Writer Judith Tannenbaum wrote to us today, sending along her notes from a May 14 workshop by Eric Booth in Berkeley: "Fostering Creative Engagement Through Habits of Mind." We thought you might find her notes valuable, so she said we could share them with you and she apologizes for their brevity.

By way of intro, she says, "I'm usually (always?) so resistant when people reduce into systems what I see as vast and layered. So I was kinda amazed by how impressed and excited I was by Eric Booth's ability to stay big (deep, complicated) and also to make points and practices specific. I've been trying to understand this 'teaching artist' field (which feels similar and also so different from our 'community arts' world). One primary aspect Eric's workshop revealed is his focus on breaking down the essential qualities of artistic/creative thinking and developing these as skills -- in combination with and also separate from actual art-making experiences."

Notes on the workshop leader (from artiseducation.org):
A master teaching artist, leading thinker in Arts Education and the author of "The Everyday Work of Art," Eric Booth teaches at the Kennedy Center, Stanford University, New York University and the Lincoln Center Institute, and is the founding editor of the Teaching Artist Journal.

The Habits of Mind of Creative Engagement
(Notes by Judith Tannenbaum from a workshop by Eric Booth)

Workshop description: Using hands-on techniques, participants will explore how our minds work when we are engaged creatively, and will delve into methods designed to enhance students’ flow of learning. Consider what this could mean to arts teaching and learning practices if teachers focus on developing these essential capacities – like analogical thinking and brainstorming. Imagine – teaching creative habits of mind instead of simply leading arts activities!

The Habits of Mind of Creative Engagement: A teaching system that has had a huge impact on the educational establishment, “Habits of Mind” are the ways we function as learners when we encounter new situations. Arts Education specialist Eric Booth connects this important educational innovation to the arts and uncovers key “habits” that invest students in their own learning. This approach invites fresh ways of thinking about arts learning, and opens teachers to new ways of bringing creative vitality into the classroom.

Judith’s Notes
Usual order: Instruction, Experience, Uncovering what we know
Shift this so begin with offering an experience and asking students to pay attention to their process. This tends to automatically lead to desire for more information (the instruction part).

When asking students to reflect on their experience, to notice how they did it, how their minds work, tends to lead to the “ah ah!” moment or “intrinsic motivation.”

Exercise:
Step 1. You will have one minute to write down all the ways in which a refrigerator and a mouse are similar. Quantity, not quality.
Step 2. Spend a minute noting what was your process? How did you go about the task?
Step 3. Some of these shared (and then Eric framed these in the language of his Habits of Mind)

Research: Nobel prize winners are about average problem-solvers, but exceptional problem-identifiers and exceptional question askers.

Trying to give students skills for encountering what’s unfamiliar.

Ability to brainstorm – to generate many ideas and solutions – considered the single most identifying quality of creativity.

Exercise:
Close your eyes or keep them cast down while listening to instructions. You are a preacher who hasn’t yet prepared his Sunday sermon. It’s Sunday morning. In a moment you’ll lift your eyes, and find something in this room that will serve as a basis for the sermon. (After a minute or so for that) – now imagine you have to explain the connection between your object and the sermon.

Again, Eric framed process in terms of his Habits of Mind. Thinking analogically, then trusting one’s own judgments (that pulling together process required for explaining the connection).

Exercise:
Pair up. One person has a minute to try to get the other person to move (without any physical touch).

Above exercises examples of beginning with the experience, and then “reflecting metacognitively.” Then Eric began the “instructional” part of the workshop:

1. Habits of Mind work since early 1990s, in education. Primary system developed by Arthur L. Costa and Bena Kallick. Eric’s handout describes their habits of mind, as well as those developed by Ted Sizer and Debbie Meier from the Coalition of Essential Schools and the Studio Habits of Mind (created at Harvard’s Project Zero), Sparks of Genius developed by Robert and Michelle Root-Bernstein, and his own.
2. Basic to this Habits of Mind is the attempt to notice ways we function as humans when we encounter new situations. Eric’s specific take on this is through the arts/creativity, what do people do when creatively engaged in anything (not only the arts)?
3. Question he – and others – are asking: what can the arts (not art-making, but creative process) bring to schools/education?
4. He talked a bit about UNESCO’s First Worldwide Arts Education Conference (March 2006).
Antonio Damasio: the dual ways the brain processes experience: fast (information exchange, multi-tasking, etc.) and slow (emotional and reflective). Both are essential. His research has shown that the fast processing is actually getting faster, along with our technological gains. However, fast processing is coming to dominate slow processing, and slow processing is essential to mental health and ethical/moral behavior. His major point was that arts learning is the optimum place in which to strengthen the balance.
In Finland, he reported, 80% of time in school is spent teaching through the arts.
From almost every country, people spoke of crises (AIDS, poverty, ecological abuse,
etc.) and how these problems are given to arts education to help resolve.
Noted that the world does not make a distinction between learning in the arts (skills in an artistic discipline) and learning through the arts (connecting arts learning with other learning goals).
5. Instead of asking classroom teachers for 40 minute blocks in which to teach arts activities, asks for 2 minutes, twice-a-day, 5 days/week to build up the capacities (“habits of mind”). Like isometric exercises developing isolated skill/habit of mind. Questions about how can we work small enough.
6. Went through his own 20 Habits of Mind (I have this sheet and will make a copy for you if you want)
7. Example exercise:
Write the first sentence of your autobiography (capacity: Using one’s own voice).
Work with an eye to craft (capacity: Crafting)
Here’s what publisher wants in an autobiography, edit for that (capacity: Making choices based on a variety of criteria)
8. Research: the single most important measure of literacy success is the number of words a young child heard spoken at home (not quality of vocabulary, just the number).
9. attention – etymologically means “to wake up”
10. Plato: most important is to teach young people to find pleasure in the right things.
11. Eric’s distinction between entertainment and art: entertainment confirms what we already know, art leads us out of what we already know.
12. Never ask questions that have only a single answer. His story about imposing a 25 cent fine on himself if he did so.
13. Julliard – contract with teaching artists, days paid to be artists.
14. Chorus participation largest arts activity in country. 1/6 American households have someone in a chorus.
15. One school choral master developed an evaluation form for students to fill out (instead of her commenting after each piece rehearsed). In quadrants:
How I did How I can get better
How we did How we can get better
Makes copies for everyone, and also saves (a record of how each student’s understanding deepened over the year – its own rubric).
16. The Montalvo example. Teaching artists’ task will be to use Montalvo resident arts with children at school, to explore what makes an artist, what does an artist need, an artist’s life.
17. Start of national research about teaching arts – who we are. Art is Education.
18. In Hawaii, took “best” 25 teaching artists and gave them an intensive workshop in advocacy. Partnership building.

   

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