft. What if laws were made like that?

Another model for thinking about our thinking (known as metacognition), is called “Habits of Mind.” Some noted educators have defined a set of sixteen such habits, and it turns out that study in and through the arts helps us develop exactly these habits of mind. Look at a few with me:

Persisting. Our immediate temptation, when faced with a difficulty, is to throw in the towel and go on to something else. As we learn to create in the arts, though, we also learn that repeated revision (look closely at that word) of our work and refinement of our techniques leads us to our goal — as long as we don’t give up. How many times in the past few weeks did people “walk away” from the discussion and give press conferences stating why they were incapable of making progress? “Failure,” for an artist, is just an opportunity to make it better the next time. Our innate desire for mastery (see Daniel Pink’s book, “Drive”) brings us back into the studio or classroom again and again to refine and polish our work. Meanwhile, Congress is on yet another vacation, with plenty of work left undone.

Listening with Understanding and Empathy. It is one thing to listen to a perceived opponent’s arguments in order to figure out how to refute them. It is another thing entirely to truly try to see the situation from the other person’s point of view. When we engage in creating art, and discussing our artistic choices, we begin to realize that there are multiple “correct” answers to any problem. Even if we do not agree with another’s view, we respect that view as valid from their perspective, rather than writing the idea and the person off as stupid, or worse, evil.

Managing Impulsivity. Half of the problems that individual politicians face are ones they have made for themselves due to a simple lack of executive function. Do you think Anthony Weiner and his wife might have benefited if he had taken a moment to ask himself if “sexting” was a good idea before he hit the “send” button? Does Larry Craig wish he had never taken that “wide stance” in that Minneapolis restroom? Does Rick Santorum regret his ill-thought-out comments on homosexuality that landed him in the dictionary as a derogatory sexual term? (Google “santorum.”) Artists quickly learn that their first impulse is rarely their best choice, and they approach creation thoughtfully and deliberately.

Applying Past Knowledge to New Situations. Once children have “passed” a knowledge test, they never want to think about that knowledge again. Facts seem dead and lifeless out of context. So when a new problem arises, children who have been taught “the American way” are stumped. And the flip side of this is that products of this system tend to repeat past mistakes because they didn’t learn from them. How many other “powers” went into Afghanistan, confident they could impose their will through might, and how many lessons from those invasions went unlearned in 2002?

Thinking Flexibly. This is the 800-pound gorilla of this bunch. Being able to change perspectives, consider options, and generate alternatives is the hallmark of the artist. And it is the singular worst failing of the people we have sent to make, judge, and execute laws. The tea partiers are only the most egregious example of inflexible thinking. How much more inspiring it would be to see people of passion and conviction working together to reconcile differences, which is the true meaning of “compromise” – to make something together while not surrendering our principles.

There are many more of these habits of mind. (Check them out here.) Each is an example of what we learn as we create in the arts. Would focusing education through the arts mean that we do not teach facts, that there is no content we expect students to learn, that they just spend their days doing whatever comes to mind? Not at all.

A rigorous study of the arts requires that we learn (or invent) techniques, that we create in the arts, that we engage in thoughtful and objective evaluation of our efforts and those of others, and that we learn about arts in other cultures and other times. The subject matter of our art work can, and should, be mathematics, science, history, language, culture, and even the arts themselves. Rather than focusing on rote remembering, we engage in higher thinking skills to create lasting and meaningful work.

Such an education would be a process of discovery of self and universe, with the arts as the connecting fabric on which we embroider our understandings. It would be both individual and collaborative, both guided and open-ended, both rigorous and playful. And it would help us create a society in which diversity is valued over parochialism, shared success over stardom, and cooperation over power. Not to mention we would all be having a great deal more fun.

What do you suppose it would take to change?

 

The Purpose of Intelligence

In which the author argues that the evolutionary need for, or “purpose” of, intelligence is to create.

Many species of animals have evolved a powerful method of teaching their young. It is called instinct. The very genetic material of the offspring contains most of the instructions that they will need for survival. The role of the parent is often to demonstrate the behaviors that will trigger the instinct. The role of the offspring is to imitate the parent, and then follow the irresistible urge that results.

