Creative Teaching for Today's Young People

Correction

Here is Cornel Pewewardy's Holistic Circle in its entirety.

Cornel Pewewardy

I have had Medicine Wheels and Dreamcatchers hanging on walls in my home in Minnesota for over twenty years. There is no question in my mind that they guide and protect me.

My last two posts here displayed digital photos I took of some of them, with various Photoshop filters applied that seem to me to bring out the unique energy and power in each of them. Look closely and -- if you care to find it -- you can almost feel the strength in these images.

This wasn’t an idle exercise.

The search I began over a decade ago -- to find ways to become a more creative, effective teacher – was given an enormous boost when I attended a lecture by Cornel Pewewardy (www.hanksville.org/storytellers/pewe/ ) about his “Holistic Circle of Learning” (©Cornel Pewewardy; see below from my book Creative Planning Resource ).

No one has more completely visualized interconnected teaching and learning than has Pewewardy in his “Native American Educational Philosophy, for which he designed the “Holistic Circle” with cardinal directions of the Medicine Wheel as passed down from his Comanche and Kiowa traditions. Pewewardy has explained that his philosophical view “encompasses the education of the whole child with many types of learning styles and teaching styles. A child does not live in multiple worlds but lives in one surrounded by sensations, events and feelings impacting him or her from all sides. A holistic educational philosophy is geared toward teaching the whole child and not just separate pieces of the child.” His words spoke to me forcefully at an important time in my sunwise journey to become a better teacher. His lecture was a turning point for me. I began to research interconnectedness, the world view found in many non-Western cultures.

At the core of Pewewardy’s Holistic Circle is the Self, the child himself/herself in an empowered position of strength within the learning environment. The outer ring represents the global, universal view of the world that shows we are all related and all things are connected, and a middle ring representing social values – Virtue, Significance, Competence and Power -- that are influenced by and have influence on the child.

The first inside ring has the locators on a Medicine Wheel – Mental (at the north, representing winter, fire), Spiritual (at the east, representing spring, earth), Emotional (at the south, representing summer, air), and Physical (at the west, representing autumn, water). (I had a typo in my last post that substituted the word social for spiritual, a major mistake for which I apologize.)

Eight pie-shaped spokes emanating from the Self are Howard Gardner’s (www.pz.harvard.edu/PIs/HG.htm ) original seven multiple intelligences (see Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences, 1993, and Intelligence Reframed: Multiple Intelligences for the 21st Century, 1999), with Pewewardy’s own idea for an eighth, “Native American World View,” which balances the wheel and completes the circle.

Pewewardy explains that his addition in 1993 is like Gardner’s own addition in 1996 of a Naturalist intelligence, but Pewewardy’s World View does not apply solely to nature. He defines it as a person’s ability to recognize larger contexts about all things or to “see the big picture.”

Learners with this intelligence consider the larger spectrum in which any task is embedded,connect one idea to another, like to know backgrounds and reasons for doing things, encourage harmony among their peers, and make connections between work and play at school and the outside world. They are interested in large concepts, patterns, biographies, making things work, drawing, stories or mythology, and learn best in informal, social situations; by example and modeling; by sharing and helping each other, through peer tutoring and group problem-solving; and in noncompetitive efforts that foster pride in the group.

This intelligence is a world view that is part of the culture and spirituality of many non-Western peoples -- not only First Nations People but also the African Gaian, the Australian aborigine, the Hmong of southeast Asia -- and seeing the big picture can be brought into public schools without infringing on any student's belief system. It is an awareness of the interconnectedness of all life and does not take the shape of formal religion. As such it globalizes education for all children, not just for those from whose culture it may derive.

Pewewardy points out that attention to this aspect of human existence is noticeably lacking in American public education, but for First Nations People it can not be separated out, just as it can not be for other peoples who share this belief. It is a shame in our public schools that this world view -- for First Nations People and many of our immigrant children -- is ignored. Interconnectedness can be described as the self's interdependent functioning within a larger system, as a way of knowing, as an integrated brain processing. It must be recognized, welcomed and nurtured as such.

 

Medicine Wheels

The Medicine Wheel or "Circle of Life" is a symbol of wholeness and balance for the self that permeates the philosophy and thought of many indigenous peoples in North and South America. Medicine Wheels are carefully and respectfully fashioned in several ways, created on the ground as a circle of stones, or visualized in a person' mind as he or she stands in what is understood to be the center.

