conformity strangles creativity
Monday, February 16, 2009 at 01:18PM Can you really blame us teacher-folk for placing an almost singular emphasis on getting our students to pass multiple choice tests when that’s the only indicator that anyone really cares about? Why should I go out on a limb and spend time allowing my kids to create when no one measures and reports on their abililty to innovate?
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Spend a few months in a typical American schoolteacher’s shoes and you’re going to find that our jobs have shifted over the last 15 years. No longer are we artists crafting lessons based on a meaningful understanding of our students, ready to shift gears at a moment’s notice to respond to what we see unfolding in front of us.
Instead — in high performing schools with confident principals — we’re scientists methodically studying our instruction trying to identify and amplify “best practices.” Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with practitioners working together to identify “best practices.” The hitch is that principals want to see best practices administered in the same way in every room. There is real pressure in today’s schools for instructors to conform — and conformity strangles creativity.
The pressure to conform is only multiplied in low-performing schools, where teachers aren’t even gven the opportunity to develop and identify practices. Instead, heavily scripted curricula developed by “district experts” are handed to teachers, and implementation is carefully monitored. If teachers aren’t at a particular point on a particular day, they’re reprimanded for falling behind the district-approved pacing guide.
What kinds of messages are we sending to teachers about the importance of creativity when we take ownership over the most basic tasks in their profession away? Can you really expect teachers to provide opportunities for their students to create and innovate when they never see the same opportunities?
To put it simply, innovation isn’t rewarded in schools. Instead, it’s often punished. Want to see creativity creep back into the classroom? Empower teachers. — Creativity is Dead, Ken..., by Bill Ferriter
“Conformity strangles creativity” — and, I might add, conformity doesn’t meet the needs of individual students. It’s what we were talking about here, isn’t it?
We cannot champion ideals, goals, and values for our children and simultaneously rip them away from the adults who mentor them.
We need to find a way to release schools, teachers, and students from the shackles of standardized testing and standardized education.
And we homeschoolers need to take every advantage of our ability to craft a custom education for our children.
Reader Comments (31)
I've been out of elementary school way longer than 15 years, and I have no idea what this person is talking about. I certainly didn't encounter any educational "artists crafting lessons based on a meaningful understanding" of me or anyone else. Shift gears? Really? We were given standardized tests every year. The kindergarten results tracked us FOR THE REST OF OUR PUBLIC SCHOOL LIVES. Once tracked, it was extremely difficult for anyone to claw their way up. And god forbid you were a "smart" kid in my middle school who wanted to take art instead of French--it was one or the other, and the higher-tracked kids were given French. (That was the only language option.) This whole piece you've quoted makes me laugh (in a sardonic, cynical way) because it implies things were MUCH better when I was in school. Nope.
Wow, thought I. I can only imagine what she would make of us!! Ha. The kids I know who have had a decent time in public school and who have emerged relatively unscathed and with their creativity and brains intact and functioning independently, all -- ALL -- have had parents who were involved in the school. Every single one. Step back and let someone else with their quotas to meet and their test scores to maintain in order to keep their job? Interference?! *sigh*
I was glad to arrive back home and read this post : )
of all the teachers i had from K through 12th, i would say i liked a few of them, but i can only think of one teacher who might have fit the description up above. but i always think that i probably had a bottom-of-the-bell-curve education at my dinky rural school so i shouldn’t think my experience as typical.
still, as an adult i do know teachers who desperately want to be this and are ordered *not* to be by their administration.
This whole piece you've quoted makes me laugh (in a sardonic, cynical way) because it implies things were MUCH better when I was in school. Nope.
Glad to make you laugh, Amy.
Having taught my way through the past 16 years, I can tell you that things are certainly much different now than they were when I began teaching. "Better" is a subjective word---what's "better" to me might be "worse" to you---so I hesitate to use it.
What I can say is that there is no wiggle room in schools today----no opportunities to explore student interests or to drift away from the required pacing guides set by the state. When we do drift, we end up behind, our test scores suffer, and our principals call us on the carpet.
For students, that means personal interests and motivations are completely irrelevant. Take today, for example: I had my students completely jazzed by the idea that color is nothing more than reflected light and that without light, you couldn't have color.
They asked a million questions and had a million mini-experiments that they wanted to try. We sat in a pretty well equipped science lab, so trying their tests was entirely possible. The hitch: I have to have light done by Friday so I can start sound. We didn't have time for their studies.
Fifteen years ago, I would have canned everything, cut a few lessons out of the sound unit and let the kids bury their minds in something that resonated with them. Today, I literally said, "Great questions, kids. I wish we had time to explore them, but we don't. We've got to move on."
How's that for funny?