The problem with instinct is that, since it is genetically-based, it takes generations of mutations to allow the species to change to meet new conditions. If the species cannot adapt quickly enough, it dies out. Some species have evolved more flexible behavior, called intelligence: the ability to adapt consciously to changing opportunities and threats. In other words to create new solutions.

Such flexible thinking has long been dubbed “cunning,” “sly,” or “almost-human,” when applied to animals other than ourselves. But science keeps bringing us up short by forcing us to notice tool-making crows in New Caledonia, rapid change in social order and aggressive behavior among baboons, and evidence of song-writing skills among whales. This forces us to look again at our assumptions about being the “king of beasts” and the only truly sentient species on our planet.

Humanity has always been driven to create, even when that creation has no visible survival or social function. Some of the earliest human artifacts we have so far discovered were clearly crafted with an awareness of form and design that goes beyond the utilitarian.

35,000 years ago, there was art

Our current factory school system, assembled by the robber barons of the industrial revolution to provide the raw material of labor for their money-making machinery, aims only at getting children to imitate what teachers say and do, and to regurgitate the raw and undigested facts they are fed. It operates under the assumption that, once children have a sufficient set of factual information, they will be able to go out into the world and make sense of it.

No Guidance Now

And so our metaphors take shape as schools organized into rigid-walled boxes, segregated from the world they are trying to explain, and with children separated from one another by artificial and superficial barriers of age, subject matter, and level of “achievement.” Metaphors of “tracks” and “scaffolds” lead to the use tools such as scripts and stopwatches to “standardize” teaching and learning. The Holy Grail of education is “proficiency,” as measured by computer-scored tests.

But the ancients knew what science is now re-proving: that learning is not a linear process, but a spiral. And that learning, for an intelligent being, requires the active participation of the learner. We all begin as tiny seeds made of an egg and a sperm. Implanted in a uterine wall, we grow in a spiral, centered around the umbilical connection to our mothers. Once born into the outside world, we grow in a metaphorical and logarithmic spiral, gaining momentum and abilities far beyond linear constructs.

Classic Cretan labyrinth with spiral overlay

Think how quickly infants mature from helpless, slug-like creatures, whose only defense is their very helpless cuteness. Almost in the blink of an eye, they develop coordination, intention, and personality. Soon, they are motoring around in creeps, crawls, walks, and runs. The brain goes from a confused and overwhelmed nervous system ganglion to an amazing central switchboard of sensation, impulse, action, and reaction — and that is all in the first few months of life.

By the time we reach “school age,” we are already marvels of fine-tuned biological and intellectual possibility. As does every other creature of similar complexity, we indulge in play in order to discover and hone our skills for the time they will be needed in earnest. We begin to invent ever-more-difficult problems for ourselves to solve, and we begin to investigate real-life mysteries. Why does the moon wax and wane as it does? Where does the sun go at night? Why do these plants grow here and not here?

As we mature, our questions, and our investigations, become increasingly complex and more related to larger issues. What is my relationship to other humans? To other life? To the planet itself? Why am I here? This is the natural order of things, and has been for hundreds of centuries, pre-dating any form of history that has survived.

Now, having heard and wondered at the songs of mystery as sung by the universe, our species has been forcefully confronted with a new deity: Progress. Of course, Progress is but Mammon dressed in high-tech clothing. The only purpose of Progress, according to the new high priests of the world, is to increase wealth. And of course, since there is not enough wealth to go around, wealth should be reserved for the deserving.

One way of looking at capitalism.

These plutocrats, who currently control the world and its debates, follow a sort of retroactive social Darwinism that states: “Wealth migrates to the deserving. Since we are wealthy, we must be deserving. Since you are not wealthy, you exist to increase my wealth.” Those who take this view of society love to think of themselves as being at the top of a sort of pyramid of capitalism, victors in a global game of “Survivor” due to their superior genes and/or ability. “To the victor go the spoils,” remains their cry, but now they want us to acquiesce in being stripped of our value as well as our valuables. But that’s a topic for another day.