No two people find exactly the same thing when studying a Medicine Wheel, and as a reflection of one's personal way of living, it can be seen as a life journey in which all things and ideas are connected, related and welcomed as lessons. Medicine Wheels often are seen as representing points for the four directions, four basic elements, four races, and/or four dimensions of human existence (cognitive, social, emotional and physical). As such, they may represent paths to follow, as in the four directions for the Diné sunwise journey.

Original teaching of the Dakota/Lakota is that balance on the Medicine Wheel is achieved by "traveling the Red Road, when you are in the center, a holistic concept." The Wheel provides a metaphor for discussions concerning holonomy or the duality of existence, in which the independent self is surrounded by larger systems at work in the world, various aspects of which may be represented at points around the perimeter.

Dreamcatchers

I read about dreamcatchers
                                             to a group of kindergarteners

how Ojibway mothers make them
                                            still today for their children

to catch the bad dreams
                                            and let only good dreams in

a little girl raised her hand and said,
                                            “Teacher, can I have one of those?”

So You Want To Do A Play

So you want to do a play...

After spring break, when teachers and students begin to emotionally slide toward planning for the end of school, many of you think of having a grand finale, a play perhaps, or a class revue. Participatory storytelling (discussed in my last post) is one way to involve everyone in the class. That was always a priority of mine, to have all kids participate, especially classes of younger children, and although behind-the-scenes participation is fine, it's still much better if indeed each child can take center stage, however briefly.

I wrote a few plays early in my career to achieve just this egalitarian goal for elementary students, and here are a few things I found out that worked best:

• Adapt a story students already know, so that almost no time is spent on plot development, other than breaking the story down into its consecutive scenes.
• Choose a story with a number and type of characters that fit students who are available to perform. Main characters will need students who can read and perform well; provide for less-proficient students by changing a story to include a multitude of minor characters (farmers, toys, whatever it might be) who perform together as choral readers/reciters.
• Often you can group characters so that rehearsals can involve only a few students at a time. For instance, maybe all those farmers could be one of your reading groups that can rehearse on its own. I did one class revue that was never rehearsed with everyone present, and that certainly made scheduling easier on me as well as on the children. The revue was seamless when finally performed, even though I was the only one involved who knew it in its entirety prior to performance.
• Limit scenes with main characters or give them simpler, shorter lines. It's not fair for a few students to have much more to prepare than the rest of the class.
• Include a narrator to read prose sections, set the scene, and occasionally describe action.
• Use plain English and lines that are short or to the point, except when flowery speeches are just more fun.
• Uses echoes in dialogue as useful repetition for the audience as well as for the actors. Too many times, young actors will mumble, so the audience appreciates such repetition.
• Script some of the dialogue in a pattern for actors -- in which Kim follows Robbie follows Frank, repeated by Kim following Robbie following Frank, etc. -- to cut down on missed cues. Believe me, most audiences never catch on.
• Putting a long line of masking tape on the stage floor for Kim, Robbie and Frank to stand on makes the three nervous youngsters even more comfortable. And once again, the audience usually won't notice.
• Everybody gets makeup. Everybody. Just a little rouge on the cheeks. Your costumes and props may be very very simple, that's perfectly all right, but the slightest touch -- and smell -- of "greasepaint" is what makes a final performance real. And turns youngsters into stars.

Creative Teaching

Listening: Participatory Storytelling

Moving right along. Or rather, backing up a bit to spend a little more time with listening skills before I strike out in new areas of creative planning.

To recap my previous emphasis on the development of active listening skills, especially with young media-distracted children, it has been said that listening is the other half of talking. To encourage active listening, strategies must be used in which students listen to increasingly difficult material, to think, to remember, and to respond. Effective listening is the ability to concentrate on, organize, and interpret what is heard. And last of all, learners should listen because they want to.

Developing children's listening skills is woven in and out of our daily interaction with them. However, when we want to give it center stage, I have found that participatory storytelling is most effective. It is teaching listening itself. And it is so much fun.

When youngsters have a role in the telling of a tale, the story directly relates to them personally, and they want to listen.

When they have a part to play, they have a reason to listen.

When the tale is also both and funny to tell, the humor appeals to youngsters' desire to "get a joke."

When they find out they are going to entertain others with their performance, they listen more intently.

