Traveling Art Teacher

In my days of student teaching I learned to dislike a certain type of art instruction. My elementary co-teacher had perfected the art of making teaching art easy for her instead of challenging her students. The lessons she wanted me to produce were step by step procedural examples of craft. Any room for creativity was limited and left as an after thought rather than the motivation for the lesson. For example the students would all draw the same thing in the same style using the same steps (I call this cookie cutter lessons) and probably after watching a 10 minute Reading Rainbow video. Discussion of concepts or ideas from the video did not happen. The project was all about the final pieces which all looked shockingly similar.

As an artist and an educator I found this manner of teaching to do more harm than good. Sadly I still see it today where teachers share or blog about their cookie cutter lessons. Some teachers actually take the time to develop the concepts for the piece or incorporate art history. Often though the students have beautiful looking projects without understanding the actual Creative Process. Simply put the Creative Process is: Plan-Do-Review. More complexly it is what we as artists do, think, investigate, revise, evaluate and reflect on wether formally or not. If that is how I make art, how can I ask my students to become factory workers and create projects in the same way, based of the same image and using the same materials? Fortunately I discovered other educators who were like minded. I researched Choice Based Art or Teaching for Artistic Behavior (TAB) and the work of Dr. Marvin Bartel. Dr. Bartel’s website is an amazing resource for art educators, in fact it is how I first learned about the backwards design for curriculum aka UbD. This was also before I learned about project based learning and the IB programme. Yes, boring dry curriculum should actually encourage creativity and it can even be fun to write.

If there is an educator around that has not seen this video I would be concerned. Here is Sir Ken Robinson’s wonderful TED talk about creativity in schools. He raises the question: Do Schools Kill Creativity? The answer is yes and I am sad to say I see it to frequently in a class that is associated with being the most creative, art.

As I work on and revise my own curriculum I focus on how to best assist students on becoming independent creative thinkers. I know most of my students will not go on to a field art related, but the skills and processes they learn from it will be used. It is not an easy to go from being a student where the teacher demonstrated what was expected and following it to be a teacher where I clearly define a more challenging and creative outcome, but it is very rewarding and valuable. It is also comforting to see leaders in education agree. Below is a list of the creativity killers from Bartel that I use to evaluate my lessons.

Dr. Marvin Bartel’s Creativity Killers

#1. I Kill Creativity when I encourage Renting (borrowing) instead of Owning ideas.

# 2. I Kill Creativity when I Assign Grades without providing Informative Feedback.

# 3. I am Killing Creativity if I see a lot of Cliché Symbols instead of Original or Observed Representation of Experience. I am Killing Creativity even more if I criticize it.

# 4. I Kill Creativity when I Demonstrate instead of having students Practice.

# 5. I Kill Creativity when I Show an Example instead of Defining a Problem.

# 6. I Kill Creativity when I Praise Neatness and Conformity more than Expressive Original work

# 7. I Kill Creativity when I encourage Freedom without Focus

 # 8. I Kill Creativity by Making Suggestions instead of asking Open Questions.

# 9. I Kill Creativity if I Give an Answer instead of teaching Problem Solving experimentation methods.

# 10. I Kill Creativity if I allow students to copy other artists rather than learning to read their minds.

I’ll admit that I rely on differentiation and technology due to time material restraints instead of letting students experiment as much as I would like to. I create tutorials and examples of the processes instead of allowing students to fail and learn from their mistakes. However these creativity killers are a great way to begin rethinking how art is taught and how to improve.