My Name is Sandra

Watching Sandra, my six year old daughter, learn to read has been one of the most gratifying experiences for me both personally and professionally. When Sandra began writing in preschool, she began with the letters of her name. Many early childhood literacy methods are rightfully built around a child's name. We could see Sandra then moving to other words that are similar to her own: Santa, sand, sun. Eventually she became interested in how to write the names of her family—Luis, Kurt, Maria—and then began to read words that were similar, gradually expanding her letter recognition and her ability to piece together new words.

When we started our language and arts lab school Habla, we knew for people to learn a new language, they need to begin with what is most important to them. Hence our first classes in language learning are called "All About Me." 

Brazilian educator Paulo Freire knew that literacy begins with "reading the world." In Pedagogy of Hope he writes,

Anyone taking a literacy course for adults wants to learn to read and write sentences, phrases, words. However, the reading and writing of words comes by way of reading the world. Reading the world is an antecedent act vis-á-vis the reading of the word. The teaching of reading and writing of the word to a person missing the critical exercise of reading and rereading the world is, scientifically, politically, and pedagogically crippled.

In his literacy programs for farmers in rural Brazil, Freire began by looking at pictures that relate directly to the farmer's worlds including their landscapes, tools, crops, and animals. They then learned the words for the objects and built their phonemic awareness from the context of their own lived worlds.

I'd bought the book Lily The Unicorn by Dallas Clayton for my daughter, mainly because I brought back a unicorn stuffed animal from one of my trips and i wanted to have a book that went along with it. I read it to her when I came home and didn't think much about it for another year.

Lily the Unicorn

By Dallas Clayton

Then the other night we picked it up again. I read it this time and envisioned how it might be used to build an early literacy course or beginning language class. Let's take a look.

Each page of the book is organized around a central idea. On the first page Lily says,

My name is Lily! I'm a unicorn. I like to make things.

The language is simple so for an early language learner it wouldn't take much time to teach the words. Then on the page we see a variety of objects.

I can imagine giving each student a large sheet of white paper with a variety of colored markers. On the page they personalize the language. 

My name is ________________. I'm a ________________. I like to __________________.

Then each student draws all of the things they like and, with the teacher's help, labels some or all of them. We then begin the class by learning everyone's name and what they like.

The book continues in a similar vein with Lily talking about what she likes in various categories. Eventually she meets a friend named Roger who is very afraid at taking risks because the "world is afraid of scary things."

I can imagine the students moving in a couple of directions with this. One is for them to create an imaginary friend and to build a world around that imaginary friend using the prompts of the book. What is your friend afraid of? What does your friend not like? What kind of adventures can you imagine having with your friend? What kind of games would you like to play with your friend? What could you invent with your friend? Students could write their own version of Lily, The Unicorn! from their own perspective with their own imaginary friend.

Another direction we could take this in is to have the students in the class interview each other. Students then, instead of writing about their own imaginary friend, write and draw pictures for a class partner, using the same prompts. We could place butcher paper on the wall, divide it into the different "pages" of the book, and have the class add images, based on their partner, what they like, what they are afraid of, what adventures they'd like to have etc. We then end up with a class mural.

What I love about this idea for a curriculum is that we would move from the "I" to the "we" and students would really have to learn about another person in their class to honor them on the class wall. At the end of the unit we would have a class wall with everyone's lives represented through images and text.

Rules and Instructions

Over the holidays I've been reading quite a few new stories at night for my children. As I read books to them I frequently have ideas for how these books might be used in classrooms. Some of these ideas eventually are realized in workshops I lead for teachers, but many aren't.  I thought why not share a few of these rough ideas here on this forum in case they might be of use. Over the next few days I'll write a series of short posts highlighting some of my favorite books I've read lately and offer some ideas for teaching them in classrooms.

My wife told asked me to order Instructions written by the prolific Neil Gaiman and illustrated by Charles Vess.

Instructions

By Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman takes us through a series of prompts for exploring an imaginary world. My favorite moment in the book is when the hero rides a series of animals:

Ride the wise eagle (you shall not fall).

Ride the silver fish (you will not drown).

Ride the grey wolf (hold tightly to his fur). 