And once they know that the pattern of the story demands that they pay close attention, they simply do not want to miss a cue!

For participatory storytelling, you need to find a folktale or story in which a few parts of the text can be changed into refrains for recitation by the children. This will be a patterned, repetitious routine, familiar in the oral tradition, and is usually humorous or is sometimes admonishment.

Several years ago, I had a grant to experiment with this type of storytelling and adapted about ten stories for this purpose. My most successful attempt was Wanda Gág's "Gone Is Gone: Or The Story Of A Man Who Wanted To Do Housework" (2003 edition, University of Minnesota Press), which I received permission to reprint for my OxCart Productions DVD of "Wanda Gág: A Minnesota Childhood".

I highly recommend getting a copy of the wee book itself to enjoy Gág's delightful Old World illustrations, and of course I'd love to send you the "Minnesota Childhood" DVD with my script attached, if you want to order it.

My examples here will be from that storytelling project.

With the very young, I found I was the one doing the telling. As primary narrator, I needed a script to read aloud and would suggest you do the same. It can be bound perhaps as a booklet to make it an easier prop.

In the script you should highlight visual cues that you will use to indicate silently to the children when it is time for them to recite their parts. For instance, my index finger held up signaled the children's shouted response, "But Hulla!", and my hand on my cheek called for their wail of despair, "Hey, hi, ho hulla! Na, na, na!"

The script also should have verbal cues, which will be emphasized by you in a rather loud voice, at least during initial rehearsals. For instance, in our performance, my repetition of the phrase "and this is what she said" signaled the children to recite in unison:

"I clean the house,
Cook the soup,
Churn the butter,
Care for the baby
And all the animals in the yard,
Working hard
From day to day."

These lines were right out of the book, but I just put them together as a refrain to be repeated a few times. I used simple drawings at first (a broom, soup kettle, butter churn, baby, farm animal) for cued recall during initial rehearsals. This created a bridge for children from stories with pictures to the oral tradition (which in its purest form does not rely on pictures at all).

After the refrain was memorized, hand motions replaced the drawings as children began to remember the sequence of events. These were simple and obvious visual elaborations of the actions described (rocking a baby back and forth in your arms, etc.) and were for the children themselves to do as they recited.

Use your imagination for cues and motions that are appropriate for your story and for your storytellers. Use the children's own suggestions, which enhances their retention. When developmentally appropriate, memorization may progress with practice to pure recall and pure storytelling, meaning visual cues and actions are no longer used.

For a performance, everyone is seated. Participatory storytellers sit on the floor, facing the narrator. If there's room in a classroom, auditorium or gym, both narrator and children can be angled so that they partially face the audience (but still can see each other).

The presentation should be informal and cozy, like storytellers of old sitting around the fire.

Most of all, have fun!

Flotsam, The Silver Pony

Flotsam, The Silver Pony and Debris of Several Kinds

I'm guessing for bloggers that one of the good things about the craft is that it can be picked up and set down at will. Which is what I've done by neglecting to write lately. Life has a way of interrupting one pursuit with another. It's a good thing, to have too much to do with family, travel, other writing, and just plain horsing around. Wouldn't want it any other way.

Now a couple of things have come across my desk -- the 2007 Caldecott Award winner and a New York Times article (February 6, 2007, Science Times ) -- that make the need to post on this blog rise to the top of the To Do List again.

I know for a fact that the best thing about my topic of creative planning for teaching is that it is so fluid. I ended my first series of posts, which was about getting kids today to listen and pay attention, and I was all ready to branch off into another series that might interest teachers -- integrating the curriculum in our multi-media world.

And then along come the Caldecott announcement and the Times piece by William J. Broad and I'm off and running, slightly off track but full steam ahead nonetheless. This is a case of the Gots To Do.

The interdisciplinary nature of some picture books for children is well-documented and much-loved. I've been writing about this for years, and if any of my books were still in print (heavy sigh), I'd refer you to the sections that discuss my intense pleasure at using such books with students. Alas, I'll have to re-cap some of what I've written for you, but not right now.

I don't get as much joy going over my previous work as I do in plunging into what's currently exciting me -- the work of David Weisner, Lynd Ward, and space experts. So they go first.

