Creative Teaching for Today's Young People

Borghild Dahl

I apologize for my 10-day "pause in the day's occupations", but I have been busy moving from Texas to Minnesota, where I spend the next six months. (If you're interested, the Love Of My Life just wrote about some of our Adventure Together on his blog, www.blogofages.net, which is more popular than my blog and definitely worth a looksee.)

Since returning to Minneapolis, I have worked on a new OxCart production about the Minnesota author Borghild Dahl, since I had trouble with the slides in Austin and want to finish the project because people have already sent in orders.

Let me tell you a bit about what I'm doing before I return to creative planning for teaching and learning...........

“Borghild Dahl: She Wanted To See” is a biography of the Norwegian-American author and award-winning educator who was almost totally blind.

It is 27 minutes long and for ages 12-adult. It is available from OxCart's website on DVD and also as a CD.

Borghild’s life story is truly one of the most inspiring biographies young people and adults can imagine. From childhood, she was encouraged by her Norwegian-American immigrant parents to participate in activities others would have considered too difficult or dangerous for a person with limited eyesight.

A university professor told her she should abandon a degree in education because she would never be able to become a teacher due to her disability. Yet, as a teacher in Minnesota, Iowa and South Dakota, she taught as many as seven subjects at a time, memorized each night what she needed to know for her students the next day, and once read Gone With the Wind – through the “open window” of 4/60th sight in her left eye -- in one night in order to review it on the radio.

She was the first woman ever granted a fellowship by the American Scandinavian Foundation to study in Norway, where she was the only woman in her class at the University of Oslo and the first foreign-born student to be admitted under oath as aNorsk Akademiker or formal student. Toward the end of her life, she was recognized as an Outstanding Alumni of the University of Minnesota -- the very institution that had advised her not to become a teacher.

At age 69, she moved to New York, where for 17 years she was one of the few white residents in the predominantly black community of Harlem. Her neighbors and friends celebrated the publication of her book Good News, one of the earliest novels for young adults that dealt with race relations in the United States. Her publisher gave a party for everyone at her apartment building, and a photo of the event in The New York Times was taped up in shopkeepers’ windows as an example of racial harmony during tense days of the civil rights movement in the 1960’s.

Dahl wrote a variety of books – novels for young women, folklore, historical fiction, biography, and three autobiographies – the most famous of which,  I Wanted To See, was an inspiration to servicemen who returned from World War II with sight impairments. The title of her last book indicated the undaunted spirit of this remarkable woman – Happy All My Life.

Original research and an introduction to her books make this account of her life especially interesting to writers, the blind and visually impaired, senior citizens, and students ofintergenerational studies, women’s studies, and American immigration, especially Norwegian-Americans. 

The production is available (as soon as I finish it) as an OxCart DVD with many photographs of Dahl’s family, professional memorabilia, and book illustrations, or as a CD audio book (without reference to visuals on the screen.) OxCart also has a DVD production of Dahl’s fairy tale, “The Cloud Shoes: or How We Got Skis”.

   

3-D: Media Reporting Strategy 4

Learners expressively or scientifically assemble and display information or ideas in three dimensions, creating visual media such as the following:

• Art: make a collage, mosaic, sculpture, stitchery; use found objects and experimental art processes.
• Book with special features: make pop-up pages, peek flaps, wheels (see below).
• Environment: transform the classroom into interactive museum, gallery, zoo or store.
• Experiment: follow directions of diagram to put something together.
• Junk: analyze obsolete or common items as unsightly waste, recycled resource or art; implement an ad hocism exhibit that shows objects used in unusual ways.
• Miniature: make a clay figure, puppet, paper doll, shoebox diorama, origami.
• Object: collect micro-cultural or historical items for a game, ritual, meal, storytelling, party, parade, play; may be aromatic, flavored, tactile; may have articulated designs (parts are shown) or closed (parts are hidden); may be standardized or individualized.
• Promotional material: convey ideas or decorations on a class button, T-shirt, etc.

Pop-up books have long been a fun type of nontraditional picture book. In recent years, many well-respected authors and illustrators have increasingly experimented with special movable features in their books. By their very nature, books with special features meet many youngsters' needs to manipulate things, to be surprised, to have multisensory experiences, and to analyze dimensionality and movement first hand and close up.

For many children a most effective way to interest them in early reading is to put a book with special features in their hands. Older children in middle school and high school can also enjoy these books when they are presented as examples of paper engineering and nonlinear thinking. The fact that mechanical paper can create effects similar to that of animated cartoons makes it especially fun for young people.

