ON CREATIVITY AND THE STORIES OUR SCHOOLS TELL THEMSELVES
Around each March, a few students say they can do my job better than me. At the end of the year, I let them mock the adults in the building for a bit before they graduate to high school. A few years ago, however, I decided to flip that challenge and gave them a lesson plan template to work from. They were interested in how they could get their class to learn. They’d create whole poster boards for their lessons and develop PowerPoint projects that they’d use to teach me. In May, they were a few days from presenting and teaching their classes.
A few adults walked in with power and gaze. One of them said, “Does this look like the kids are learning?” The question already prompted disapproval. Instead of asking for my lesson, asking my students, and watching them speak as if the learning was theirs, a few minutes passed by and a whole department and district would be pushed, prodded, berated, and prompted over the years and to this day to the traditional, rote pedagogy that would supposedly raise test scores and, ostensibly, learning.
With only a hint of irony in these adult voices, the call for creativity has rung louder recently. No. Don’t do that.
Creativity continues to float around the educational zeitgeist even as the ropes tighten the noose around our pedagogies. The move to emulate rigorous – the actual meaning of the word – instruction may have had good intentions. We assigned more numbers to what we felt the students learned. Graduation rates. College acceptance rates. Test scores. All of them. If these and other numbers CONTINUE READING: On Creativity and The Stories Our Schools Tell Themselves | The Jose Vilson