Flotsam is David Weisner's latest Caldecott Award winner for best 2006 American picture book. It is wordless, and we owe so much to Weisner for giving us such other grand wordless books over the years -- Tuesday (1992 Caldecott winner), Free Fall (1989 Caldecott Honor Book), Sector 7 (2000 Caldecott Honor Book), as well as the fun words in The Three Pigs (2002 Caldecott winner). Also look at his wordless Hurricane and June 29, 1999.

In Flotsam, the tide offers a boy on the beach some intriguing debris -- an old underwater camera -- and the developed pictures are not only of fantasy creatures of the deep but also of a girl holding a photo of a boy holding a photo of another child who is holding a photo of another...and so on, each photo seen through the boy's magnifying glass, giving him glimpses into the past in other parts of the world.

Weisner was born too late to have as much firsthand knowledge as I do of the picture-within-a-picture visual gimmick so popular in children's magazines during my own 1940's childhood. I used to collect these pictures and still have today one of my favorites: on the cover of a December Progressive Farmer magazine, Santa is in his bubblebath reading the same Progressive Farmer that has Santa on the cover in his bubblebath, and so on. Weisner's photo is also different in Flotsam, in that each child pictured holds a photo of another child. But you get where my nostalgia came from the first time I looked at the book.

A tiny disappointment in Flotsam is that the fantastic photos of life beneath the sea -- where there are mermaids, street lamps, and even a dog's collar on a fish -- are lost on the out-going tide (but maybe the creatures below find a way to snap some more? Yes, they must surely have taken the other ones!).

The ending is perfect, however, as another child in another place finds the camera as flotsam on her beach, and in the developed film will be the picture the boy took of himself holding the photo he had found. Interdisciplinary studies are abundant in this little book -- marine biology, visual literacy, language arts, history, geography.

Rewind for a look at a wordless book over 30 years back to The Silver Pony: a Story in Pictures by Lynd Ward (Houghton, 1973), selected by the New York Times Book Review section as one of the Best Illustrated Books of that year. Go online to get yourself a copy. (Ward also won the Caldecott Award, for The Biggest Bear in 1953.)

The Silver Pony is a thick, black-and-white "chapter book" without words and at first glance, you might well say No Way for today's children. Believe me, you will be wrong. After a brief synopsis of plot and book design, I will enumerate all the ways I found to expand on the enjoyment of this book with children in kindergarten through second grade --sometimes taking several sessions -- for over twenty years in the classroom.

In The Silver Pony, a lonely farm boy is visited by a flying horse that takes him on magical night-time journeys. The first is North, where the boy drops an apple to an Eskimo child; South to help an African-American boy with a rowboat save a stranded family on a rooftop during a flood (shades of New Orleans during Katrina); West where the boy and his pony rescue a young Native American shepherd's lamb from the jaws of a mountain lion; and East to deliver sunflowers, first to a Puerto Rican girl on a rooftop in the Big City and another for a girl at a lighthouse overlooking the Atlantic.

The only direction left is to fly up, but there the boy and his faithful steed get smacked by a rocket, are sent plummeting to earth, and sadly only the boy survives. His parents present him with a pony, and he is seen riding off, we assume for other, real-life, adventures.

The book design is simple, each illustration facing a blank page. An accumulation of stars signify the change in chapters -- one star, two, three, up to eight if my memory serves.  This design itself is where children begin. They are warned that for this big, fat book they are the ones who will tell the story, not you, for there are only three words -- The Silver Pony -- and showing all those blank pages assures them this is truly a book they could "read".

After one star for Chapter One, you begin lessons in Visual Literacy by asking them, What do you see? What is it called? What does it do? And thus begins a visual inventory of all the youngsters can find to point out on each page. Stressing the "What, Who, When and Where" questions gives childen -- especially city children -- the opportunity to learn and name all the details in the pictures that tell them that this is a farm early in the morning. This inventory is important to take time for, to give the very young child practice in order to be able later to analyze and interpret -- the "How and Why" questions -- other events later in the story.

Because very soon the boy -- who the children say "looks sad", the beginning of interpretation, which is great since they are starting to get into what Ward is doing with his story -- is going to get whupped, and this is also important to take time for. For goodness sake, in today's world a spanking means so much more to us than it did to Ward thirty years ago, when we had not analyzed all that such discipline might do to children.

