‘The Artistry and Craft of Teaching’.

All very well but how do we do it?

How do we develop a cutting edge classroom?

Mana Conference workshop 28.29th April

We need to putting the ‘heart' ( or art) back into teaching.

The teacher as an artist helping students develop their innate talents.

Passion

We need to re-imagine schools as communities of Inquiry

‘Imagination is more important than knowledge. To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.’

Sir Ken Robinson – an inspirational ‘guru’ for creativity. Google him and listen to his video

School have squandered or marginalized human talent.

Everyone is talented in some way.

Creativity is as important literacy and numeracy

What do we need to do to develop creative and inquiring minds?

We don’t need to teach creativity we need to stop destroying it.

‘Education ought to be about finding what people are good at! There needs to be something of a revolution in the way people are taught’.

Guy Claxton

Author of ‘What's the Point of school?”

Learnacy is more important that literacy and numeracy.

Students need learning power – to keep alive the desire to learn ( our key competencies)

A good start to the 21stC. Key phrasefor me in this document is:

‘Students are to be seen as : ‘active seekers, users and creators of knowledge’

Talent development though is a bit light

7 out of 10! Can improve

Natural born learners?Do you believe this?

What is the role of schooling?

Can we put their need to inquire and express central?

How to develop your students unique perspectives.

The life blood of genuine personal and inquiry writing is the strength of the learner’s voice – the honest communication of feelings and understandings.

All students need to be helped to do their personal best, to focus on an idea in depth and to write in a way that is natural and true to themselves.

Developing the students ‘voice’and positive identity as a learners may be the most important thing a teacher ever does

Start the year by tapping into your children personal worlds.

Placing students ‘voice’ central to all learning.

All too often students ‘voice’and creativity is constrained by the imposition of teacher intentions, WALTS , imposed success criteria and the conformity of best practices.

Too much work looks all the same – it might be quality but it lack creativity.

I want to be me!!!

Assess your strength out of ten for each and share with someone

Which ones do schools over emphasize to the detriment of the other talents?

Develop your Da Vinci skills - simply observe through your senses and describe the scene to someone who is blind. Da Vinci observed drew and described whatever caught his eye. He the let his curiosity ask whatever questions came into his mind. Have we lost this basic skill.

Value observation and description

Learning ‘how to learn’ is important

but so is

An appreciation of the

power ofpersonal

excellence.

Creative teachers have the ‘David’ factor.

I dreamt I saw an angel trapped so I set about to set it free.’

Let’s do fewer things well – aim for excellence.

The power of doing something really well

When students become involved with a powerful experience the feelings gained will last forever – such transformational experiences literally change our minds forever.

This is Dewey's learning through experience

It is these experiences that develop a love of further learning

This is about doing fewer things well

Observation a key skill .

‘Draw’ on your prior knowledge

Inquiry begins with observing something that capture our attention.

What do you know about constructivism?

Draw a spider?

After drawing check with those near you and amend your ideas.

( power of collaboration – or wisdom of crowds)

Assess your efforts –what criteria make a spider?

Now draw a bit of the spider.

What are you thinking? – think of one ‘deep’ question to research

Drawing strategy:

‘Look –draw- look.’

Remember to slow the

pace of work!

Before drawing Focused drawings

From memory –assessment.

Imaginative spider.

Teach students to be aware of their

thinking –metacognition.

Students need to know: what, why,

how, and how good.

But it the subconscious brain that counts most! Feed it stories.

Literacy the key to inquiry learning!!

I am an afternoon person who believes in integrated studies and creative expression.

I used to ignore literacy and numeracy.

Then I saw them as the ‘evil twins’that gobbled up the time for real learning.

Now I see literacy and numeracy as the ‘key’ to powerful inquiry learning – but they need to be ‘re-imagined’

‘Reframing’ literacy and numeracy

This book outlines inquiry learning but has two chapters ‘reframing’literacy and numeracyto be used in the service of inquiry.