This book works perfectly if you are teaching books related to Joseph Campbell's The Hero's Journey or reading Percy Jackson or The Odyssey at the secondary level. 

I would use this book especially in the elementary school classroom at the beginning of the year. We often, with our students, write our own classroom norms or rules for the year. When I see classroom rules on the wall, I often find them a bit mundane. I would combine Instructions with The Rules of Summer written by one of my favorite children's book authors, Shaun Tan.

Rules of Summer

By Shaun Tan

At the beginning of the year work with the students to develop a set of rules or instructions for the year that are both realistic (nothing wrong with sharing our toys) and some that are more creative. Return to them throughout the year. Add to them. Revise them. Make them more wonderful. We need a bit more of riding eagles and wolves in our lives, don't we?

Making Monsters with Kids

Two weeks ago, my wife returned home with terrifying news—it was our turn to visit our daughter’s preschool in Mérida, México, to read a story to her class. Marimar saw the look on my face and offered,  “Don’t worry I’ll do it.” For a moment I thought I was off the hook. Then she added, “But Sandra would love for you to be there."

“Of course I’ll go."

I’ve observed many masterful preschool teachers. Who first came to mind is a teacher in West Palm Beach who took the ideas from a workshop I’d led and applied them elegantly in her own classroom. Each of her students sat in a square listening to the story. She’d ask them all to close their eyes and imagine what a character looks like in the story. Then she said, "By the count of five you’ll rise up from your seat to make a still statue of your character  . . .1 . . . 2 . . .3 . . .. “ As they grew into statues the kids were completely focused, embodying their characters. They were doing playful, imaginative work, and the classroom wasn’t absolute chaos. When working with kids I'm always afraid that I'll completely lose control of the classroom—a third grade classroom in Manchester, Massachusetts still haunts my memory.

Teaching reading is what we do in our day to day work, so the pressure was on! We started by discussing the kinds of books our daughter loves and what her interests are when she plays around the house.  Many of the mistakes we make in "educating" children is imposing our adult priorities onto their worlds. Educator and philosopher Krishnamurti writes,

“When we are working together for an ideal, for the future, we shape individuals according to our conception of that future; we are not concerned with human beings at all, but with our idea of what they should be. The what should be becomes far more important to us than what is, namely, the individual with his complexities.”

— Education and the Significance of Life

Rather than thinking about what kids should be, we looked for clues of what to teach in Sandra's natural play. One of her primary occupations is taking care of her many dolls and animals—reading stories, bathing, and feeding them. Sandra also has several imaginary friends that she talks to when her dolls aren't around. Children at this age aren't in much control of their lives—they always have adults issuing orders from "be careful" to "get dressed it's time to go." Preschoolers are also navigating relationships with friends, relationships that require constant negotiation, "What do I do when we both want to play different games? How do I compromise?"

The world of creative play with dolls and imaginative friends gives children a sense of control, allowing them to set the rules of their own world.

Could we create an experience of play in the school where students are fully in control of building their own worlds?

Children at this age (or perhaps of any age) are fascinated by monsters. Sandra consistently picks a few favorite monster books at bedtime.

Since Sandra's school is bilingual we decided to read one monster story in Spanish, Monstruo Rosa, and one in English, Leonardo the Terrible Monster. 

Finally the day came. We entered the classroom and, of course, I threw Marimar to the wolves asking her to read her story first. One little girl grabbed onto my arm and kept looking up and laughing at me as I tried to refocus her. As students became interested in the book, they moved closer and to closer to Marimar. I never know how to deal with masses of climbing kids, and I was worried when it was my turn I’d be buried under a mountain of five-year-olds. We were taking a small step towards the classroom chaos I feared!

Marimar finished and I took the stage. I opened the book and began. To my disbelief most of the kids sat in their seats and actually listened. Although the little girl on my left still laughed at me from time to time, I finished reading with a “yay . . . round of applause," and they clapped with enthusiasm. 

We believe that while kids can certainly enjoy hearing a great story, the reading experience improves when they become co-creators of the story world. To use a jazz metaphor, we think of books as the initial melody for students to riff off of with their own original work.