So children's own experimentation with nontraditional book production offers them exciting interdisciplinary exercises in creative planning and problem-solving in science, math, and visual discrimination as well as language arts. In general paper engineering for a mechanical books results in four basic types of what is called paper performance:

• "Popping out" in three dimensions from the page, usually using a fold, hinge or spring, makes figures go either in or out.
• "Popping up" toward the top of the page, usually using a fold, pull tab, sliding strip, or turning wheel, makes figures go either up or down.
• "Popping over", using a fold, pull tabs or flaps, makes figures go to left and right or diagonally.

• "Popping around", using a turning wheel, sliding slats, or a window, makes figures go around.

Popping out creates three-dimensionality. The other actions generally offer the creator opportunities to include surprises, answers, and changes of all kinds. To help students make pop-up pages, do an Internet search for pop-up card and book instructions or find a copy of Joan Irvine's easy-to-use books about How to Make Pop-Ups.

Two-Dimensional: Media Reporting Strategy 3

In addition to digital and electronic reporting, students also express their understandings of information and skills by creating two-dimensional media such as the following:

• Art: draw, paint, make prints.
• Book: make a nonfiction book cover and illustrations, coloring book, picture dictionary, wordless or topsy-turvy book.
• Game: make a jigsaw puzzle, board game, overhead projector game, or chalkboard game.
• Photograph: make a subject-driven, theme-driven or design-driven essay, collage or sequence of still-film images.
• Picture: draw or diagram an idea; illustrate a story problem; create a cartoon, comic strip, or postcard.
• Promotional: create an ad, package, box, magazine, book, CD cover, poster.
• Sketch-to-Stretch: make a drawing for a quote, passage or entire text; create a visual for a verbal analogy.
• Symbol: make a sign, logo, crest, shield, flag, quilt square, rebus, flowchart.
• Visual organizer: make a calendar, map, sequence of pictures, or otherwise reformat information or ideas into simple or highly complex graphic organizers (see below).

Graphic organizers are one type of visual organizer that we use often to display verbal or written information in a visual form. When broken down into basic kinds, they can be seen to incorporate a visual similar to the following eight designs:

      

Some graphic organizers begin with a simple visual figure like a circle, with more circles added as the lesson progresses, and color coding, icons and additions or subtractions are used to demonstrate understanding of the differences among connected and discrete concepts. Some organizers evolve into wildly complicated clusters, trees, chains, etc., which are indeed the names given to dozens of kinds of graphics. Often exacting uses are assigned to each kind, but such prescriptions are limiting and hard for students to remember. Many attributes suit several purposes and can be legitimately used for whatever purpose a creative student chooses. Mind maps, for instance, can be flowcharts, pyramids, feature charts, herringbones, semantic maps and clustering for analyzing and problem-solving.

Electronic: Media Reporting Strategy 2

After digital communication strategies are electronic strategies, in which students use audiovisual technologies to create media such as the following:

• Audio tape: simulate a radio program, panel discussion, speech, press conference, debate, music, narration for a slide/tape show, storytelling with dialogue and sound effects, self-guided tour, or directions for a process.
• Video tape: create a commercial, public service announcement, dramatization, infomercial, demonstration, TV magazine, news, special effects, documentary, story, interview (talk show), or quiz show; use long shots, medium shots, and close-ups to guide the viewer's attention.
• Combined digital, audio and video: use computer software to create animations, movies or photo collages for DVDs and CDs for viewing on TV.

Much more will be said in this Creative Teaching blog about media literacy, strategies and resources. We are just looking at reporting strategies in the most general sense here, because the end of the school year is coming and such broad categories for strategies are good to help generate ideas for final reports that fit specific standards teachers are responsible for teaching.

Theodore Sizer has said that educators must learn to "plan backward", considering what students' reporting strategy will be first and only then devising the lessons and practice sessions that lead up fairly and logically to that assessment. So it makes sense in that regard to look at what we will be expecting students to know and do with their knowledge.

Reporting strategies -- at the end of the year, at the end of a unit, or at the end of a course of study -- are the interactions with students that fall under the last category in "How We Learn" above. In other words, reporting as an assessment tool is "Using" the information and skills that have been acquired in the previous three steps -- first students make "Connections" with previous learning or to the real world, then are given explanation and clarification to "Construct" new learning, followed by "Extension" through practice and feedback, until they finally "Use" the new information or skill in the same way or in a different way by reporting. We will give more time to the control and sequencing of these four interconnected steps later on this blog when we discuss instructional design. Suffice for now to simply clarify that I am putting the horse before the cart for a reason.

