ALT/space

As I finished a session with a class of second-graders today, I asked them to identify their favorite moments from class.  Amongst the ‘everything!’ answers and those noting the joy of being unusually physically involved during a lesson, one girl said, ‘Being the Christmas present.’ It’s true.  I bestowed upon her the title of Christmas present for a brief moment as the students were forming themselves into groups. I note that, in that brief moment, all eyes were on her and she held the greatest power in the room. Then she made a choice, the session continued and the moment forgotten until she mentioned it again at the session’s conclusion.

The moment came about when I tasked the students with creating groups of their own choice, bound only by the number to be included.  The students bustled about, as expected, choosing and re-choosing potential group mates until just the single girl stood alone.  I called her over to me, saying, ‘Look what I found. Look what I found!  A Christmas Present. Which group would like a present?’ Hands in every group shot up. The girl smiled and chose the group she wanted to join.

Such a small moment, such a simple task, the question might be why put so much energy and focus on it?  Why not simply assign her a group and move on?  I am the product of last choice sports teams.  All throughout high school I suffered the indignity of being last choice when teams were chosen. And generally it was very public, as the team captains slowly chose one team member at a time, until I stood there alone, last, undesirable choice. I was generally told to just toughen up and learn to get over it.  And I always wondered why should I have to?

So I have experimented endlessly, and continue to do so, to find as many ways to guide students to create and choose groups that support varied interaction, giving power to the oft powerless and finding ways to turn the dynamics, so that those who might have once stood vulnerable and deflated, suddenly become the most powerful and desired in the room.

More than just momentary power and good feeling, these tiny events contribute to positive, support working relationships in the room.  Trying to avoid telling the students how to treat each other, I offer models for how we honor each individual and their potential contributions.  In addition to the answer, ‘being the Christmas present,’ I have regularly heard from older students such answers as, ‘I got to meet more people in the class’ and ‘I liked working with the kids in class I never worked with.’

Christmas is a time for good feelings. I keep wondering, why not bring that to class every day?

“I have a question for you.” This starts most of my residencies nowadays, followed by, “But you cannot answer it. Not now.”  I fashioned the opening to grab students’ attentions quickly. They always show greater interest in a question when they are not allowed to answer it. I also find having a question to dangle throughout a lesson keeps students both more focused on our task and more clear about the purpose of their participation: find an evidence-based answer to that question.

The concept of an Essential Question never played a role in my early training or reading.  Upon ‘discovering’ it and its partner, the Enduring Understanding, the pair quickly became a core part of my teaching and my training of others, which started with my own staff.

While reviewing evaluative forms with my staff from teachers and students, I discovered a reoccurring issue.  In post-program reflections, students referred most often to statements repeated by my staff many times throughout a program or residency; these tended to be management statements focused on how to behave, listening carefully, maintain concentration and the like.  These responses started to outnumber those that mentioned the actual learning objectives or central purpose of the program.  The obvious struck me.  Core ideas needed to be explicitly introduced through questions or big idea statements, repeated many times and involve students in realizing them in tangible ways that would help the students clearly understand the original, explicit question. In other words, Enduring Understanding statements and Essential Questions should permeate a residency to provide focused lesson design, re-occurring reflection on the questions, and a sense of investigation with a continuity of purpose.

Quite simply, employing this pair of tools has helped me focus every residency, but more importantly, the students have shown greater understanding of the purpose of their experiences and are much easier to engage in reflective discussions.  In a more effective way than with my previous work, the students are ‘in’ on what we are exploring and discovering.  They have a heightened sense of why they engage in the ongoing sequence of activities. For some, they show a desire to want to answer the question that gets introduced daily but is almost a tease because answering it remains forbidden.

I once guided a group of first graders to consider the following pair.  ‘Great ideas live inside of stories,’ and ‘When stories are different, can they be the same?’ The purpose was to get the students to compare a pair of stories and to uncover ideas and concepts that exist in many stories beyond the obvious elements of setting, character and etc. 

Although the Essential Question isn’t one that elicits deep answers, I designed it specifically to trick the students. In addition, in combination with the Enduring Understanding, I would be able to guide the students to reconsider their kneejerk answers by first considering what great ideas exist within individual stories and then use that to compare the pair of stories we would explore.  One student couldn’t wait to answer the Essential Question and, despite the fact that I forbade any answers yet, the moment I said, ‘When stories are different, can they be the same?’ he blurted out “No!” several times.  As about halfway through the residency, as we finished exploring the first story, he answered the question again, saying, “They could be the same, I think, if the stories were by the same author.” At the end of the residency, when we finally had a full discussion on the question, he said, “I know now.  Stories have different parts that can be the same as each other.”

