Partnership Welcomes Guest Bloggers! This Week: Pamelia Valentine

At the Partnership, we’re always looking for ways to bring you innovative education content and insight. And what better way, we thought, than to bring a few new perspectives in to the fray. Over the next few weeks, you’ll meet two of our new guest bloggers. Both teachers in Washington state, these women bring wisdom, passion and reflection from the area in education that matters most: the classroom.

This week, we welcome guest blogger Pamelia Valentine! Pamelia graduated from the Masters in Teaching program at Evergreen State College in 1999 and was hired by the Shelton School District that fall. She received her National Board Certification in Early Adolescent/Young Adult Art in 2006. She is a life-long artist and a mother of three beautiful children and one darling granddaughter.

Creativity Really Does Matter

I recently attended the "Creativity Matters" conference in Tacoma and followed that up by reading Daniel H. Pink's book "A Whole New Mind; Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future" (2006) and Thomas L. Friedman's "The World is Flat" (2007). All of that creative input left my brain whirling and my imagination totally fired up! And as a teacher, it got me thinking: What does this all mean for our public education system?

Since I am a junior high art teacher and a literacy coach in my district, I have a dual role in shaping curriculum and in implementing systemic change. But every teacher from elementary to college; from food preparation to calculus should understand that our students need to be well-rounded in subject information and resilient in problem-solving. We need to be vigilant in avoiding a tunnel vision approach toward one measure of learning and we need to deliberately provide our students with open-ended creative problem solving opportunities.

At our school all teachers are asked to spend a concentrated amount of time teaching students how to answer test genre questions. We invest time and energy into writing lesson plans that meet state standards. We have staff trainings geared toward boosting our student’s scores on the Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL). And, don’t get me wrong; I do think we should prepare our students for tests that could very well alter the course of their lives. And of course we should keep testing to make sure that all students receive a good education. But we also have to create well-rounded individuals who can problem solve and think creatively—it isn’t an either or proposition, we must do both.

It’s not terribly difficult to open the door to creative thinking. In my sculpture class, I ask students to build sculptures that have beautiful form and an aesthetic function. I give examples: A beautifully sculpted kaleidoscope—the form is the intricate relief carving—while the aesthetic function is a beautiful new way to look at the world. A mouse-whistle—the form is the carefully rendered field mouse—the aesthetic function is a musical sound.

Instead of providing a step-by-step plan to make one of these projects exactly as the examples are made, I have students spend time brainstorming ideas about form and function. We discuss aesthetics and how ideals of beauty have changed throughout human history. I don’t hand them a plan at all—no blueprint to success—no keys to the kingdom. I hand them the world and ask them to create an interpretation based on their understanding of aesthetics and their ideas of beauty. It scares them, some balk, some are frustrated, but they all get over it. They get over it and they thrive.

The world IS flat and because of the emphasis on creative problem solving, the onus is clearly on the public schools to take a leading role in preparing our students with an understanding of what that means to them. We must begin to beat the drum! As the digitalized information highway paves the way toward the future, we would be wise to teach our students to be well-rounded creative problem-solvers, the kind of folks who can think outside the box BEFORE they get painted into a corner.