That reason is because Sizer has been saying for years that teachers must plan the last step first, how students will "Use" or be assessed, before they plan the other three. So we will then look at planning our coursework differently:

In the Coalition of Essential Schools, "planning backward" is for an entire course of study, in order to better determine what the curriculum should be, how it should be taught, and what learning students should be expected to demonstrate. Sizer and the Coalition will be topics of a future blog, but interested readers can find much about them online.

Digital: Media Reporting Strategies 1

We have started studying various types of learning strategies for producing and evaluating information. One type of reporting strategy is writing, which the last four posts have been about. Now we look at media-based strategies for communicating understanding of information and skills.

I continue to plug away at this blog for teachers who want other ideas, for teachers who're having trouble with recalcitrant or bored students, and for teachers who want to be more creative and say "Why not try something new?" After setting the stage, I have tried to get right down to the practical business of giving lists of ideas for teachers to choose from to suit their individual needs. If just one teacher finds a Eureka in what I put here, then I will feel I've spent my time well.

In our networked, diverse society, the practice and application of media-based communicating strategies relate directly to achievement of the learning objectives and standards intended to prepare learners for the 21st century.

These strategies involve skills in word processing; creating graphics or multimedia (digitally); video- or audiotaping (electronically); and drawing, sculpting or otherwise expressing oneself three-dimensionally or two-dimensionally.

Starting out with digital strategies, these are the ones in which learners use computer technologies to create media. For a well-rounded media education, all students should have experience in the following general types of digital communication:

• Database construction: tabulate results in such fields as:

1. Agricultural databases (i.e., states, crops, average temperatures)
2. Career databases (i.e., interests, capabilities, skills required)
3. Historical databases (i.e., years, places, events)
4. Personal databases (i.e., family members, pets, favorite things)

• Desktop publishing: publish information, stories and visual ideas as well as written ideas in a class newspaper, literary journal or magazine that is formatted, saved and printed.
• Graphic creation: create images, diagrams and photographs by designing, transforming, rotating, replicating (using clip art), scanning, saving and printing.
• Multimedia creation: combine still and moving images, sound, written text and interactivity using multimedia or hypertext software.
• Spreadsheets: tabulate numbers (i.e., surveys, grades, experiments).
• Telecommunication: contribute views, thoughts or stories to a chatroom or blog dialogue on the Internet; communicate with an e-mail keypal.
• Word processing: key in information, stories and ideas that are then formatted, saved and printed.

The specifics for each type of computer "report" is up to the individual teacher and needs in the classroom. Types can be combined. Any one of them can be a short project or an extensive one. The main thing is that in today's world all students should be familiar with the steps required to make each type a successful communication of information. Even very young children can be introduced to the basics, the language used and the steps required.

Writing 4: Genre-Related Reporting Strategies

Writing in a particular style is called genre-related writing. Often, to hone skills in spelling, punctuation, grammar, sentence structure and fact-finding, creative teachers present examples of this type of writing in passages with errors for students to discover and correct. Students should also be given opportunities for informal freewriting without regard for mechanics. They may also experiment with writing on unusual things (i.e., wrapping paper, place mats, paper plates) or perhaps write a report using only objects or visuals for their resources and doing research in print materials afterward.

Some activities for genre-related writing are:

