Teaching Creativity

I am a musician so selling me on nurturing  creativity in our schools is not difficult.  I believe there are benefits that go way beyond learning a specific art that you are studying.  I always refer people to this link why we teach music. Studies have also shown that when someone is playing music, it is one of the only activities that uses both the left and right side of the brain, connecting the logical and creative side.  So studying music (or other arts) can help someone in other subjects or everyday life, it doesn't mean they are studying to be a musician.
Sir Ken Robinson brings up the story Schools Kill Creativity about the choreographer for Cats and other Broadway plays, going on to say that when she was a girl, she didn't pay attention in school and was fidgety.  So her teacher recommended dance school and she grew up to be a successful Broadway choreographer and millionaire entrepreneur. This is a bit misleading.  What if she went to dance school and became a mediocre dancer? Would she have any other skills to fall back on?
This is what parents will be asking when more emphasis is put on the arts and creativity in schools.
The point of that story, I think, is that if the girl stayed with her regular schooling, then she may have continued to misbehave and not do well academically.   Whether or not she was going to be a dancer, she need that outlet of creativity and movement.
Will education shift to emphasize creativity and the arts? Not any time soon. It's too risky of a proposition for both parents and educators to see the value in it.  They must understand that we are not teaching the arts so our kids will grow up to be musicians or artists or painters or dancers,  we teach the arts so that our kids will grow up to be better people

21st Century Skills ....Friend or Fad

    I started my graduate career at MSU in Sept of 2010 and since then,  21st Century Skills have been incorporated into the lesson plans being taught to me and in the lesson plans that I've been making for my students.  But it never occurred to me that these new standards in teaching weren't here to stay.   After reading several articles that were both for and against these new skill sets, there was one thing that I was sure of, fads do happen in the education world.
This was something that I hadn't realized, but the word fad came up in about 80 percent of the articles leading me to believe that it has happened before. According to Diane Ravitch article, "Criticle Thinking? You Need Knowledge", it's been happening since the early 1900's.  And just like 21st Century Skills  these "fads" emphasized hands on learning and real world skills.  
The question has been asked if I think that this is a fad, and to me that means do I think this will last or revert back to emphasis on fundamental knowledge (the 3 R's); it is asking me to predict the future. If I make my prediction based on the past, then yes,  I believe this doesn't have enough steam to keep moving.  There seems to be too much opposition to the movement.
People like Jay Mathews who is calling it a pipe dream and Daniel Willingham who says that Partnership for 21st Century Skills has overstepped their bounds by not just setting goals but suggesting methods, assessments and professional development that have not themselves been assessed and shown to be affective are both fighting this movement for various reasons. Although if you read their articles, you will see that both of them find value in what the 21st Century Skills are teaching.
The problem seems to be not so much the content, but how its delivered and there needs to be a balance (that everyone can agree upon) between the hands on, critical thinking, communication and people skills offered by  21st Century Skills and the fundamental knowledge of the core disciplines. Until teachers find a happy medium, this will continue to be a fad.

slideshow

Back to school_night

View more webinars from msbiskup.
Here is my back to school night slideshow with audio.  I really hate my voice, I need to start talking clearer and mumble less.  This portion of the slide show presentation was easier for me.  I am already familiar with music and sound editing programs, I own Pro Tools and Garageband and I have worked with Audacity and many other programs. Most of them are easy to use and as you jump from one program to another, you start to see they they operate very similar. 
After seeing the presentation about power point presentations and how they can be more harmful than helpful, I realized that there are a lot of pitfalls that I may have fell in had I not seen it. Still, my presentation still needs a lot of work.  I think I'll do much better when planning out my next presentation.  Or if I were to plan a whole lesson using it.  I really like the video where the science teacher was able to relay the information through a presentation over the internet and save class time for the hands on part.  That really got me thinking about the applications for music class.  It would be great if I could find a way for them to practice music together with these programs.

