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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