In The Silver Pony, the boy is turned over his father's knee and flat out gets a whipping, and some entire classrooms full of children I have known fall absolutely silent at this, either out of disbelief or out of empathy, bless their hearts (maybe having experienced some such themselves). You can not continue The Silver Pony without first analyzing why it is the boy is being punished, and it gives an adult an excellent time to help children examine in pictures the motivation for actions that often occur in real life. Is this case, the boy endangered himself by running in front of the father's tractor, plus dad had to stop work for nothing (assuming the boy lied.....).

Isn't that what visual literacy can be about? Applying what we see in pictures to help us understand our own lives?

This unhappy episode early on also sets the stage for the fact that this book will not be all sweetness and light. Hard times lay ahead.

I will not deconstruct all of The Silver Pony is this way; it would be far too tedious. I leave it up to you to find the book and begin your own interpretations. But I hope you see that within the first few pages, this book can reach today's kids with an impact few other books have.

I will however give a shorthand review of all I found delightfully interdisciplinary about the book as I used it with children through the '70's, '80's and '90's:

(1) Language Arts: Introduce younger children to chapter books, in which a change in chapters is defined as a change in Time or Place or Both. Can they distinguish which it is for each chapter? And what parts of the story might be left out between some of the changes?

(2) Weather Science: Review the cardinal directions through Ward's use of a weather vane on top of the barn. (City kids may at first call it a windmill or a pinwheel....) Weather vanes can be fascinating works of art. Buy a simple one and mount it for kids to work with. Make simple ones with straws, straight pins and paper.

(3) Geography: Study a map of North America to imagine where the pony is taking the boy each time. Study about those places. Learn about the people who live there. Why would apples and sunflowers be such surprises for children in some parts of this hemisphere? What other kinds of things might be fun to take? Does the boy himself live in the Midwest?

(4) Literature: Broaden a search for other stories about flying horses, a recurring motif in literature around the world down through the ages. You have only to start with Pegasus, and for that many children have already seen the Hollywood animated movie.

(5) Last of all the areas to study -- Space Technology -- is introduced by the terrible scene in The Silver Pony in which the boy and pony have flown into outer space, only to be sent falling to earth again. The silence in the classroom can indeed be deafening when this page is turned. All the practice given to the children in inventorying and analyzing what they have seen in the book until now comes into play, usually with positive results for their interpretation of events, however disquieting.

It seems that in 1973 Ward envisioned the possibility of space debris in a nuclear age, a veritable junkyard of whirling debris either cast off by space craft or left over from explosions and destructive tests. Bits of orbiting, cast-off technology, he was saying in his pictures, would begin to dangerously crowd outer space.

Enter now -- February 2007 -- The New York Times Science News article with its headline, "Orbiting Junk, Once a Nuisance, Is Now a Threat". (An Internet search for "space debris" offers all the background needed to explore this topic if the article itself can no longer be accessed.) According to the article, not only is the threat of colliding debris a reality in space, but it is also predicted that such a collision will "start a chain reaction, a slow cascade of collisions that would expand for centuries, spreading chaos through the heavens."

Reading further, one learns that such cascade warnings began as early as 1978 (Ward must've surely felt vindicated), but Washington and Moscow generally ignored the danger, so the number of objects grew as more nations launched rockets and satellites into orbit. By now, two-thirds of the 3000 spacecraft orbiting Earth are no longer active, and nearly 7000 pieces of man-made debris are large enough to be tracked.

Flotsam indeed.

Never fear that children will have bad dreams after this part of The Silver Pony. The resilience of childhood is truly remarkable, as study after psychological study has assuredly shown. Bringing kids the bad news about our space junkyards -- if only in a wordless picture book backed up by newspaper accounts -- succeeds only in firing most of them up to get out shovels and the dustpan. Time and again, the ending of The Silvery Pony to youngsters is still uplifting, because the boy gets a real pony and has the first truly big smile to be seen in the whole book. So it is. They view the calamity as solveable. In a child's world, so it is and so it goes. Every silver lining's got a pony in it. This book ends for them as satisfying as does Weisner's Flotsam.

For our adult edification, experts say that a solution to the cascade threat in space may exist, but it will be costly. Existing large objects might be removed from orbit. Lasers might be used to zap debris. Engines might be installed to send dead spacecraft back into the atmosphere. 

And it could be that some youngster sitting there quietly for the ending to The Silver Pony will be the one who grows up to figure it out.

   

Is The Teacher Listening?

(This post was inadvertently dropped from the sequence. It should be read before the post titled "North". Sorry, I'm still very new at blogging.)