After we read the monster books aloud, the students sat on the floor in a circle. We asked them, "If you had the chance to create your own monster who would be your best friend, what would it be like?" The responses poured out faster than we could control them, "blue," "furry," "with wings," "with lots of teeth."

It was now time for the students to design their own monsters. We know from experience that just handing students a blank piece of paper and telling them to "draw a monster" doesn't always result in the best product. So to give just a little structure to their project, we offered students just a shape (download the "Make a Monster" template here)  and explained that the shape could be the monster's body or head. The students started eagerly drawing with markers.

Driving to school earlier that morning, Marimar thought about this project, and knowing how Sandra loves to paste "stuff" onto her artworks (glitter, buttons, stickers etc.), she stopped at a craft store to purchase a few more materials—packages of googly eyes and colored feathers. After the students were well into drawing their monsters, we introduced the other materials and the kids enthusiastically added accessories.

Preschool educator Erika Christakis writes in The Importance of Being Little: What Preschoolers Really Need from Grownups, "a playful childhood is worth more than the accumulation of every conceivable standard, real or imagined." In today's standards-obsessed educational climate, we could do with a lot more watching and listening to our young people and much less telling them what we think they should be.

Sandra's final monster.

Other Resources.

Although we only had time to read two books to the kids, if we were building a larger monster unit in a school, these would be some of our top picks.

The Gruffalo has an absorbing sense of rhythm and rhyme—perfect for read alouds. The monster in the book, the Gruffalo, is imagined piece by piece in the story by the various characters. In the classroom, students can design the specific body-parts of their own monsters.

Love Monster is another favorite. The story is about a monster's quest for a companion. After designing one monster, students can design a second one to be the first one's friend.

In The Importance of Being Little: What Preschoolers Need from Grownups, Erika Christakis really considers the world from a preschoolers point of view and helps us to see how we might better raise our kids from the perspective of the child's world.

6 Powerful Ideas for Reading with Kids

Previously published here on Huffington Post Parents (but without the fun images and music!)

Reading daily to our children is important for both the pleasure it brings in its own right and for the future benefits it promises for academic, professional, and even economic success (for more on the importance of reading check out Jim Trelease's classic  The Read Aloud Handbook). If you're reading this as a teacher or parent, you probably already know reading is critical. Over the last twenty-three years I've been teaching students and teachers how to make reading playful and engaging. I've enjoyed using some of the ideas from my classrooms with my now three-year-old daughter in our days and nights we spend reading together. The most important thing we do is reading together every night before bed. Sandra always has the choice of reading with Mommy (Spanish) or Daddy (English). We've done this since the day she was born. It might seem that for babies, since they cannot speak, reading to them is unnecessary. But research has demonstrated the importance of reading to children from the earliest age.

In addition to our nightly ritual, here are few ideas for making reading an interactive journey.

1. Build. Many kids do love to sit and listen to stories, but all kids get restless and need to do things. Maria Montessori wrote, "The hands are the instrument of man's intelligence." Many books provide inspiration for building things in the real world. In the book Roxaboxen, a girl named Marian transforms a hill across from her house into a city using only natural objects and the help of her friends. Sticks and rocks are all that's needed to start building our own city with our kids. Books like If I Built a House and The Big Orange Splot allow us to dream of our own special house that matches our personalities. With pencil and paper, cardboard, or a set of blocks, kids can go about dreaming up their own homes.

2. Record. Many of us face the challenge of having parts of our family live in different places. We live in Mexico and Sandra's grandparents live in the United States. My mother records herself reading and singing along to various books and sends them to me. I create an iTunes playlist of my mother's readings and stack the corresponding books on the coffee table for Sandra. Sandra always insists on completing ALL the books we have recorded at one sitting. She loves getting these little gifts from her grandmother and best of all they can arrive to Mexico instantly over email. Listen below to my mother, Alice Wootton, singing this book for Sandra.

3. Search.Goodnight Moon is a timeless book  for a reason: kids love to look for things. Many children's books are filled with objects, people, and animals in rich landscapes (see for instance books illustrated by Graeme Base and Jimmy Liao). We often stop the story and I ask Sandra, "How many birds are in this picture?" or "Can you find the monster?" Such concrete tasks help her build a relationship to the book, and, on her own time, she opens the books and looks for the objects herself—an early stage in her journey towards becoming an independent reader.

