Geisen: Bring creativity to classrooms
05/09 -- To prepare students for the 21st century, educators talk about teaching students about creativity, collaboration, innovation, and continual learning.
What we actually teach students is how to sit still and memorize a bunch of boring facts.
That kind of schooling isn’t doing our students—or our nation—any good, Michael Geisen, 2008 National Teacher of the Year, told conference attendees at a Focus on Education session.
Our nation’s current preoccupation with testing bears much of the blame, he said. State exams measure a student’s ability to recall facts and demonstrate basic skills, and as that’s all that counts in state accountability systems, schools have narrowed their curriculum accordingly.
But cramming facts into students and limiting the time available for them to practice advanced skills, learn on their own, and engage in collaborative and hands-on learning is resulting in students who actually are less educated and prepared for the 21st century.
“I see this every day in my classroom,” said Geisen, a middle school teacher in Prineville, Ore. “The joy of learning . . . that joy has been drained slowly from them. We’ve turned education into an industrial process.”
He told attendees that students’ experiences in school don’t start off as poorly as he had described. In kindergarten, he noted, children paint, draw, listen to stories, and play games.
Unfortunately, that idyllic setting ends, Geisen said. Soon students are sitting in rows and being fed facts. They learn algebraic equations that their parents learned—and never used again. Yet such equations are taught because they’re essential to pass state tests.
“We hold this up as a holy grail,” he said. “This is what achievement is all about. But this is not achievement. This is jumping through a hoop.”
School boards should take heed, Geisen said. As China and India graduate more and more engineers and scientists, the United States runs the risk of seeing its economy fall behind. Even if the nation produces plenty of graduates for its own economic needs, the reality is that engineers overseas will work for far less pay. Jobs will be outsourced.
“We need to be producing more creative engineers, more creative mathematicians, and more innovative scientists,” he said. “Around the world, people see the U.S. as a very creative entity. But when you go into our schools, well . . . that [creativity] is getting lost. That’s not what’s happening.”
Geisen advised school boards to allow teachers to inject more creativity, to take more risks, and to introduce more humor into the curriculum. Students should work more with their hands, to create more, to work together more.
“The curriculum and instruction and even the assessments we do should be imbued with creativity,” he said. In his classes, “we do a lot of dance, we build stuff, we do theater productions, we read children’s books. We check out the natural world. We make videos. We write songs.”
It’s the school board’s job, he added, “to make sure your schools are human, with a climate for enjoying and creating. It’s essential.”