• Biography/autobiography: write about your life as if you were a character from history or fiction; create a diary you imagine a famous person or fictional character might have written; create an annotated family tree for yourself, a real or fictitious character.
• Book report: know what kind of book report is expected and decide beforehand what kind to do (i.e., traditional: story information, theme and opinion; alternative: artwork, drama or creative writing that stands alone or supplements traditional report); note good passages and page numbers as you read, outline or web the ideas; write a topic sentence stating the main idea, support with passages, conclude with overview.
• Critique/opinion essay/speech: decide on an opinion, list examples from a text that support that opinion, write a lead sentence that states the opinion followed by examples, conclude with your opinion stated another way; keep a collaborative journal in which comments, opinions or conclusions are written share with other students for their support, constructive disagreement or suggestions.
• Essay: write a definition, comparison/contrast, facts and figures, persuasive argument, proof of a point, anecdote or summary.
• Genre-to-genre: rewrite a prose selection in a new form, such as a speech, play, epic poem, dialogue, essay, song, mock interview, reader's theater script, picture book, TV or radio script.
• Journal: write down thoughts, doodle or draw to stimulate writing, thinking or personal expression.
• Miscellaneous: rewrite a well-know commercial to present an opposite meaning; transform an article into an advertisement; create a whimsical world-records book; write a slogan, riddle, rhyme, chant, jingle, rap or music video about a topic; write a how-to manual, field guide or annotated catalog about real or imaginary things; create a movie poster, book jacket, comic or storyboard about a story.
• Newspaper article: write facts about a person, place, thing, event or idea (i.e., who, what, when, where, why and how); editorial: write an opinion; feature: write from a human-interest angle; column: write from a specific perspective.
• Poem: write a story poem, ballad, cinquain, bio-poem or haiku about a topic.
• Report: pick a topic, list what you know and what you need to find out, use research strategies to gather new information, outline or web what you find, write lead sentence as an overview, support with information you know or found out, conclude with an overview stated in another way.
• Story: rewrite traditional folklore to have a contemporary setting; write original folklore; turn a math problem or science project into a detective story; transform scientific or historic fact into fiction; retell a famous story as closely as possible to the original; write historical fiction; write an animal story in which fictional characterization and accurate natural information are both included.
• Summary: rethink the content of a text in your own words; write main ideas a smaller version of the entire original text.
• Web site: create your own web site or add your response to a personal, classroom or school web site.

Writing/print reporting is one of six learning interactions with students that allow them to show what they know and can do. They are strategies to produce and evalute both student understandings and their abilities to do something with their understandings.

Next we will look at another set of the six strategies for producing and evaluating understandings -- this set is called Media-Based Communicating Strategies. This set is also used year-round but is especially appropriate for students to show what they know and can do at the end of a school year.

Writing 3: Collaborative Reporting Strategies

Writing and reporting strategies in print form involve learners in stages of prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, finalizing and evaluating. Students may be asked to write about topic headings, topic sentences, provocative sentences, questions, fictional plots or characterizations. They should experiment with writing for different purposes (i.e., narration, description, conveying information and expressing a point or view or emotion).

Collaborative writing engages students in the following kinds of writing with peers:

• Card sort: a small group sorts and labels a series of cards with topic-related words or pictures into categories and uses information for writing activities.
• Class anthology: contribute to a volume of prose or poetry, dictionary, textbook, daily diary, alphabet book.
• Class letter: all students in a class offer ideas for an invitation, inquiry, complaint or note of praise to a public figure involved in a topic being studied.
• Community text: cowrite with family or community members about themes (i.e., family, dreams).
• Composite poem: all students in a class add a line to a poem describing a photo or picture.
• Mock conversation: write dialogue for characters in the same story or in different stories as if they had just sat down to dinner together.
• Newspaper publishing: write and illustrate factual accounts, editorials, columns and feature stories related to a topic for a class newspaper, literary journal or magazine; production staff might include copy editors, graphics staff, distribution/promotion staff as well as writers.
• One-sentence summary: share/compare a written sentence about a topic with another learner.
• Paired/dyadic: partners share responsibility for writing together and receive same evaluation; peer tutoring or mentoring.
• Partner-share: partners write, read aloud and discuss ideas with each other.
• Peer editing: read and comment on drafts of another learner's paper, with editing guidelines from a teacher that focus on particular aspects of writing which have been talked about in class; editing groups: one learner responds to first draft, different learner to the second and still another to the third.
• Peer response: a small group compliments positive aspects of each other's work and suggests improvements.
• Reflective writing: write thoughts, ideas or feelings and share with a partner.
• Research group: members of a small group each research a different aspect of a topic, then share one written report with the whole class so that all learners are exposed to every aspect.
• Study group: a small group confers and supports each other in reading and exploring concepts; each learner responds individually in journals, present insights to large group, reflects on and evaluates their own writing.
• Textbook writing: a small group reviews all material studied in a course, selects and organizes what should be included in a written text for the course and provides rationale for selections.
• Time capsule: a small group gathers items that are representative of a text, writes about each item and puts them into a sealed container for another group to open before they read the same text.
• Writing response group: a small group of writers provides feedback on strengths and limitations of one another's work during the revision stage, checking first for satisfactory ideas, then for correctness.

Writing 2: Additive Reporting Strategies

Writing assignments as year-round activities need to be varied to suit topics, students' abilities and yes, as we know, even the weather. Additive writing is one of the easier, earlier types of assignments teachers can give, in which writers expand on a text. This type of writing is also often used as a prewriting activity (other prewriting favorites are brainstorming, listing, ebbing, clustering, mapping, outlining and responding to story starters or prompts).