I enjoy it when the students want to answer the question, want to discover the meaning behind an Enduring Understanding and become the ones moving a lesson forward in the hopes of uncovering a new possible answer.  When they develop understanding and ownership of an experience, I find the learning is that much stronger.

A young model and actress recently messaged me online. ‘Dan, I shot the first scene on my first feature film today.  I was thinking back to when I was twelve, on stage performing in the play you directed.  I want to thank you for that wonderful experience and let you know you had a great impact, even thirteen years later.’  This was perhaps the third time I’ve heard from her in those thirteen years

As a teaching artist, due to the brief time I most often have with students, I too rarely know the long term impact I have on them. If I do reminisce with one-time students, however, I hear lovely and affecting anecdotes, pithy memories crystallized over time.  A local Hawaii actor, one who is a great risk-taker, reminded me of being inspired when I, apparently, said, ‘It ain’t worth doing if you ain’t going to go all the way.’ A budding film-maker attributes the wild style of his first film to my statement, ‘Be very good. Be very bad. Just don’t be forgettable.’ The truth is I don’t always remember saying or doing what some attribute to me.  The words or actions so often arise in the moment as I respond to the needs of the particular group or individual.

Zoom forward to now…

Quiet Isabel, a first grader and English Language Learner, is a bit overwhelmed by school, language, learning and her surroundings. By all accounts, she is reserved and generally withdrawn in class.  However, in my recent drama class, she always participated, most often with a giggle on her lips and wide, enthusiastic eyes.  Although she struggled with words and speaking, generally only talking aloud when we practiced the poem we were working on, she always proved ready to participate. Enthusiastically.

Her teacher approached me one day and thanked me for helping this little girl become more vocal and participatory in class.  From then on, as I watched Isabel progress through class, I thought of my previous students and began to wonder, what is this little girl walking away with?  What has captured her attention? What have I done that inspires this young child who has been so reserved in class, but suddenly has discovered a new aspect of herself? Since she could not articulate such thoughts beyond giggling the words, ‘its fun,’ I was left to imagine the reasons.

I cannot predict what they will remember and I don’t for a moment believe that just because I say it, or teach it, that they will remember it.  Thinking about Eric Booth’s 80% rule (which he spoke about in this article posted on the Teaching Artist Journal website), I believe more and more that inspiration comes with the atmosphere I create, the invitation I offer to the students to be deeply invested and work with me more as a partner than a student, how I embed my philosophies in the way I teach the class rather than simply talk about them and the way I embody what I espouse.

I become a kind of drama mother or father. The students watch and listen, but more importantly they engage with me, gaining more from the way I interact with them than from what I say. A random, unplanned moment here or there inspires, tickles, humors or impresses them.  I will probably never really know when those moments happen, so I challenge myself to own them, to live them, to be them in the hopes that I am what my students might like to be.

While driving along the lava framed highway of Kona with a fellow teaching artist, we chatted about a series of just completed sessions. This was our first time working together with children and we had gained great insight into each other’s approaches and processes. During our drive he asked several insightful questions that opened me to describing beliefs and practices that I rarely voice yet significantly inform my work in the classroom. My descriptions surprised me somewhat, in that I had never really owned these beliefs in a tangible form, simply practiced them. As I detailed moment by moment choices, decisions and revisions, I came to a few realizations about how reactive my work is to both the students as well as my own momentary choices. The conversation also solidified that, although I value and espouse thorough planning, I am more conscious than I thought of the needs of the moment when I teach.

Being a teaching artist is, by nature, a solitary endeavor and working in Hawaii intensifies that condition.  Even having a staff and even as one who regularly hosts and conducts teaching artist trainings, I feel that I don’t benefit from enough situations like the one along the lava highway.  I wish to be clear that this is greater than swapping activities, or collaboratively planning learning experiences.  This is about having the time and purposeful focus to dig deeper into the reasons for choices that inform praxis and intentionality of approach, or engage in a sort of roundtable discussion that is meant to probe possibilities, or have the chance to consider beliefs.  Any of these activities are of the kind that can inspire me into new realms or endeavors.

