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.
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