Additive writing ideas are the following:

• Add speech/thought/sound effect balloons or captions to historical photographs, science diagrams, or math problems.
• Complete sentence stems (i.e., "I can't understand why...", "Inside this mystery box is a....", "The thing that worries me most is...").
• Complete sentences that have blanks to fill in or expand on bare-bones sentences.
• Create labels for things in a language other than your own.
• Expand sentences in a text by adding descriptive words.
• Incorporate figurative language from sports, politics, the medical profession, or popular culture in your writing.
• Make up jokes, riddles, puzzles or board games about characters or events in a text.
• Pretend to be a character in a book and write a continuation of events or a new chapter, ending or sequel.
• Revise a K-W-L-W chart to set personal goals in writing, such as "What I Do Well," "What I Want To Do Well," "What I Learned To Do Well" and "What I Want To Learn To Do Well."
• Write text or labels for objects in photographs, wordless books or sequences of pictures.
• Write a version of a text set in another place, culture or time period, from another intellectual or emotional perspective, using another voice or physical point of view, or as if it were an eyewitness newspaper account.

Writing: Responsive Reporting Strategies

Since December on this blog -- after an introduction of sorts to creative teaching -- I've mainly talked about improving students' listening skills: Getting Kids to Listen, Kids Listen Differently, and Is the Teacher Listening?

This is a daily, year-round struggle -- to get kids to pay attention -- so I wanted to start my blog with something everyone can relate to.

I have also digressed by picking up from the introduction to talk a bit more about where my ideas come from and how they fit together into my Creative Planning Design for Interconnected Teaching and Learning. There's a lot more to talk about in this regard, but so far I've just talked a bit about my sunwise journey, Cornel Pewewardy, Medicine Wheels, and Dreamcatchers. I will continue at a later post about some of the other aspects of the creative process I have used in my journey to become a better teacher. If you are interested in studying the process -- in fact, studying all the information in this blog -- in a more linear format, please consider getting my 2002 book, Creative Planning Resource (www.peterlang.com).

I also went into a couple of posts about children's literature -- one of my biggest enthusiasms -- to talk about the new Caldecott winner, Flotsam, then Participatory Storytelling with a folktale by Wanda Gág, and even my new OxCart production of The Night Before Christmas.

Participatory storytelling and doing plays are both ways for children to refine their listening skills.

They also make excellent performances for parents and peers at the end of the school year.

So, since spring break has now come and gone, it seems like I should continue to post some end-of-the-year strategies. Hopefully this might help someone out there with an idea or two to enrich their creative repertoire.

I begin with writing strategies. In particular, "responsive writing", in which students may be asked to report about a topic or story in one or more of the following ways:

• Art project: create a two-dimensional or three-dimensional project illustrating a written response.
• Character sketch: describe a character; rewrite a character's story or dialogue in your own words.
• Consider two characters from different stories and write a story in which they meet.
• Empty head: draw a circle and fill it with thoughts a character in a story might have.
• Graphic organizer: create an outline, web, diagram, map, time line, or flowchart about what you are reading.
• Historical letter: pretend to be an historical figure or character in a book and write to another famous person or character.
• Personal letter: write to peers, family members, teachers and friends about what you are reading and studying.
• Journal: write about a specific topic in a daily diary at the beginning of each class; keep a detailed response log, dialogue journal, scrapbook, field notes or word bank throughout an entire learning experience.
• Letter to the editor: write to the local or school newspaper, TV station, TV personality, author or other public figure about your concern, opinion or experiences concerning a current event or topic in the news.
• Open response: write an answer to a prompt about a topic that additionally asks you to explain your thinking about the topic (i.e., "Explain three ways that...", "Tell why you chose to...").
• Personal essay: write about the parts in a text that you remember the most vividly, parts that encouraged you to think in new ways and/or parts that affected you emotionally; turn your essay into a speech.
• Political activism: write a letter to a local, state, or national official or politician requesting information, stating an opinion, or calling for action concerning an issue in the news.
• Questions: write discussion, test or study questions for a text.
• Quick write: respond spontaneously to a question or a prompt by describing anything that occurs to you about a topic or by agreeing/disagreeing with what was said.
• True/false: write two sentences in response to what an ad, TV commercial, or political candidate wants you to believe and what you know or think to be true.