Bill Ferriter
Then I stepped into my first classroom, and the lesson was literally scripted out for me. We moved, but my second district was the same. Just as this says, I had to be on the same lesson as every other teacher in my district on any given day; I had to teach the lesson as it was taught. We weren't supposed to add anything or substitute anything, because the lessons in the *magic binders* were supposed to be perfectly balanced to teach everything our kids needed to know...everything they needed to know to pass the state test. Never mind what they needed to know in real life; never mind what they needed to know about art or music or so many other things.
The irony of this is that I am now struggling to break out of that mold, to allow a more organic nature to take over in my homeschool teaching. I hated following the curriculum, yet I guess some part of me loved feeling like I was accomplishing something tangible...yet teaching children is so much more elusive. A teacher might see skills develop, milestones reached, but there is so much more that is going on in the mind that is not tangible and cannot be listed and nicely checked off in a prescribed order. So ironic!
diane — wow!
bill, so depressing. thank you for sharing your story. again — something i’ve heard again and again from teachers.
i’ve had a school bring me in to talk about project-based learning and then turn around and tell the teachers that they had to turn in lesson plans for their students three weeks ahead of time detailing what they would be doing each day and how they would be meeting the state learning standards. they were completely inflexible regarding this — you had to say what you would do each day, down to the hour, period. it is entirely possible to teach with projects and meet state standards — *entirely* possible — but unfortunately it is not possible to predict exactly what you will be doing on each day if you are going to allow the children to follow their interests organically.
one teacher asked her principal if she could turn in goals three weeks early and detailed descriptions of how they met each standard after the fact. the answer? no.
jen, again, i’m so sorry, but thank you for sharing your story. re: accomplishing something tangible .. that’s one of the things i was trying to articulate the other day .. that we need to sit down and think first about our goals and what we want most to accomplish, so we can measure against that as we go and see how we are doing. and that is a list we can only write for ourselves — possibly filled with intangibles.
One school, in a poor area, tried to bring about a change, by having a reading "project". Over 12 weeks, the children were taken to the local library and encouraged to join and spend time reading for fun, they did lots of theme work on various books and authors, and the teachers took 5 mins at the end of the day to read to their class.
Afterwards, the teachers commented that they felt enthused and excited, just by taking the time to enjoy a story with the children. Before they started, they had worried that there wasn't time, they'd fall behind, etc. But they found they could squeeze in the time, with the result that everyone - child and teacher - was happier in their school environment.
If we could just see schools making small changes, here and there, teachers would feel more involved and the children would get a better education.
In the meantime, I home educate :-)
mary, i was waiting for the punchline to have something to do with school! ;^)
sam, ah, i wonder if way over there you have heard anything about my state’s now-infamous governor blagojevich. he cooked up a plan a few years ago to help bring literacy to underprivileged children by mailing them books, because, he said, these children generally have no children’s books in their homes. that program was going to cost, i believe, 26 million dollars. meanwhile we have existing libraries where parents can bring all the books into their home for free that they want — and bookmobiles to bring them right to their front door. and how many more books and bookmobiles and programs could the libraries have provided with some of that 26 million dollars?
(read a bit about that debacle — which evidently didn’t happen after all — here: http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/10/the-blagojevich-upside/ )
i agree with you 100% about small changes, and i think the point that bill was making is — teachers aren’t allowed to make those changes. they aren’t allowed to take that five minutes. i mean, we have schools that have completely eliminated recess so that students can spend more time learning (young students! kindergarten students!), where any teacher will tell you that 20 minutes racing around outside makes for a much better learning environment for the rest of the morning.
thank you so much for sharing that story!
does anyone know the correct stat for how many teachers quit in the first three years? it’s a big number.
The saddest part is that stunts like these and requiring that all students take AP classes have earned those schools spots on the Best High Schools list put out by US News & World Report. Can our priorities be any more screwed up?
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2008178151_riley14m.html
Classroom learning was not ideal in the days when I was a teacher, but at least the pendulum was off to the other direction fifteen years ago. Schools were much more child-centered. In the late 80's I was trained to teach math in a way that gave kids open-ended problems, and had them discuss their own ways of solving them. Writing was taught in a workshop environment--in other words, kids were learning to write by actually writing on topics and in genres of their own choosing. I used *real* books in my classroom rather than textbooks, and I alternated teaching science and social studies so we could really dig into a topic rather than trying to cover too much in a day.
I had a lot of freedom as a teacher, and teaching felt like an art. Of course, after homeschooling, I'd have a hard time teaching in a traditional classroom setting; I just don't believe in classroom learning all day long, day after day. But that's how most kids in this country are taught, and it breaks my heart that they can't have the experience of inspired, excited teachers who get to teach as they'd like to.
I keep waiting for that pendulum to swing back; it always seems to eventually.
I've been reading through some old posts and feel newly inspired.
And for today's topic - I quit teaching after one year and am some thankful to get to teach again - this time my own children.
funny my last 2 comments are from educators who are now hs’ing; there are so many of us on here. (though i wasn’t a teacher, i did own a school and spend a lot of time teaching.)
paula, thank you!