4. Perform. I often lead workshops for teachers on the topic of how they can have their students perform the books they teach in the classroom. One of my favorite books to do this with is Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak.

Teacher "Wild Things" Workshop in Merida, Mexico

With Sandra I'll do the same thing. We swing through imaginary trees with the Wild Things. We dance the wild rumpus. She climbs on my back as we make the parade. Books and songs that lend themselves to physical movement include: Roll Over: A Counting Song, Baby Cakes, and The Tickle Monster.

5. Improvise. This is actually an idea that came from my daughter. One day she had all of her toy musical instruments laid out on the coffee table. She handed me a book and asked me to read it. She then ran over to the other side of the coffee table and picked up the drum sticks. As I read she accompanied my reading with various instruments creating a soundtrack for the story.

6. Organize. Cleaning up may not be the most imaginative interaction with stories, but it certainly is an important one. At the end of the day when all the reading, playing, and making is done, we tuck the books away in their boxes to sleep.

Book Boxes

When I used to teach a class on literacy in a university, my colleague Eileen Landay and I asked our students to write their own literacy biographies. Consistently we'd hear that first memories of reading are with parents or loved ones. One student wrote:

Me at age five with my older brother and my twin all perched (as I remember it) on my father's belly while he lay in bed reading J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings aloud. If only my father's voice could continue the story forever!

Beyond the numerous benefits of reading, most importantly I hope my daughter will cherish enduring memories of reading every day with her mother and father.

The Immensity of the Sea: How to Lesson Plan

In the documentary film Sketches of Frank Gehry, he and his fellow architects are considering how to improve a cardboard mock-up of a building they're designing. Gehry unhappily stares at the model and gruffly declares, "Well, let's look at it for a while. Be irritated by it. Then we'll figure out what to do." He feels that something is just not right. He explains, "I don't like this side. This [wall] just has to get crankier." He and his partner fiddle around with some paper, bending and crumpling it, trying it out. Then finally he exclaims, "That is so stupid looking it's great."

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Gehry, in the stages of early planning, demonstrates a fussiness with the process. For each project he takes on, he is known for constructing at least two early models out of blocks, one large and one small. He explains, "You have to force yourself to change scale and go back and forth. It keeps you honest."

We as teachers, much like Frank Gehry, design our classroom spaces before we begin teaching. In the best classrooms, teachers consider what materials to make available, how to organize tables and chairs into various workstations, and perhaps how to create nested areas, little nooks and crannies for student to tuck themselves away in to escape the hustle and bustle of the classroom when, for that child, it all gets to be too much. A teacher who considers deeply the design of the physical classroom space typically thinks beyond rows of students arranged facing forward to coldly receive the teacher's daily lecture. Rather this teacher is considering how to make the classroom one of making and creating, a space for students to work on projects collaboratively or independently.

Teachers also think of design in linear terms, conceiving of the narrative flow of the class from the opening to the closing. This is what I wrote about in my last post about lesson planning. One of my great colleagues, John Hanlon, has taught literature and history for over twenty years. Now, a very experienced teacher, he wrote,

And with regard to your blog post on lesson planning, I have become less structured.  More and more, I walk into a class with maybe three balls that I want the students to juggle with, but how and when each ball gets introduced is not planned in advance. Nonetheless, by the end of the class, each of those balls will be deployed.

Lesson planning certainly isn't the same for all teachers. We all have our unique styles, and, as John notes, what is particularly important is our level of experience teaching in the classroom. John (teaching an advanced high school humanities class) knows that he has three essential ideas, questions, or topics that he would like to explore. For him this is a narrative thread. John's experience allows him to support the distinct ideas that will emerge from the students. Other teachers might want, or need, a more detailed lesson plan.