Back to School Night Presentation

I made a slide show presentation for the parents of my students when they come to see me on "back to school night".  In it, I brought up the 4 C's of 21st century learning (critical thinking, creativity, communication and collaboration), which I have been learning about at this website 21st Century Learning.  Then I ran the parents through a project that we would be doing in my class, a sound poem.  This is when we take a short poem and create "soundscapes" to be played while the poem is being read aloud.  The project usually takes 2 or 3 classes and in that time the students will have demonstrated the the 4 C's. Plus there is cross discipline learning with language arts. It's a really great project and the kids have a lot of fun with it.

Being able to create a presentation and post it online is a great thing. I really like the quote that professor Bigsby wrote in the weekly assignments " you have just expanded the walls of your classroom", it made me think of what I was doing and the potential of what can be done by way of communication and collaboration with parents, students and other teachers. Thinking back to when I was in school, I can see limited we were and how freeing the internet can be for educators. There are so many applications for it, maybe even some that haven't even been thought of yet.

Tech Standards and Lesson Plans

Tech Standards

After reading the Technology Standards in the NJCCCS, my first thought was "are schools going to start having a mandatory technology class?" Improbable but not impossible.  And thinking back to my class last semester, Democratic Teaching, I remember trying to make lessons that included cross disciplinary standards.  So I guess every one of the standards could be implemented in an existing classroom.
For me, being in the music program, I would utilize of the communication portion of the standards and find away to interact with music classrooms in different countries, with different types of music.
When going on job interviews and looking into schools that I would like to work at, I think it would be great to work for people that were like the ones from Chatam High School.  I think it's important to be forward thinking, especially in education. (maybe even ahead of the game a bit if we want our students to be current when they graduate).  If I want to try and do things in my classroom, like try and interact (live) with another class around the world, I would need to be working with people who understand that we, as educators, should be looking for better ways to do things.

Communication and Collaboration

I decided to think of a lesson based on the NJCCCS 8.1 Educational Technology. C. Communication and Collaboration  and environments support the learning process and foster collaboration in solving local or global issues and problems. The CPI is 8.1.8 C1 (8th grade), participate in an online learning community with learners from other countries to understand their perspectives and global problems or issues, propose possible solutions.

What I understand this to mean is that this standard wants students to be able to talk with other students around the world on specific subjects.  This will help kids understand different perspectives that people have around the word and therefore ready them for a global workplace. 

As I said in an earlier blog, I think it would be great if we can have an online interaction between two music classes around the world.  I would have the students talk about typical rhythms and melody found in there culture and perform them for each other.  Also I would like the students to get insight into how the music came to be.  Music can be a great historic indicator of a culture because the musicians are influenced by the society the live in.  Politics, economics, geography, these things help shape an artist's work.

Dover Township

For my second assignment, I researched Dover Township school district in Morris County.  I live here in Dover and have been for about 3 years so I was curious as too what their website looked like.  But before I begin with the website I would like to talk about the town.
Dover is made up of mostly a Hispanic community, about 70 percent,  comprised of Puerto Rican, Columbian, Chillian and Mexican.  Spanish is the main language spoken in this town which makes me a minority here.  But I love it, great people, great restaurants.
The school has a DFG A rating which is the lowest of the socioeconomic groups, but you wouldn't know it looking at the school district's website dover township.  It is a fully comprehensive website, it has almost everything that Jamie Mackenzie mentions in her article "Why in the World Wide Web".
There is a great home page with an introductory and mission statement, there are links to other resources offered on the web and I did find data relevant to specific subjects.
What I didn't find was any gallery of work done by the students and I didn't find individual teacher pages but there were pages for individual classes that had assignments and resources on them.  Also, there was teacher contact information.   All in all, for a a district factor group A website, I thought it was well done.

Tech and Me

I've been out of school for a long time now and it's hard for me to get use to the scale at which computers are being used in the classroom.   Since doing my observation last semester, I've seen it used from software that teaches different subjects to the students, to smart boards, to networking with the parents in order to keep them up to speed on their child's homework.  None of this was around when I was in school, but I think it's a great thing.
And like I said, it's going to take some getting use to.  I don't use computers too much in my daily life besides checking my e-mail, editing music and editing video.  I'm not really into social networking either,  I have a Facebook account but I rarely use it.  I do see the usefulness of networking on a professional level; finding out what's new in my field, communicating with students parents.  So I'm going to have to learn to love technology (not that I ever hated it)