Greenwich Post (Alum Tom Healy featured)
Encourage and Take Beautiful Risks
Editor’s Note: The following piece — authored by Ronald Beghetto, professor of educational psychology and an expert in creativity — originally appeared on the Corwin Press Corwin Connect blog.
What if we, as instructional leaders, supported creativity in teaching and learning? I mean really supported it. Here are a few things we might expect to see (and hear). We would see ourselves leading by example. We would view uncertainty as a sign that new thought and action is needed (rather than ignore it or try to quickly resolve it by force-fitting solutions). We would see ourselves engaging in possibility thinking. And hear a shift in our language moving away from “This is the way it is” and toward “How could or should it be different?” We would demonstrate a willingness to seek out diverse perspectives and honestly critique our ideas and beliefs (even our most cherished ones). We would also see ourselves stepping into uncertainty — taking measured action; failing fast, but learning even more quickly; and making small, but meaningful progress.
In short, we would see ourselves taking beautiful risks.
Beautiful risks bolster confidence, deepen understanding, and lead to new ways of thinking and acting. Taking beautiful risks has a cascading effect on others — encouraging them to take similar risks. As a result, we would see a growing recognition amongst teachers and students that creativity is not about “anything goes” or even “thinking outside the box,” but knowing when and how to strike a better balance between meeting curricular goals and, at the same time, providing students opportunities to develop and express their understanding of academic content in new and meaningful ways.
Creativity is not something that can be given or taken away. It is a capacity that all students, teachers, and instructional leaders always and already have available to them.
When we encourage and take beautiful risks, we would see teachers making slight changes to their existing curriculum to create more room for original student expression. We would see students taking intellectual risks in the form of seeking out new learning challenges, asking for assistance when needed, and being willing to make mistakes in an effort to learn more deeply. We would also see a movement away from learning academic content as a means to its own end and, instead, see academic content put to creative use. This, in turn, allows us to move away from underestimating what young people are capable of doing and toward providing opportunities for them to demonstrate the profound impact they can have on their own learning and lives.
When we encourage and take beautiful risks, we do so out of a recognition that learning and creative expression are complimentary (not contradictory) goals. We also recognize that beautiful risks do not require making radical changes or implementing yet another mandated reform initiative. Indeed, the last thing we want is a No Child Left Uncreative act.
Creativity is not something that can be given or taken away. It is a capacity that all students, teachers, and instructional leaders always and already have available to them. All that is needed is an opportunity and willingness to put it to use.
Put simply: If we really want to help teachers and students take the risks necessary to reclaim their creativity in schools and classrooms, then we need to start with ourselves.
Access the original blog post by Ronald Beghetto on the Corwin Press website. Beghetto is the author of the newly published book Big Wins, Small Steps: How to Lead for and with Creativity (Corwin Press, 2016).
Early College Experience Program, Neag School Professor Expand Human Rights Education to High School Students
With 80 students currently majoring in the University’s human rights undergraduate program and another 40 to 50 enrolled as human rights minors, UConn stands out as one of just a handful of universities in the nation offering a degree program in the field of human rights.
But educating students in human rights issues need not be exclusive to college campuses, as Glenn Mitoma, assistant professor of human rights and curriculum and instruction, can attest.
Last fall, Mitoma piloted a launch of an introductory UConn course in human rights at three Connecticut high schools, in partnership with the University’s Early College Experience (ECE). UConn’s ECE program allows high schoolers across the state to take university-level courses taught by specially trained teachers at their school while earning credits that can be transferred toward a degree at UConn or other universities. The course is the only known concurrent enrollment course offered today in the field of human rights in the United States, Mitoma says.
“UConn has the leading human rights program in the country. We have this tremendous resource, and I am really looking to make the most of it for the secondary and primary education communities,” says Mitoma, who has joint appointments in the Neag School and UConn’s Human Rights Institute, while also serving as director of the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center. “My ambition is to make Connecticut a national model for human rights education.”
The piloted course – which was offered during the 2015-16 academic year at Manchester High School, East Hartford High School, and Woodstock Academy – is oriented around inquiry- and project-based learning. At Manchester High, for example, part of the coursework includes having students develop interactive exhibits around specific human rights issues — a miniature human rights “museum” of sorts that, Mitoma says, pushes students to translate the research skills they acquire into “practices that then help communicate, or make a point, about a particular human rights issue.”
“My ambition is to make Connecticut a national model for human rights education.” Glenn Mitoma, assistant professor of human rights and curriculum and instruction
Jacob Skrzypiec ’13 (ED), ’14 MA, a Neag School graduate and social studies teacher who began teaching the ECE course at Manchester High last fall, says the impact of the coursework on his own students is clear.