One of the reasons Frank Gehry's process appeals to me is that I see designing classroom environments, both in terms of time and space, as inherently creative processes. In 1940 Ralph W. Tyler published a book called Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction where he laid out the idea of "learning objectives." This was a radical departure from the notion that teaching is determined only by content. He wrote that regarding the student, ""It is what he does that he learns, not what the teacher does." In the 1980s this model was developed by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe into a system called "Understanding by Design" or UBD—a more general term is "backwards planning." The idea is that the teacher begins with the larger objectives and then figures out what activities are needed to help students reach those final goals. Certainly not a bad idea overall, and at the time, this was considered a radical departure from the textbook driven way of teaching content, moving from chapter to chapter until reaching the end. Even in 1949 Tyler's book was a bestseller!

Fast forward to today. Now teachers are often required to write daily "learning objectives" or "standards" on the board of the classroom. These objectives are determined by school districts, states, or today, on a national level, from a document called the "Common Core." Teachers all naturally teach with a set of objectives in mind. In a classroom for teaching English Language Learners the objective obviously is for the students to learn to communicate in English. A quote often attributed to Antoine de Saint Exupéry notes the power of focusing on the bigger picture rather than only the details,

If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

One of the problems in educational reform are the lists and lists of learning objectives we give to teachers. I'm not sure why this has always been a part of education policy making. In the twenty-three years I've been involved in education, I've seen a steady stream of binders delivered in boxes to schools. I suppose it makes committees and administrators feel like they're doing something. I've often written here about the school administrators who perform "walk throughs" of their school where they stop in a classroom for a couple of minutes to ask students "What standard are you working on?" Classroom teaching today is envisioned by policy makers as a clean process: 1) state the objective; 2) plan the learning activities to meet the objective; 3) test the students on whether they have achieved the objective. 4) repeat said process for all given objectives.

As Gehry notes, the creative process is much messier than that. Right now I'm planning a workshop for teachers. I think I'm going to use the amazing book by Jimmy Liao, The Sound of Colors, but at the moment that's all I'm sure of. Like Frank Gehry I need to stand back from it awhile and get irritated. I'm not sure what the real objective of the workshop will be, what we'll create together, or whether I'll focus it on performance, writing, or visual art. The ideas will come, but I need to give them time to percolate.

The best educational programs I've ever seen are ones without explicit objectives. Class doesn't start with the teacher explaining "what you will learn today." Rather, in my experience, the most effective learning spaces are ones where students are deeply engaged in making things and then sharing them in public settings.  But ultimately, the student is on his or her own journey. Teachers might have a sense of the broad goals and ideas—loving to read, learning how to express oneself in writing, or thinking like a scientist—but the meandering paths students take to reach these goals are really up to them.

Teachers need to have the creative freedom necessary to design teaching experiences and our students need the same freedom to create, spaces where they have the opportunity to develop original work, step back from it, get irritated, and then return working with a fresh perspective. Learning objectives and documents like the Common Core are not allowing us to see what is truly in front of us: young people, of every age, who want to be given the space and responsibility to make new things, to wrestle with big ideas, to contribute to the larger community, and most importantly, to have a great deal of fun along the way.

Charting the Course: The Importance of Lesson Planning

I have a confession to make. When I first became I teacher I didn't write detailed lesson plans. At the boarding school where I taught, as humanities teachers we were free to develop any curriculum we liked.  With our students, we worked through books of literature chapter by chapter with all of the various pedagogical accoutrements you'd find in a traditional classroom: writing assignments, discussion questions, vocabulary lists, and the occasional creative project. In planning for a class, I'd review the chapter we'd be working with that day, develop a list of discussion questions, and then go for it. Generally our students were motivated so they'd enjoy talking about the book and I'd make what I thought were perceptive points. My philosophy of teaching at the time was that if I could model for the students how I was taught to analyze literature in college, then wouldn't they be able to?

After my first year of teaching I designed and co-taught a humanities class with a colleague of mine, John Hanlon. John taught his classes with a clipboard in hand, the day's lesson carefully mapped out in his meticulous handwriting. I adopted John's lesson planning techniques down to the clipboard and the neat handwriting. These were my first forays into lesson planning, and by working with John, I realized several things about the way I was teaching my first year. Here are some reasons why teaching with a lesson plan in hand is crucial if we seek to create student-centered classrooms:

1. Without a lesson plan, I was largely generating my own ideas about literature rather than inspiring my students to think for themselves. Early in my teaching career I appreciated when people described me as a "dynamic," "energetic," or "inspiring" teacher. In high school and college I had acted in various theatre productions, so when I began teaching I liked the feeling of performing for an audience; I could entertain the students while sharing my ideas about how to interpret a work of literature. We all had fun . . . or at least I thought we did. What I realize now is that I was the one doing the work of the class. I was putting on my own grand performance that showed how well I understood the text. I wasn't giving the students enough of a chance to be the performers themselves—allowing them  to wrestle with the big ideas of literature.