I realized over coffee this morning that I'd dropped an important stitch in the weaving of my sunwise journey. I left you hanging in the south, where I had begun to collect energy from my colleagues for practical, day-to-day teaching strategies. I need to explain that this kind of journey is not usually neat and tidy.

One can travel erratically in several directions, pointing efforts first south, then back to the east, in and out, sometimes with a dizzying effect that seems messy until you sit back to reflect on where you have been and what you have learned. Creativity itself is messy, especially trying to create a plan for better teaching.
                                                                            

In the south, I had found the first of many lists I would make from my colleagues, a list of attention-getting strategies. Now I would also need research for more ideas, and for that I turned west in the Diné sunwise journey where is found, among other things, the energy for thinking and learning. I needed ideas from persuasive and creative researchers who are experienced teachers themselves, describing what they see the best of our colleagues already doing in schools and suggesting what could and perhaps should happen next. I sought out ideas that were acceptable, workable and doable in my classroom and found writers who are committed to bridging from theory to practice.

I was still focused on finding strategies for getting students to pay attention. And in my research I found the first of several Eurekas I was to find on my journey. It was the idea that students themselves should be actively engaged in learning how and when to use the strategies I used. In addition to curricular content, I should be imparting to my students the strategies I was using so that they also might use them. They should learn where and when strategies are to be used as different ways of approaching problems in their own lives.

Meaningful strategies of all kinds are whatever a creative teacher and student do together during a lesson in order to accomplish a task. Every strategy employed to achieve an outcome in a creative classroom should be a positive interaction among teachers and students.  it is just as important that teachers listen to students, because what students learn most often relates to how they are taught.

The following general suggestions -- another list -- are for such positive interactions, in which teachers and learners listen to each other and share strategies that contribute to the learning process:

• Include strategy instruction as well as subject-area instruction.
• Involved all students affirmatively, helping each of them to participate.
• Provide positive reinforcement, encouragement and praise.
• Demonstrate empathy, support and acceptance of all involved.
• Treat a variety of competencies with respect, courtesy, sensitivity, and dignity.
• Developing individual processing skills as well as group processing skills.
• Demonstrate a dynamic, enthusiastic teaching style which encourages enthusiasm from students.
• Include real-world as well as subject-specific tasks.
• Include coursework that has intrinsic interest and develop basic skills as a means to an end for real-life purposes.
• As often as possible, involved students themselves as partners in determining what will be learned and how, so that instruction emanates from needs and interests.
• Make use of strategies already successfully in use in learner's real life or in other subject areas.
• Vary the rhythm or pacing of instruction; have smooth transitions.
• Include affirmations of answers and feedback.
• Reward effort as well as success.
• Alternate a longer wait time with a quicker pace when needed.
• Periodically halt to check for understanding.
• Use effective nonverbal communication.
• Create a dynamic tension between challenge and comfort for students.
• Monitor, modify, refine and reestablish expectation if needed.
• Involved students in self-monitoring, self-control, goal-setting, self-verbalizing, and self-recording techniques.
• Incorporate any applicable special talents student have.
• Consistently give students practice in making good choices.
• Mutually agree on expectation and reasons for those expectations.

North -- Not the End But the Beginning

North is the direction in a Diné sunwise journey where energy is gathered for such things as reflection, wonder and joy about the unifying nature of all things. I am respectful of the spiritual nature of this time for many First Nations people. For my own personal and professional search to be a more creative teacher, I reflected how all I had learned might come together harmoniously. I had defined what I value about the role of creativity in our schools. I had listened to fellow teachers' suggestions about day-to-day practical improvements, such as how to get students to listen, among other things. I had delved into researchers' theories, such as the attention-getting strategies I wrote about here. Now I sought a way to unify and share the nature of my studies, not just about listening skills but about all the areas of education I had begun to study.

I decided to write a book. All teachers should write a book about their craft. It is the best way to solidify what they believe in, do every day and want to do better. So, I would be no different. My book would be for teachers and would be called Creative Planning Resource (CPR).

The book would be filled with lists of ideas to choose from -- alphabetically when reasonable, not chronologically or hierarchically prescriptive -- in categories that could prompt us to think in new, more creative ways to teach. Teachers would be able to put together ideas in their own ways to improve learning by their own students using their own resources and their own time frames. Ideas would offer infinite potential for combinations, reflecting the fact that no single model of teacher in sufficient to achieve all the aims of schooling because each teacher has his or her own unique situation to satisfy.