Maslow's Pyramid

The pyramid is much more importantly a metaphor for a much older understanding. Building upon a solid foundation, enduring difficulty and privation, and completing a whole person who stands erect and aiming ever-upward: that is the purpose of life in many traditions. The spiral, as a life path or a migration story, appears in numerous cultures. One common human interpretation of the spiral is the labyrinth, which encourages the one who walks the path to consider their journey through life and the fact that the beginning and ending are at the same point. And it is quite possible that the Egyptians who built the Great Pyramids did so by constructing counterclockwise spiral ramps up the exteriors, acknowledging even in that process that the path to completion is not a straight one.

Did the Egyptians build a spiral ramp to construct each pyramid?

That fact means, in turn, that creativity — the ability to invent new solutions to problems — is essential to the survival of our species. The problems we face today, many of them of our own making, require completely new ways of thinking and behaving in order to solve them. We have to work together for the common good, and acknowledge that no one — no human, no creature, no resource — is dispensable. We all sacrifice to become a better whole, and humans are no better than any other part of the community. We, as a species, are uniquely able to step up to the challenge.

“Humans have invented the small, nomadic band and the continental megastate and have demonstrated a flexibility whereby uprooted descendants of the former can function effectively in the latter.” – Robert M. Sapolsky

But we have to fix the way we teach our children. We have to make creation the primary goal of the school day: students must learn to create their own understanding in multiple ways. We have to abandon the idea of total control of the scope and sequence of lessons by some all-seeing authority. We have to celebrate the truth that everyone learns differently, but that we are all designed to be excellent learners. And we have to acknowledge that we all need each other in the process. As social beings, we challenge each other, we lift each other, and we help each other climb our own spiral ramps of personal success.

Shouldn’t that be what school is like?

Getting it Horribly Wrong

As I was composing a post on a general view of how arts integration is becoming more widely recognized as powerful teaching and learning, I ran across an AP article on the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as the “Nation’s Report Card: Science 2009.” This test is administered to fourth-, eighth-, and twelfth-graders, and has recently been updated to measure more than simple factual knowledge, though it is still a single snapshot rather than a comprehensive assessment of understanding.

You can download the full report.

Standardized testing flaws aside, the test can still give us important information relating to how we spend our time, money, and other resources in education. What the NAEP report tells us is that a fraction more than one-third (34%) of students are “proficient” in science at 4th grade, a percentage that declines until, at the 12th grade level, just a hair more than one in five students (21 percent) ranks as “proficient.”

How can this be?

Welcome to another unintended consequence of “No Behind Left Uncovered,” or NCLB (No Child Left Behind), the G. W. Bush administration’s attempt to drive test scores upward with a complicated set of carrots and sticks (mostly sticks) applied variously in the fifty states.

What happened? Well, testing during the early years of NCLB was in reading and mathematics only. The incessant drumbeat of rhetoric about “failing” schools and “bad” teachers, the billions of dollars in incentives for increased test scores, and the emphasis on “teaching to the test” drove good teachers from the field and labeled successful schools as in need of “corrective action” when they failed to get 100 percent of their English language learners, disabled students, and other subgroups to achieve at nationally mandated levels on the tests.

This led to some marvelous insanity: teachers being told they could only deliver math and reading instruction until the last 20 minutes of the school day, which could be used for either science or social studies. The reading instruction was tightly scripted, and teachers in different classrooms had to be literally on the same page at the same time each day. Principals enforced this policy by sending observers with stopwatches and clipboards to the classrooms to ensure teacher compliance.

To clarify: teachers could not choose the material to be read, or adapt the teaching and learning experience for diverse learners. All creativity disappeared from the art of teaching; it became a rote, high-pressure, low-engagement experience for everyone. Why not read about science or history, thereby getting double benefit?

No, the big-dollar textbook and testing companies got the most return profits from a regimented system, so teachers were told this was a “research-based” program that would work fine if they were competent enough to teach it properly, proving once again that the policy-makers in this country are completely under the thrall of major multinational corporations. Big business doesn’t really care about education in the U.S., because they are getting more of their workers overseas these days anyway.

Besides, an uninformed populace is much easier to fool. Look at all the smoke and mirrors in the debates over national health care and global climate change. When people don’t have enough skills and information to make up their own minds about which science is solid and which is spurious, they tend to listen to whichever politician makes the most reassuring noises.

So, to summarize: if we don’t teach science, how can we expect students to learn it? And if we don’t teach the tools of critical, divergent, creative, and empathetic thinking, how can we expect the next generation of citizens to grapple with the enormously complex and inter-related problems of the 21st century?