2. The classes I taught were "one note" classes; they lacked variety and I didn't plan ways to meet the different learning styles of my students. I had a few ideas sketched out on a piece of paper, but I wasn't varying the instructional methods. My students didn't work in pairs, individually, or in small groups. I wasn't planning how I might mix various literacies together such as writing, reading, listening, and speaking. Nor was I considering the multiple ways we might activate what Howard Gardner refers to as "intelligences."  As teachers we should integrate multiple ways of understanding and communicating into our lessons employing the disciplines of storytelling, visual design, performance, and movement, to name a few. We can think about ways to incorporate project-based learning so that students are collaborating on real products that can even have an impact beyond the classroom. Rather than investigating a symphony of possibilities, as a teacher I was playing one note on one instrument. It occurs to me that I did this because this is the way most of us are taught throughout our school careers and certainly in our universities: read a book, have a discussion, write a paper.

3.  Since I was largely improvising my classes, the quality of my teaching would vary tremendously. Sure I would occasionally have a seemingly wonderful class (at least to me—see the first point I make above), but I also taught many mediocre classes as well.  Taking the time beforehand to map out the general direction of class and thinking through the class moment-to-moment is more likely to result in a classroom that moves briskly from activity to activity. Even more importantly we can consider how to shape an open question or build an activity to ensure that the students are cognitively wrestling with the course material.

4.  Because I was generally improvising, I had no documentation of my classes. I've always been the kind of teacher that never teaches the same class twice—I'll develop a new lesson plan for every class I teach, even if I've taught a book or a lesson before many times. I still do this today. The problem back then is that I also wasn't a reflective teacher. I didn't look back at what I'd taught before, consider how I might improve, and then make the necessary adjustments. I was reinventing the wheel every class, every semester, every year.

Today, by designing a lesson plan for every class I teach, I have a record of all the past classes I've taught. I'm able to share these with other teachers that are teaching the same material, and now when I write lesson plans, I write them as if I am always leaving them for another teacher—I'll describe each activity step-by-step, even if I know how to teach an activity by heart. I find this level of detailed planning also helps me to fully review the way I need to facilitate the activity before I lead it:  to think through the directions, the support I'll need to provide individual students or groups, and the materials that will be necessary.

An effective lesson plan allows us to consider carefully how we will facilitate a variety of activities in the classroom in a way that will place the responsibility and rewards of learning on the students.  Professors Finkel and Monk note that teachers often have an "atlas complex": referring to the teacher's need to shoulder the burden of learning in the classroom. Instead Finkel and Monk warn us that,

a teacher who takes responsibility for all that goes on in the class gives students no room to experiment with ideas, to deepen their understanding of concepts, or to integrate concepts into a coherent system.

Shifting the paradigm requires, in educational reformer Ted Sizer's terms, for the students to become the "workers" and the teacher to serve as a "coach." If we as teachers feel that we are doing all the heavy lifting in the classroom, then we probably are. It took me many years of teaching to realize that if the students are all wrestling intensely with a project, and I'm sitting on the side of the room trying to figure out what to do, then that moment is likely a moment where real learning is taking place. Today, I love it when I walk up to a group of students to maybe offer a bit of coaching and they all are engaged deeply in debate. As I get closer to them they all look at me, not necessarily with a look of annoyance, but with a quick glance that says "I really hope he doesn't come over here and interrupt us. We have work to do."

Rarely have I seen a teacher set up a productive learning environment without a lesson plan. I have witnessed many classrooms, particularly of inexperienced teachers, where the rough idea is good— students will work on an interesting project, write a story, or create a performance—but without a plan as to how the classroom time will proceed from activity to activity, the students often lose interest, and the classroom becomes unproductive for everyone.

