"If you are
not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original."
In class we watched a presentation by
Sir Ken Robinson entitled, "Do Schools Kill Creativity?" During this
talk, Robinson states that "we are running education systems where
mistakes are the worst thing you can make." He believes that this negative
attitude towards taking risks, being creative or being "wrong" is
negatively impacting the children in our school systems. He believes that all
children have extraordinary capacities for innovation and tremendous talents
that we, as educators, squander. When reflecting on this talk, I found myself
strongly agreeing with everything highlighted by Robinson. I too believe that
the education system as we know it, does not provide students with many
opportunities for taking risks or expressing themselves creatively, because it
is too concerned with academic status. I agree with Robinson when he states, "we
are educating people out of their creative capacities." As future
educators, I believe that it is our responsibility to create the best possible learning
environment for our students, ensuring that each child has the opportunity to reach
their maximum learning potential. This
means that we must nurture our students’ talents and learning styles, whatever
they may be.
Robinson strongly believes that "creativity
is as important as literacy" and that the education system must recognize
this. Robinson highlights that the hierarchy of subject areas are the same
everywhere you go, with Mathematics and Language Arts at the top, the
Humanities just below and then the Arts at the very bottom. He believes that we
are educated upwards with a focus on the human mind but that this needs to
change because there are many "highly talented, brilliant and creative
people who think that they are not, because what they were good at school
wasn`t valued, but actually stigmatized." From Howard Gardner’s work on
multiple intelligences, we understand that there are many different ways in
which individuals can learn and be successful. We must recognize that a
learning style that fits the needs of one child, may not fit the needs of
another child, and that we must allow children to experience a variety of
learning styles that assess all possible intelligences, until they find one that
allows them to succeed. Robinson gives an excellent example of this, when he
references the story of Gillian Lynne. As a young girl, Gillian did not thrive academically
in a traditional classroom setting and was considered to be disruptive because of
her inability to sit still class. However, once somebody recognized that she "needed
to move in order to think," she was introduced to the world of dance and went
on to have a successful career as a dancer and choreographer.
Something that struck me as
interesting when watching this presentation was when Robinson made the comment that
children who are going to school this year will be retiring in 1965 and that nobody
knows what the world will be like in five years, yet we are supposed to be
educating them for their futures. This was something that I never really thought
about until now. Education is constantly shifting and evolving and we as educators
are responsible for preparing students for their futures, whatever they may be.
It is troubling to know that what we teach our students now may have no
relevance to life in the future. However, as educators we must stay positive
and always keep an open mind. We must be flexible and willing to adapt our teaching
styles at all times, in order to create the best possible learning experiences
for our children, giving them their best shot at having a bright future. We
must not inhibit our students’ talents and creativity, but rather encourage
them if we want to produce a successful generation.
While watching and reflecting on this
presentation, I thought about ways in which it could be connected to teaching children mathematics.
Mathematics is a subject area that holds a lot of prestige in the school system.
Children often come to math class feeling as if they are failures because they
believe mathematics to be a subject area in which there is only one answer and
if you don’t have it, you are unintelligent. Since many mathematical problems
often do only have one answer, teachers must emphasize different ways in which students
can reach that answer and allow them to be creative in the strategies that they
choose, rather than simply saying yes, you are right or no, you are wrong Teachers
must make the effort to give students the opportunity to express themselves creatively
and must consider the different learning styles and intelligences that each
child brings to the math class and ways in which they can be utilized. I am
excited to learn how to approach teaching mathematics at the primary and
elementary levels through this course and hope to learn more about the ways in which
I can encourage creativity and risk taking in my future classroom in terms of
mathematics.
“We have to
rethink the fundamental principles on which we are educating our children."
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