The only solution to this dilemma is to junk the old system entirely, use the factory/prison school buildings for something else, and start fresh with what we know about how people learn best. Obviously, this would be an enormous upheaval, and could not happen in all 50 states overnight, or even soon, but the alternative is to keep doing what we know already does not work.

Science requires real-world interactions.

How many “report cards” will it take for us to start to look at the real roots of our education problems?

The Definition of Insanity

You know the one I mean. Famously attributed to Albert Einstein, but also Ben Franklin and Rita Mae Brown (go figure), it defines insanity as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

Thanks in large part to No Child Left Behind, educators all over the country are caught in a vicious loop. As the test score requirements to make “Adequate Yearly Progress” (AYP) spiral ever higher, teachers have less and less discretion over how to spend precious classroom hours. School has become an endless series of repetitive “drill-and-kill” exercises to prepare students to take standardized tests.

Teachers’ salaries, school autonomy, and community esteem all hinge now on how well students do on those tests — and don’t forget that the impossible target of 100% proficiency for ALL students looms in 2014. That means in three more years, ALL schools will fail to meet the targets. Then what?

Meanwhile, in the face of solid scientific research to the contrary, schools are racing to handicap students even further by taking away such essentials as physical education, arts classes, and even recess. Misguided, panicked principals and superintendents are taking away every opportunity for students to engage in higher-level thinking and real-world problem-solving in favor of practicing for standardized tests.

In most of what passes for public “debate” on the issue, the assumption that such tests give us valuable information about student learning is rarely challenged. This begs two questions: What do these tests measure? What do they show us about teaching and learning?

Knowing that the Finns or the Japanese score higher on standardized tests than US students do sends legislators into a tizzy, but does it really signify anything important? What these tests measure is information, knowledge, facts. In a century and a world in which just about any fact we need is literally at our fingertips through the Internet, having a storehouse of knowledge in each learner’s brain is far less important than the learner’s skill at making sense of all that information.

What we learn through the creative process, from looking at things from many different angles, and from unstructured play is far more important than the random facts we memorize. Why? Because the discovery process is open-ended and leads to new solutions to evolving problems. The memorization and rote regurgitation of facts only leads to the sort of rigid, canonical thinking that drags down civilizations due to their inability to change.

Many dedicated and forward-thinking educators are ahead of this curve. They are doing their best to try to shape teaching and learning in a way that is sustainable and that connects education to solutions to the challenge of our long-term survival as a species. The problem is how to operate in an environment that is increasingly hostile to teachers and students alike. Yes, there are bad teachers (and bad legislators and bad doctors and bad financiers), but the overwhelming percentage of teachers is in education because they are called to a vocation, not to cash a paycheck.

When politicians point the finger at teachers and unions, they avoid having to actually confront the problem and figure out a solution. And not only have they so far failed to confront the problem, they have misidentified it. The central issue is that we need to junk our old-fashioned, factory-model education system. We need to replace it with one that is based on awareness of pattern, relationship of humans and environment, and an understanding of how we learn best.

How do we initiate such an endeavor with a population that is the product of the inadequate and downright harmful system we seek to replace? That is indeed the question. All I know is, we have to try. Anything else would truly be insane.

2010 in review: Blog Stats

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

The average container ship can carry about 4,500 containers. This blog was viewed about 24,000 times in 2010. If each view were a shipping container, your blog would have filled about 5 fully loaded ships.

 

In 2010, there were 27 new posts, not bad for the first year! There were 70 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 8mb. That’s about 1 pictures per week.

The busiest day of the year was November 30th with 391 views. The most popular post that day was Dance and Multiple Intelligences.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were mystufie.co.cc, facebook.com, stumbleupon.com, healthfitnesstherapy.com, and owldancer.net.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for multiple intelligences, multiple intelligence, gardner multiple intelligences, howard gardner, and intelligences.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

Dance and Multiple Intelligences May 2010
3 comments

2

What Do We Want from Our Schools? August 2010
1 comment

3

Dance and Comprehension May 2010

4

About this Blog April 2010
1 comment

5

The Math of Moving August 2010
1 comment