My suggestion for beginning teachers is to write as detailed a lesson plan as possible. Plan the exact directions you will give for every activity. Make sure there are many "moves" between group, individual, whole class, and work in pairs. Consider the different ways to integrate the arts into the classroom in order to help students make connections between the various ways we understand our world and to provide opportunity for multiple means of sharing ideas. Set up the activities to inspire the students to do the thinking and creating themselves. And most importantly, ensure that students are given the opportunity to share their thoughts and opinions through publishing, public performances, and exhibits. As teachers we might help chart the course, but in the end, it's the students who are taking the journey.

A Dog in the Barn: Parallels in Teaching and Parenting

Previously published here on the Huffington Postand on Arnold Aprill's blog here.

Sandra, my two year-old-daughter, has a wooden puzzle in front of her with a series of doors. Behind the doors sit magnetized objects, each corresponding to the image painted on the front: the cow rests in the barn, the turkey cooks in the oven, the bird perches in its cage. Sandra became fascinated with these puzzles when she was about a year old, presenting me with a dilemma: what to do when she puts the object in the wrong box.

I've watched many parents over the years play similar games with their children. Generally what I've witnessed is the child places the dog in the oven and the parent responds, "No, Carlos, the dog doesn't go there. Where does the dog go?" The child looks up, hears the word "no," moves the dog to another location, perhaps the birdcage, and then looks up again to see if Mommy is smiling (she isn't, the dog belongs in the doghouse).

When I became a parent, I'd previously taught in classrooms for 20 years, so I find my parenting largely informed by the choices I've made as a teacher. I've always believed we should nurture children's imagination and help them to see possibilities in their own lives as well as in the world around them. In other words, our work as teachers is about opening doors rather than closing them. Which brings us back to the puzzle. When Sandra places the dog in the wrong location, how do I respond?

There are times in our lives when we do need to know the right answer—which button to push on our television's remote control to turn it on, for instance. However, we also want to be able to think outside of the box and explore possible options that might be beyond the set of choices that are put before us. Is it possible to have it both ways?

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I decided when she played with her puzzle to never tell her she was wrong. When she was one year old, I would play the game with her. As she placed objects wherever she liked, I'd be working on the same puzzle placing them behind their "right" door. But now around the age of two, an age where she understands language and can speak in small sentences, I realized a different approach was possible.

One day, as Sandra began putting all the objects behind various "wrong" doors, I wove an imaginary tale explaining why that particular object, at the moment, is resting in that location:

- It's nice that you put the lunch in the garage. I'm sure the workers will appreciate something to eat around lunchtime.

- Oh, the dog is going into the barn. He's a good friend with the cow and I hope they have a nice time together.

- You're putting the cookies in the gift box. I think someone will love to receive your homemade cookies as a present.

- The dog's going into the birdcage! Oh no! I hope the bird is somewhere else. I'm not sure if they are friends.

Some might argue, "But there is a right answer. The puzzle came with all the objects in the correct places." It most certainly did, and my daughter mastered that a long time ago. Now it's time for the real learning to begin. By putting the objects in a variety of locations, Sandra creates what psychologists refer to as conceptual blending. When the brain is forced to bring disparate concepts together, it must work harder as different parts of the brain are activated. Once you learn where the objects go, it's quite easy to keep repeating the same activity, but when you place the object in a different slot your brain must think, "Hmm, how can I make sense of the fact that these two images that appear to have no relation are now together?" Now the puzzle becomes infinitely more interesting, even for adults, as we must invent narratives that might explain why the dog is now in the lunchbox. Sandra now enjoys putting the objects in different places and we laugh together at the disjunctive associations.

I arrived at this solution because I simply wasn't comfortable telling my daughter the dog was in the wrong place. Who determines the right place for the dog to take a nap? Such approaches to the simple dilemma of a puzzle mirror the daily choices I make in the classroom. I have the same hopes for my students and my daughter. I hope they are able to see many solutions to a given problem. I hope they approach the world with a sense of imagination and adventure. Perhaps most importantly, I hope they may see things from different perspectives, and realize that indeed, the dog might be much happier resting in the barn.

