Sunday, November 25, 2012
creative schools- or not.
I was reading an article by Eric Sheninger, a principal that I follow on twitter, on creative schools. Here is the link to it. The article itself wasn't really eye-opening for me because I happened to agree with what he was saying. In short he toured a Google campus and was inspired by the creativity of the building and wanted to know why we can't translate some of these ideas to our schools. What really suprised me, was the number of negative comments the post received. Almost every single person posted about how horrible an idea it would be to model our schools after Google's workspace. How it would distract children from their work, how our schools need a firm structure or our children won't learn, and how we need to focus on improving the quality of education our children receive and not just the exterior of the building (which is a valid point, but shouldn't we be doing both?) I am not sure why these comments bothered me so much but they did. It was almost as if these people didn't want school to be engaging and fun for children. As if this was the worst idea they could possibly imagine. But why? I am interested to know what others think. Am I reading too much into these comments? Should our already limited budget go to more important resources, and if so, what resources should we invest in to motivate and engage our students more effectively?
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This seems sort of the classic argument that we hear a lot that a) schools are badly broken and b) to fix them, we need to do more of the same. So many of the comments assume that there is something called "basics" that we must trudge through before being allowed to get to the creative/critical work. That's sort of classic factory model thinking where schools just keep adding things incrementally in a pre-ordained pace.
ReplyDelete(and the Architect recently took at team of teachers to Google to generate talk about what their new school might become!)
Wow, that is a lot of toxic spewage in the comments! A good reminder to avoid the comments when I read a really thoughtful, reflective, creative post like that. Sheesh.
ReplyDeleteWhat struck me most about his actual post (as opposed to the toxic comments) and about your reflections was *not* some idea that we should spend money we don't have on architecture we don't need while our children are suffering, but rather that he was noticing the possibility of choosing to operate from an abundance mindset right now, even in in the middle of our existing situations.
• What is stopping us from having a LEGO wall and creative spaces?
• Why should our schools NOT designate common spaces for shared extensions of learning?
In spite of our country's disastrous economic hardships, most of us still live in the midst of great abundance, if we are only open to seeing it. I discovered this last year when I wanted to do a LEGO project in my math classes. At first I was put off by the prohibitive cost of the LEGOs themselves. So I sent out a message to our community to ask if anybody had any LEGOs tucked away in their attic or garage that they might like to donate to my classroom. I could not believe how many families were delighted to donate old LEGO sets and pieces they had hung onto and forgotten -- and how happy they were to see them put them to good use in my classroom!
Reading those comments on Eric Sheninger's piece was a good wake-up call for me to stay grounded in a mindset of abundance rather than of scarcity. The scarcity-mongers and naysayers have been in charge for too long, and it is time for us to take education back from them. That is part of why I came back to teaching. Teaching gets done by the people who show up. I would rather that people like us show up and teach our children to dwell in the abundant possibilities than in a mud puddle of whining and negativity.
- Elizabeth (aka @cheesemonkeysf on Twitter)