Poem in Your Pocket: Wrap Up

Well, all in all, Poem in your Pocket went really well. There was a noticeable buzz about poetry in the school, and many of the students remembered to bring their poems along. The special assembly was great, with a wide range of poetry shared, and a lot of people were stopping to check out the poems displayed around the school. Extra special was the poems placed into the tuck-shop bags - lots of kids got a kick from this. A really fun way to celebrate poetry!

Enjoying Moments of Beauty

After a short week (agricultural show holidays on Monday and Wednesday), I'm kind of looking forward to a proper week of work. Unfortunately I won't be enjoying that next week as I have training Monday to Wednesday.

Yesterday was another variation when the next door teacher and I took our combined classes to the Queensland Art Gallery to see the American Impressionists and Realists exhibition. This wasn't a terribly planned excursion (although it fitted in to my museum unit, it wasn't written in) but the chance to take them to this was just too good to pass up.

Our aim was simple - to have the kids looking, enjoying and sketching the paintings. The reality was amazing - students were completely engaged with some of them spending up to an hour working on one painting. Most of them had never been to an art gallery before, and many of them were completely awed by the beauty of the paintings - one even begged to go back and look at one painting 'just one more time.'

It really reminded me that part of being a teacher is allowing the students to have moments like this - to allow them to explore and experience beautiful things. To let them immerse themselves in it, without a huge focus on what is 'produced'. I think yesterday is going to be a day which sticks for many of those kids, for all the right reasons.

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Picture from Queensland Art Gallery

(Professional Learning) On Creativity in the School System

I just finished watching my first online lecture, and I've got to say I've never been happier to have wireless! What was I thinking staying on dial up for so very long.

Anyway, the lecture I watched was Do School's Today Kill Creativity by Ken Robinson. Ken Robinson is a world recognised expert on developing innovation and has a particular interest in school. He gave this lecture at a conference on ideas and creativity.

The basic idea was that the education systems we have today were evolved from the industrial times in the 19th century, and therefore have a focus on two things - a) doing things which will get you a traditional job and b) traditional academic achievement leading to eventual university success. This focus means that schools consider mistakes to be the worst things you can possibly make.

Of course, as Ken Robinson says, " . . . if you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original."

I see this in my school, in the requirements I'm required to meet in my classroom, in the media we are bombarded with. This evening the news was making pronouncements on the 'best' schools, based on their OP scores. This morning we were being told that we're poor teachers because we're not university professors in all 7 areas we're required to teach, that we should specialise, break all knowledge into cute little boxes and never stray from our best areas.

At the moment I'm teetering between QCATs (Queensland Comparative Assessment Tasks) for Year 6s and NAPLAN (National Assessment Program: Literacy and Numeracy) for my Year 5s. While we were practicing the writing task today for NAPLAN (5 minutes planning, 30 minutes writing, 5 minutes editing, write a story about this topic and please stay within the lines) I had to remind one of the students not to spend time drawing an illustration for her text. Even if her picture told the story better than her words, that picture would leave her severely disadvantaged in the tests because of the short time limit, and she would be considered not to be taking the tests 'seriously'. This is despite the fact that our 'Essential Learnings' (curriculum) regards art as a type of text to be studied and created.

So what is creativity and how can we make sure it's there, present in our classrooms?

I suppose creativity is in dance and art and music and drama. But it's also in thought, in encouraging the students to take risks, to approach things in their own way. It's in encouraging students to think and to be prepared to get things wrong from time to time.