Creative Teaching Design

My last two posts were Medicine Wheels and Dreamcatchers for a couple of reasons. Of course the Medicine Wheels help me introduce Cornel Pewewardy's masterful use of the Wheel from his own tradition to create a holistic plan for reaching students with multiple intelligences. My other reason is that I also needed a way to introduce my own wheel-like design for a creative plan for interconnected teaching and learning:

I began my blog talking about taking a sunwise journey to discover if I could find ways to become a more creative teacher. I digressed for many posts to plunge right in to strategies for developing listening skills. I digressed for a reason -- as a teacher myself, I don't like theory disconnected from practice, and I wanted to give my readers right off the bat some examples of the kinds of things I had found on my journey.

Now it's time to back up somewhat to fit what we've been talking about into perspective. I feel the need to fit what I'm talking about into the big picture of creative planning. And the big picture for me is my wheel above. It has in it all the components for creative planning that I will talk about in this blog.

I started my blog, you see, with listening skills -- how to focus students' attention -- and this fits into my wheel under the quadrant "Connect", for it is here teacher and student begin an exploration together, by connecting with each other, by connected to previous learning, by connecting to the outside world, etc. I deliberately wanted to connect with you, my reader, from the beginning, by giving you practical, day-to-day tips you could use in your own planning.

Now I want to begin to fit things I talk about into this larger context of Creative Planning for Interconnected Teaching and Learning. So bear with me.

Back in the north on my sunwise journey, I needed to take care that the balance between research and practice would be correct. Predictably, I got stuck. I was stuck for a very long time, going nowhere, writing too much or too little or nothing at all, and there was no wonder or joy to be found in the north, where wisdom resides. Significantly, it was another bitter winter in Minnesota and on evenings and weekends, I burned up the woodpile and all the scrap lumber in the garage as I sat at my desk, got up to stoke the fireplace and stomped back to my chair.

I was stuck in my thinking about all the aspects of creative planning -- there was holism, a balanced curriculum, constructivist planning, grouping arrangements, types of resources, and types of strategies, both for accessing information and reporting information. To be stuck in this theoretical web was not moving me forward in the practical world where I lived and worked with my colleagues.

Artist and fellow teacher Bill Slack (whose art adorns my book, Creative Planning Resource, which makes me very proud) suggested I take a break from words and draw my ideas. Clever man. I needed to know and show what my book about creative planning looked like as well as what my book was going to say.

Bill gave me a drawing of one of his ideas and then, when I drew my own, writer's block was released. My Interconnected Design clarified how all I had gathered might be arranged for creative teaching and learning. It was no little doodle.

Even though the drawing was a mere swirl with pen across paper when I did it, it was intuitively correct, and I could see where all the parts of my journey fit it. To me, at first, it resembled the cross section of a seashell. A colleague said it looked like a propeller or maybe a hubcap; another said it was like a section of the double helix, that spiraling staircase of DNA; a third said it was like some Thing under a microscope from CSI. Certainly not elegant, it was still for me the right graphic for several reasons.

Classically circular, it symbolizes holism. It is not a Medicine Wheel but a spiral, representing a wheel in time, with a gap at the top that is open to past and future. This suits a way of thinking about time for many indigenous people that says we are all moving events within a moving universe, shaped by and shaping our environment, with no starting or ending points.

This same idea was applied to American education by John Dewey as cyclic, recursive or dialectic learning, in which meeting an objective and assessing success are not ends in themselves but remain open-ended. Each educational experience is generated from what went before and generates new experiences, with meaningful ideas growing from and leading to related ideas, questions and problems. Thus was born our time-honored, familiar notion of spiraling curriculum and its companion, spiraling planning, or one coil unwinding into another as we develop a theme.

Another influence on my design is the theory that the number four contributes to harmony and balance, especially when applied to information on wheel analogies. This idea is reflected in my spiral, which is divided into four pie-shaped chambers of time for creatively planning events with and for students.

The design is interconnected, with influences in each event to be understood as flowing back and forth, as do dynamic and evolving aspects of creative planning in real life. In each event, decisions are up to individual teachers about when and how fast to move along. The events are driven by the propeller, if you will, in the center. The four blades represent choices to be made among grouping arrangements, resources and two categories of strategies.

At the core of the design is the whole child, who is surrounded by a balanced curriculum, around both of which all plans for teaching and learning revolved. Looking up through the gap, teachers and learners consider what has gone before and what should come next. The outside rim represents the continuing goal for creative planning: the development of interconnected student behaviors.

Now that I had a visual that represented my ideas as concisely -- if imperfectly -- as I could, I was as close as I could get to a definition of creative planning that might make me a better teacher.