The book would present short and sound descriptions for a spectrum of ideas from the reform movement in education that, when put together creatively, have potential for making learning meaningful for students and for coping with changes in our schools. And the underlying theme in the book would be interconnectivity.

Over the next several years, I worked on CPR. My colleagues recognized themselves and their ideas as it developed. This nurturing group environment is behind the efforts I put into the book, and only with help and enthusiasm of my colleagues was I able to build a fledgling idea into a plan of action.

I salute every one of my friends and hope they find in the book at least one more Aha.

The book title became Creative Planning Resource for Interconnected Teaching and Learning (Peter Lang Publishing, 2002). It took ten years to gather everything I needed and wanted about teaching to the whole child using an interconnected design for learning across a balanced curriculum. I compiled a rather overwhelming twenty-page bibliography, in which are cited origins for the ideas in my mountain of material.

My blog in 2007 will continue to present categories of creative teaching ideas (like my first three posts about listening skills) until I have gotten through the whole book. Why? Because the book is such a good resource for teachers, a book of lists for them to choose from for their own classrooms. Although Peter Lang Publishing is a very good, well-respected publisher of educational books, it does not attempt to market to K-12 teachers. As a result, my colleagues in K-12 were never informed fully about the book's potential for improving the creativity in their teaching. I hope this blog will become a site for teachers to discuss some of the ideas in the book and to offer their own creative strategies for solving some of the problems in today's schools.

As I wind up today's post, I have before me the December 18 issue of Time magazine, in which the cover story is "How To Build a Student For the 21st Century" (or "How to Bring Our Schools Out of the 20th Century"). How gratifying it is to find the ideas I espouse in CPR to be some of the same ones in this article -- the importance of innovation and global citizenship, the need for interdisciplinary combinations, the value placed on new kinds of literacies and different intelligences. I hope you will stay with me in '07 as I continue on my journey -- however awkward and imperfect it is -- to present ideas for creative educational reform that are acceptable, workable and doable for our students in the 21st century.

Kids Listen Differently

Kids Listen Differently.
I took a few days off -- well, almost a week -- to work as webmaster on the site for my home-based company, OxCart Productions, Inc. Created a bunch of new pages for new products we have finished, one of which is the Christmas Medley I wrote about earlier. Got all the pages finished only to have trouble uploading to the godaddy hosting I use.

I feel pretty fried by this mishap, really really frustrated, so will take off today and go Christmas shopping. Before I leave, I wanted to piggyback on another post about listening strategies. I think they are some of the most important strategies we can practice and adopt to help reach today's youngsters.

We all know about learning styles (I'll get into a quick-and-dirty update of the variety of cognitive style systems one day soon, just so we're speaking the same language). But how do we incorporate every day some of the strategies that students with different styles need us to use?

Here are some ideas to begin with for one of the most commonly-used systems -- Barbe and Swassing's (1979, Zaner -Blower) Modalities system, in which learning is by use of sensory channels through which information is processed most efficiently.

Teachers can sprinkle these strategies randomly into lessons to reach a variety of kids' styles.

To appeal to visual learners:

• Write or draw as you speak.
• Show how to do a task rather than talk about it.
• Use a visual organizer to represent information.
• Depict a problem situation using pictures.
• Display an intriguing object.
• Use color, imagery, dramatic lighting.
• Dress up as someone else.
• Relax with mental imagery exercises that encourages visualization.
• Use visual-based words (i.e., "look", "watch", "viewpoint").

To appeal to auditory learners:

• Ask students to repeat what you have said.
• Describe how to do a task.
• Use lists or outlines to represent information.
• Depict a problem situation using colorful language.
• Describe an intriguing object.
• Use recordings, chants, dramatic music, sounds.
• Speak as if you were someone else.
• Relax with mental imagery, soothing music, environmental sounds.
• Use aural-based words (i.e., "well said", "low key", "tune in").

To appeal to kinesthetic learners:

• Ask students to demonstrate what you have said.
• Have students perform a task.
• Use manipulatives to represent information.
• Depict a problem situation using students as participants.
• Pass around an intriguing object to be touched and examined.
• Use actions, dramatic movements, games, making and doing.
• Have learners act like someone else.
• Relax with aerobic exercises.
• Use tactual-based words (i.e., "touchy", "handle", "relaxed").