“Connecticut students in particular, many having lived their entire lives in somewhat isolated/independent hamlets of the state, divided by social, economic, and political limitations beyond their control, can sometimes have a narrow perspective on the world around them,” Skrzypiec says. “The reward for high school students taking a course or engaging in human rights education experiences is endless, as they can not only become greater global citizens, but can be nurtured to think, rationalize, and critique as engaged, focused participants of society. For me, the best is seeing my students gain a greater sense of empathy, compassion and understanding for others.”
In fact, the course has been so well received at Manchester High that, come the 2017-18 academic year, it will require all juniors to complete coursework in human rights in order to matriculate — a development about which Skrzypiec says he is particularly proud.
The success of the piloted course, from Mitoma’s perspective, has been twofold. “One is the demonstrated impact on students,” he says. “The students immediately begin making connections, looking to past examples and historical instances of either human rights abuse or human rights struggles to contemporary manifestations.” Seeing students begin to make these connections, Mitoma adds, “is always a mark that we’re having the kind of impact we want.”
Another measure of success is evident in the professional networking that has naturally developed among the ECE teachers, Mitoma says. For instance, fellow ECE teachers, including Skrzypiec, are now collaborating to organize a series of human rights conferences for high school students — to be hosted at UConn later this year — that are meant to foster discussion around human rights issues and to allow high schoolers to hear from experts in the field.
In light of its growing success over the past year, the course will now expand this fall to two additional partner high schools — Conard High School in West Hartford as well as Crosby High School in Waterbury. A second Neag School alum, Abigail Esposito ’14 (ED), ’15 MA, will be teaching the course at Conard.
“I am very happy that we can offer such an important and specialized course at the high schools,” says Brian Boecherer ’03 (CLAS), ’14 MA, executive director of Office of Early College Programs and ECE at UConn, who worked with Mitoma to launch the piloted course in Fall 2015. “This is a very important course for many students because I think it allows them to become aware of a major that is yet not well known. It also allows highly credentialed instructors at the high schools an academic home where they can feel part of something much larger.”
At the same time, Skrzypiec adds, giving high schoolers the opportunity to take a college-level human rights course “can push students to rise to the academic rigor expected in a collegiate course, while also allowing students to discuss and grapple with potentially controversial issues not otherwise touched in high school classrooms.”
To learn more about the human rights ECE course or ongoing efforts to expand human rights education and programming, contact Glenn Mitoma at glenn.mitoma@uconn.edu. Follow him on Twitter @GlennMitoma. Find more information about the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center at doddcenter.uconn.edu, or at @DoddCenter on Twitter and at facebook.com/doddimpact on Facebook.
Assistant Professor Glenn Mitoma also recently led the Upstander Academy, a weeklong research and engagement program for middle and high school teachers designed to examine the role that intellectual humility can play in meaningful public dialogue. Read more about the Upstander Academy here.
Early Standouts May Not Make Future Champions
Editor’s Note: This story — written by Kim Krieger — originally appeared on UConn Today, the University of Connecticut’s news website.
As you watch this year’s summer Olympics, pay attention to the athletes from smaller countries. There’s a good reason why some countries manage to produce elite athletes consistently, even though they’re drawing from populations much smaller than those of China, Brazil, or the U.S. They cultivate them differently.
“In U.S. sports, we focus too much on early success,” says Jaci VanHeest, associate professor of educational psychology in the Neag School of Education at UConn. And that detracts both from the kids who play and from our country’s potential success in games like the Olympics.
In the U.S., it’s become common to sort kids in sports by the age of 8 or 10. We put the kids who perform well – those who score the most goals, or run the fastest, or seem most coordinated – onto travel teams or ‘A’ leagues. Other kids can still play, but are often overlooked for future opportunities, or get discouraged and quit altogether.
VanHeest calls this the “Hunger Games” model, and says it’s misguided. Most people don’t display their true physical potential or agility until after the age of 10 to 12. Other critical aspects of success, such as power and psychological resilience, don’t become apparent until the mid- to late teens.
Identifying athletic talent
“If you look at the Rio Games, probably less than 75 percent of the champions will have been standouts at age 10,” VanHeest says. And she would know. She was one of a team of physiologists employed by U.S. Swimming in the early 1990s to identify promising young swimmers who just might become champions at the Sydney Olympics eight years later. You’ll recognize the names of the some of the swimmers she and her colleagues identified: Natalie Coughlin, for example, and Michael Phelps.
The physiologists looked at young swimmers, and focused first on factors such as body shape. Most champion swimmers, for example, have long arms with a “wingspan” broader than they are tall. And of course Michael Phelps has famously big feet, often compared to flippers. Metabolic abilities – whether an athlete is better at sprinting or endurance – are another factor, as is muscular strength. The U.S. Swimming sport scientists also looked at the athletes’ parents, to get a hint of what the young person might be like as an adult.
