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Unlocking Teacher Creativity: An Approach to Staff Development?

I posted recently about learning from Wes Fryer’s Shanghai workshop how easy it is to compose original music on Apple’s GarageBand. I posted my first two fragments (one funk, one trance), both of which I made in less than 20 minutes, and made in front of a student audience during a demo. More interestingly, that post includes what Jason, a teacher down the hall, strutted into my classroom the next day to show off - his own very first composition, a catchy little hip-hop piece.

Carolyn Foote put a tweet out on my Twitbin yesterday

If anyone wants to twitter “One trait of a good staff development workshop” for my teachers, that’d be great–doing this workshop all day!

Remembering Patrick Higgins‘ typically innovative approach a few weeks back of rounding up any edublogger volunteers to join his teachers in New Jersey on a Skypecast, in which teachers asked the questions and led us (Carolyn, Konrad Glogowski, and me) into discussions about classroom blogging - and remembering Will Richardson’s “unconference” approach to a workshop he led in Shanghai this month - I replied to Carolyn with this: “Interactive, unconference - let them guide (like Patrick’s Skype session with us and Konrad).”

Now, I know this requires a Mac with GarageBand, but I’m going to pass this little anecdote on, anyway, because you may be able to adapt it with cross-platform things. Here it is: I put an “allstaff” email out labeled something like “Be a Songwriter in 20 minutes with GarageBand.” In the email, I attached the mp3 of my first composition, and shared that anybody could learn to create a song on GarageBand in a flash. And I invited all-comers to let me know if they wanted me to show them how.

I got six replies (out of 30 teachers, not bad) the first day. And again, Jason had already started composing within 24 hours of seeing how easy it is now.

So my gut says - and I’m repeating my previous post here, because I think it bears repeating: Workshops that present technology as a teaching tool - something “schooly” - might be less effective, as Wes Fryer and Gary Stager would probably agree, than presenting it as a creativity tool.

We’ve read a million times (and should write it a million more) that teachers cannot understand blogging, much less use it effectively in their classrooms, if they haven’t experienced doing blogging themselves (and even that’s too simple, since they need to do more than just write online to really understand blogging - but that’s a later post). That’s a similar sermon to what I’m preaching here. But anybody who has tried to persuade teachers to begin blogging knows it’s an up-cliff battle almost all the time. All the teachers (and administrators) I’ve encouraged to begin blogging have resisted with such claims as, “But I don’t have time to write every day” (rebuttal: Moses included no Law saying “Thou Shalt Blog Daily”), or “I’m not a good writer” (a response worth its own post, later, or addressed sort of at the end of my last one), or “I don’t have anything to say” (a cause for weeping).

These are all responses we have to respect, because well, there they are: cold hard realities.

But the easy seduction of six teachers into creating their own music with GarageBand suggests that maybe we should remember that, like our students, our teachers and admin too possess multiple intelligences (and check out this great interview with Howard Gardner at Edge.com, my favorite science/philosophy/culture online mag).

And maybe we should approach Staff Development Workshops by having a menu of “digitally creative activities” grouped under headings for all those multiple intelligences.

So: a sketch of the process that I might try out next week for our own workshop:

Step One: Take a multiple intelligences inventory and discover your strongest intelligence.
Step Two: On the “Digital Arts” menu, select an activity you want to learn under your specific intelligence type.
Step Three: Alone or in groups, go at it, and ask for help whenever you need it.

Uh-oh. This calls for a wiki to host that menu.

Often when I have ideas, I tend to stall and falter, out of some perfectionistic strain that says, “Don’t commit to trying this until it’s perfect.” But somebody’s remark recently - Doug Noon’s, maybe? who has some great thoughts and comment-resources about staff development on this post, by the way - that learning and teaching are “always in beta” helps. I’ll make the wiki and invite all-comers to comment and contribute.

Has anyone else tried the “personal creativity” intro, instead of the “classroom tool” one, for staff workshops? Anybody have anything to report on that?

Because I can’t help but say it: Even if we love our jobs, the word “job” is still aversive - especially in comparison with the word “creativity.” Don’t we all have creative yearnings? And isn’t satisfying them more possible now than ever before?

And wouldn’t discovering that possibility by unlocking your own creativity be a much more powerful motivator than being told you’re expected to use this stuff in your class?

I can’t help but think that, once teachers find themselves making music, films, photo-collages, whatever, creatively, then the creative classroom use of these tools will follow.