This all leads to why I write for public forums; blogs, articles, and books.  As both a reader and a writer I am less interested in being told or telling someone how to conduct a class or which activity to choose, but more in discovering what beliefs I own, why those beliefs exist, what mistakes and choices led to uncovering those beliefs, the risks that have paid off and those that have not. It gives me the chance to have an internal dialog, but more importantly to tangibly define my understanding of the choices I make and the reasons I made them:  to own my work in a concrete fashion.  I have often encouraged other teaching artists to write publically because, frankly, I want to benefit as well from their internal dialogue, to delve with them into the depth of their reflective thought and discover new inspirations.

When speaking with my newest book’s co-author recently, we discovered that our developing book about reflective practice has been more beneficial to both of us than we anticipated.  We began writing together in 2010 because we believed that we had many common beliefs. However, our still very current (2012) partnership continues because we have discovered so many differences that, honestly, have enriched each of our practices.  Our conversations have not always been easy, not at all. But the challenging debates have led to an ongoing series of discoveries which have forced each of us to be very clear about why we believe in and advocate for the work we do

The great joy of writing is that upon completion, I find success in what I have discovered about my beliefs and practice.  The actual appearance of the work in black and white feels good, but the ownership over my practice is so much more rewarding.

Vanmark sat in the corner, his hoodie drooped far over his eyes. He volunteered no answers to questions. During the drama sessions he, like most of the other students, waited for others to stand first or looked about the room before making any choices and then usually contributed the minimum possible.

Four years later, Vanmark still wears the hoodie, but by creative choice as he is portraying the Prince of Darkness in a Faust-like scene that his group is creating.  Four years later, he has annually participated in my drama residencies as well as occasional projects conducted by his teacher. I have, in essence, partnered with Vanmark and sixteen other students from his class for various numbers of years (Henney and Charisma, 11^th graders, first participated when in elementary school). 

In this remote, North Hawaii Island high school, artistic experiences are few and nearly non-existent for the English Language Learners (ELL) with whom I work. About 30-40 of them see me generally for 7-8 sessions each year as a part of an annual residency that is financially precarious; the very existence of the partnership is a struggle as mandates and funding are subject to the almost whims of administrators and legislators far removed from the daily benefits of such collaborative relationships.

Despite the precarious arts education situation in my island state, these students have experienced a long-term, widely-spread developmental cycle in which growth has been steadily apparent. Intrinsically motivated involvement has increased and the students’ enhanced awareness and understanding of drama has contributed to both comfort and the desire to engage.  I cannot, however, claim complete responsibility for these successes. Strong, enthusiastic partnerships support, extend and make possible this work in a school that lacks consistent arts experiences for any of its students.  The school ELL resource teacher is enthusiastic and hands-on, the Vice Principal is a quiet cheer-leader and the District-wide ELL resource teacher is a champion who digs up needed financial support.

I write about this multi-tiered relationship, as I have been thinking a lot about a recently released nationally-focused white paper which defines a partnership triad that includes arts educators (part- to full-time faculty or staff in a school setting), classroom teachers and visiting teaching artists.  As it defines and triumphs the skills and expertise that each of these roles brings to the various possible partnership permutations, the paper also broadly devalues the role of the teaching artist in a classroom setting. The core argument, as I read it, being that the teaching artist potentially provides schools/districts a cheaper alternative to the arts educator yet lacks the training and comprehensive programming that is necessary in school settings.

My question is, why the divisiveness?  Why not champion the myriad of possibilities of partnerships? To date there is no clear, large-scale commitment to arts education in our country.  We, the arts educators and teaching artists, need to define and promote how individually and collectively these roles can enhance the school experience of students, not in preference to one another, but how each can accomplish the desired outcomes of quality arts learning experiences.

In my case, the strong partnerships that permeate my work in this small Hawaiian high school contribute to large-scale comprehensive success. My immediate partner, the ELL resource teacher has, over time, collected materials I provide as a part of such residencies, and slowly constructed her own extensions that she employs in her classroom regularly now, which are spoken of highly by the Vice Principal He provides support that makes the teacher’s hosting of this annual residency much easier.  The VP notes that this teacher has become a model for all of the school’s other English teachers.  The District ELL office has provided needed supplementary funding for this and other district schools. 

We have, together, overcome the challenges to encourage students such as Vanmark to become more engaged, artistically active — and to find value and purpose in it.