What skills need to be integrated into the literacy programme to avoid the ‘google cut and paste culture’?

Authentic literacy and numeacy

Artistry of teaching doing fewer things well

It’s the creativity of the teacher that counts

The David factor – seeing potential in all learners

Quality.

Students need to construct their own meanings –learning must bepersonalized.

Now for the

The Craftof

Teaching

Or the art of ‘Crowd Control’

We all need a mix of certainty/routine and freedom and individuality.

Which style does traditional education favour?

Lesson blocks could have three elements:

1. Introduction to class

2 Group activities

3 Reflection – next time

A simple planning ‘scaffold’

1

2

3

AAR –After Action Reviews

To develop ownership negotiate tasks with learners:

1. Key questions – or ‘fertile’ questions.

2. Gather prior ideas/theories

3. Plan and assign tasks ( use of ICT)

4. Present , demonstrate or display findings.

5. Evaluate using agreed criteria

Assess in depth the self chosen individual study.

Begin the day to outline the programme and remind students of their tasks.

End the day with a reflective period to discuss what important things they have gained and to remind them about tomorrows tasks.

Beginnings and endings!

Create an ‘invitational’ curriculum‘Teaching is the canny art of intellectual temptation’.Jerome Bruner

How to ‘hook’students on to learning!

‘We all get good at what we like!’

We covered multiple IQ earlier

We need to present invitations to learn.

Why not ask your students what they want to find out about?

Could not a curriculum simply ‘emerge’?James Beane ideas –what do they

want to study or learn about?

Key words: 3 ‘R’s

‘Rich, Real and Relevant’

to the learner!

Elliot Eisner writes about exploring ( inquiring) our world with ‘nets’, or frameworks, to capture and express meanings – similar to multiple intelligences or traditional disciplines.

As an artist

As a scientist

As a writer/poetA a historian

As a mathematician

As a builder

Or whatever

‘ Fertile Question

Research Question

Research Question

Research Question

Inquiry Inquiry Inquiry

Concluding Performance

Concluding Performance

Concluding Performance

Communal Concluding Performance

Another model – From Yoram Horpaz

Once again what skills/competencies have to be in place to research, record and communicate.

Hook questions/Key questions

Research tasks divided up.

Room should celebrate students inquiry and ideas

Interactive dialogue is the talking, questioning and probing what children think and why –the teacher must actively explore children's ideas and thinking.

Are children questions and ideas a feature of your rooms?

Main ideas about the craft of teaching

Both teachers and students need ‘benign’ routines – what, where, when and how

Focused group teaching a good idea to cater for learning styles

Need rich, real and relevant studies to allow for talent development and ‘big ideas’ for students to become informed kiwi.

The room environment your ultimate ‘message’ system

Do what you do well!

We need to re-imagine everything.

‘Schools could not have been better designed to destroy the talents of students’.

Our schools are products of a n industrial age mindset – along the lines of factories based on standardization.

Primary schools have to a large extent escaped from this conception during the 50s to 70s but new ideas are now required.

‘To save our youth and our planet will require the death of education and its rebirth’

Do what you like! Do as you are told!

Child centred

PrimarySubject centred

Secondary

Learning centredTeacher as a

creative coach!Talent centred.

!

Negotiated curriculum

I have a dream

‘I have dream that all our schools become caring communities of inquiry; places where the gifts and talents of all our children are recognized and amplified,; places where the inborn desire to learn is protected and strengthened. We need new minds for a new millennium. Only then will we be able to face up to the challenges of the future’.

Apologies to Martin Luther King

So we have a choice…..

Take the freedom offered by the NZC for spontaneity and creativity ( but now at risk of being stillborn) or comply to the imposition, sterility and distortion of the failing populist concept of National Standards.

No choice!!

Lots of ideas in my book and on my website/ blog.

Feel free to use my advice – I’m not using it!

www.leading-learning.co.nz