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Design and Symphony
Design: Bring back the arts into schools! Today's students need opportunities to explore ways to express themselves using pencils, paints, clay, chalk and music. Our schools are not allowing students to explore their right-brain way of discovering the world. Instead we are harvesting a future filled with left-brain thinkers. Without their counterparts, our future will be unbalanced, lacking design and beautiful music.
Symphony: Symphony is about seeing relationships. Pattern recognition is a needed skill for math students from the early grades through Trigonometry. Math classes should be designed to allow students time to think about how mathematical concepts fit together. Focusing on several "Big Concepts" throughout the school year instead of dozens of standards would allow time for students to create meaning while going into depth on important topics.
Schools must continue to find ways to connect content standards across all subjects. This can be done when teachers work in concert to prepare lessons. Research shows that when students connect learning to real-world application comprehension increases.
I really liked your specific example of teaching conceptual math. I think this is such an important first step in moving towards students who love and appreciate mathematics. I believe math is an artform, but so often we reduce it to a technical cook-book approach.
ReplyDeleteI was intrigued by Pink's comment that many of us are "crunched for time, deluged by information, and paralyzed by the weight of too many choices". When I have too many decisions to make or too much stimulus I sometimes feel overwhelmed and don't know how or where to start. It makes me wonder if students ever feel overwhelmed by the amounts of stimulus in their environments or if their brains are hard-wired to understand it.
ReplyDeleteOur school is focusing on student motivation throughout this school year. Although this may sound like a difficult task, I think a harder task might be to motivate teachers.
ReplyDeleteWhen I think of creativity and design I wonder how students would design classrooms if given the opportunity. Would it increase their motivation and desire to learn?
Classrooms are a fascinating thing to observe as a space, and the design within them on a campus can tell you a lot about where the faculty is in terms of releasing the cognitive load of learning to the students from the teacher.
ReplyDeleteIt is interesting to me that several mathematicians I know are also artists. Take Einstein, for example (I don’t really know him, but I am sure he would have liked to know me ☺), was an accomplished violinist. I worked with a math teacher who was also credentialed in art and made beautiful pottery. There are obvious design elements in architecture that are predicated upon mathematical calculations and knowledge. If we teach broad concepts in a problem-solving approach, there are extensive mathematical implications to aid in solving those problems. Redesigning mathematics teaching and learning in this way would surely help in the “motivation” arena.
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