Teaching Through The Arts

By virtue of our humanity, we are all creative beings.  Creativity is as much a part of us as is our very heart, soul, and mind.  So, creativity itself need not be taught.  What CAN be taught are ways to recognize, develop, and nurture that creativity within us.  Students can learn (or re-learn in many cases) that they are indeed creative.  Students can learn to rediscover the inner child.  Students can learn to think creatively and critically.  So, as teachers we certainly can teach how to explore our innate creativity, how to think creatively, and how to use our imagination to foster an open mind, heart, and spirit.

​My philosophy of teaching is simple: make learning relevant and fun. As a teacher of high school English, my goal is to help my students to become better communicators. The desired outcomes in my classroom, then, go beyond simple recall and identification. Rather, the students need to develop ways to communicate effectively on an interpersonal as well as an intrapersonal level. That is, students must be trained to be independent, critical thinkers and problem solvers who can tap their creative and imaginative potential. Simply put, they must develop their thinking, writing, reading, and speaking skills - and creativity. To achieve this, it is critical that the students see the relevance of what they are learning, and have some fun learning it. Realistically, not every student is going to find everything that is taught in my classroom relevant all the time, and not every student is going to enjoy every lesson, every method and every activity. Nevertheless, it is reasonable to try ...

Art Therapy Teaches Students to Engage Constructively with Their Emotions This article on Lesley University's website provides yet another testimony to the power of the arts in education

Teaching Through The Arts: "Gamification" I Like the Sound of That and So Wil... : Walk into many high school classrooms a few minutes before class starts and what will you see? A large number of students will be on their c...

Walk into many high school classrooms a few minutes before class starts and what will you see? A large number of students will be on their cell phones, iPads, etc. and many of those will be playing games. So if they like playing games (and who doesn't?), then shouldn't we be figuring out how to take advantage of this in the learning process? Like making a worksheet into a "playsheet" perhaps. In her article "Beyond the Worksheet: Playsheets, GBL, and Gamification" (I love that term), Educational Technology Specialist Alice Keeler discusses how using electronic devices to play learning games in class has become a hot topic in education.  She defines the following terms as " GBL [Game Based Learning] is when students play games to learn content. Gamification is the application of game based elements to non-game situations." Keller also  goes on to discuss the use of playsheets instead of worksheets; it's a thought-provoking argument that may...

In this age of let's memorize this content or this form of writing so we can do well on the high stakes testing and pretend that we learned something valuable, it becomes more and more important for us to get our students to think and have a voice. Allowing students the opportunity to come up with their own ideas and cultivate a point of view can often get lost in the race to cover content. This activity called "Save the Last Word for Me" from Facing History and Ourselves is a way to facilitate thinking and voice for all of our students. I'm definitely going to use it this fall. Save the Last Word for Me Rationale “Save the Last Word for Me” is a discussion strategy that requires all students to participate as active speakers and listeners. Its clearly defined structure helps shy students share their ideas and ensures that frequent speakers practice being quiet. It is often used as a way to help students debrief a reading or film. Procedure Step one:...

I love learning new terms and putting language to concepts; it helps me to learn it better and also helps me to explain it to others better. Allowing students to move so they can learn and think has been a constant theme in this blog, and the term "embodied cognition," thinking with and through our bodies from the article "The Body Learns"   by Annie Murphy Paul on Slate.com discusses the importance of getting the body involved in the learning process. In a series of experiments carried out more than a decade ago, Arthur Glenberg of Arizona State University " found  that children’s reading comprehension improved when they acted out a written text , using a set of representational toys (a miniature barn and horse, for example, accompanied a story about a farm). Glenberg then  demonstrated  that the same procedure could work on a digital platform: In a 2011 experiment, he showed that having first- and second-grade students manipulate images of toys on a comput...