Throw Out the Desks! Planning On Your Feet

This week at Habla we've had several extraordinary educators from around the world visiting: Anne Thulson, Arnold Aprill,  and Terry Blackhawk. Along with the formal presentations for the community that are part of our "Pedagogy of Creativity" series, we created an informal opportunity for our visitors and local educators to share an "aha moment" over the last year when they deepened or changed a particular aspect of their work. You can read about some of them here on Arnold Aprill's blog. Here is my story:

In working with teens and adults we've all witnessed the post-lunch slump. Our classes, workshops, and meetings are filled with energy in the mornings, with everyone fresh from a night of sleep and amped up on coffee, only to be followed by an afternoon where we can barely muster the energy to offer an idea.  We're all just trying to make it through the rest of the day.

I've been facilitating day-long professional development workshops for teachers for many years. In the mornings, my colleagues and I  demonstrate how teachers can incorporate a variety of performance activities into their curriculums. We take teachers through an active process of reading, writing, and performing. Everyone is energetically engaged . . . then we have lunch.

Seated Planning

In November, Eileen Landay, my coauthor of A Reason to Read, and I presented a day-long workshop at the Coalition of Essential Schools Fall Forum. After lunch we decided the teachers would sit to work in groups and consider ways to take the ideas of the morning back to their classrooms. As they worked I saw the zombie-like stupor take hold. We mixed the groups up again to share ideas, and this helped, but still, it wasn't the kind of vibrant process we had experienced in the morning.

The next week I was presenting another day-long workshop for teachers in South Portland, Maine with my colleague John Holdridge. I knew we could do better.

Thumbs Down!

When the teachers entered the room after lunch we didn't let them sit down. John said, "By the time I count to 10 please be in a standing circle . . . 1,2,3 . . ."  We introduced a childhood game to get them back in the space and working together. John demonstrated the game Rock, Paper, Scissors to the teachers and asked them to play a version of it in pairs (little did I know about the history of this game and the variations of it but there were several introduced in the room). Then we asked the question, "When this morning did you feel you were most challenged?" They had a quick conversation with their rock-paper-scissors partner and then returned to the circle. We then instructed, "Change places in the circle by the count of 5" and everyone quickly crossed over and found a different spot. We asked them to find a new partner and play a quick game called "Thumbs Down" (see below). After this we asked, "What was your experience working with the text this morning?" (in the morning we had participated in a process of bringing a chapter of Seed Folks to life with a variety of performance techniques). After this conversation we gathered again in a circle, changed places, and then John asked them to grab a partner, choose a letter from their names they have in common, and physically represent that letter.

We repeated the process several times of a) having conversations in pairs; b) returning to the circle; c) changing partners; and d) playing a quick physical activity.

An Energetic Afternoon

Some might think playing physical games between conversations is a ridiculous waste of time. But what I found is that when we interspersed discussions with "play", the room filled with laughter and energy, not just during the games themselves, but also during the task-oriented conversations. The discussions were much more animated as teachers energetically exchanged ideas, a stark contrast to the previous conference's post-lunch slump.

When it came to more extensive conversations, and planning for classroom implementation, we asked the teachers, in pairs, to go for a thirty-minute walk discussing how they would like to use the set of ideas from the morning session in their own practice. It wasn't until nearly the end of the afternoon session that the participants actually sat down in groups and planned on paper what they hoped to accomplish in their classrooms.

We spend a lot of time sitting, not just in schools, but also at work and at home. New research suggests the detrimental effects of sitting too much for adults as well as kids. I'm not sure if it's time to throw out the desks and conference tables, but a little more moving around sure wouldn't hurt.

Additional Ideas:

Thumbs Down

Find a partner and face each other arms length away. One partner puts hands out palms up. The other partner puts hands in a thumbs-down position with the thumbs in the partners palms. Everyone begins playing the game where the palms-up person tries to slap the top of the hand of the thumbs-down person before he/she pulls away. Go for 3 out of 5 and switch sides.

For more theatre games see Viola Spolin's Theater Games for the Classroomand Augusto Boal's Games for Actors and Non Actors.

What other ideas do you have for "planning on your feet"? Feel free to add your ideas in the comment section. Thanks!