“In U.S. sports, we focus too much on early success.” Jaci VanHeest, associate professor
There’s a lot of science to this type of talent identification, but also art and guesses. At its best, the focus is on the young person and guiding them to a sport where they can be the most successful, VanHeest says. A physiology-minded coach might meet a 12-year-old who plays rugby and is obviously unsuited to it. If the child really likes rugby and wants to play just for fun, VanHeest wouldn’t discourage him. But she might gently point out a more suitable alternative to the child, noting that his agility and body type could make him a really good tennis player, for example, and he might enjoy trying that sport.
Mental skills are also very important, and often don’t mature until a person is a teenager. Many riding sports – on both horses and bikes – require highly tactical thinking at high speeds, for example. VanHeest herself tended goal for field hockey in college, and points out that all goalies, whether they’re playing soccer or ice hockey, need a good intuitive grasp of geometry. If they can’t judge the angle of a shot, they can’t block it.
Because so many factors critical to sport success develop during the teenage years, it’s important to keep more kids playing for longer, and avoid sorting them based on deceptive early performance, she says.
That’s where other countries do better than the U.S. Canada has a great system for ice hockey talent development, for example. Australia and Britain both have very systematic methods of developing athletes, as do many small countries from the former Soviet bloc. VanHeest says the U.S. could learn from them, and encourage coaches to take advantage of the more holistic talent ID programs already available through some nonprofits devoted to youth sport.
But sometimes the idea gets pushback. VanHeest used to teach her students the basics of talent ID. Some felt uncomfortable with the idea of suggesting that a young athlete choose one sport over another.
“They felt it was un-American! They felt if you wanted to play a sport, you should be able to play that sport,” VanHeest says.
“I get it,” she adds. “But in my version, someone who can’t make the ‘A’ meet in swimming at age 10 should stick with it, because they could find great success later … it would be nice if someone could tell the youngster that.”
NEPC Reviewer Finds Problems With Charter School Report
Benzinga (Neag School’s Casey Cobb weighs in on report about charter schools in Milwaukee)
Former Dean Schwab Joins National Commission to Address Teaching
Former Dean Richard Schwab Joins National Commission in Issuing Urgent Call for Action to Address Future of Teaching in the U.S.
Today, between a quarter and a half of new teachers in the U.S. leave the field of teaching within their first four or five years on the job, with teacher turnover incurring costs of more than $2 billion each year. Meanwhile, a mere 5 percent of high schoolers say they intend to pursue careers as educators, according to recent findings — all of this while the achievement gap between high- and low-income students has continued to expand even further over the past 25 years.
“We have spent billions, passing endless pieces of reform legislation at the state and national level — yet still we have not succeeded in supporting and enhancing the teaching profession to the degree we must if we are to achieve the lofty goals all of us have for our nation’s schools,” says Richard L. Schwab, former dean of the Neag School and a longtime commissioner for The National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future (NCTAF), a nonprofit that aims to engage education policymakers and practitioners to address the entrenched national challenge of recruiting, developing, and retaining great teachers in order to ensure that all students have access to quality teaching.
Schwab has joined fellow commissioners of NCTAF in shaping a national report, released this week, that addresses the current challenges facing the future of teaching. The report — titled “What Matters Now: A New Compact for Teaching and Learning” — outlines a series of recommendations focused on improving the system of teaching and learnings in the U.S. in the coming years.
“This document is a research-based, common-sense roadmap for making the necessary changes in our educational system to enhance life for our future generations and to maintain economic prosperity in the new global economy,” Schwab says.
Recommendations on Advancing Teacher Preparation
“We must come together to demand that every child in America has access to schools designed for deep, rigorous, personalized learning led by competent, caring teachers,” states the report. Included among the newly issued report’s recommended action steps are the following:
- Policymakers should establish and broadly communicate a new compact with teachers.
- States and districts should codify and track whether all schools are “organized for success.”
- Teacher preparation should be more relevant and clinically based.
- States should support all new teachers with multi-year induction and high-quality mentoring.
Among other key ideas covered in the report is a “new vision for teaching and learning where schools emphasize skills and knowledge needed for the 21st century – not the memorization of static knowledge, but the ability to be self-directed learners and problem solvers,” Schwab says.
“Our new report brings us back to our core belief that every child deserves a caring, qualified, and competent teacher, and that all of us must do everything we can to support teacher’s efforts to enhance student learning,” he adds. “This support includes job-embedded and research-based teacher preparation programs, structuring schools so that teachers can work collaboratively to address the complex challenges they face every day in and outside the classroom, as well as providing meaningful professional growth and learning opportunities.”
A Call to Collective Action
Schwab and his fellow NCTAF commissioners this week gathered with invited guests in Washington, D.C., to discuss the report in further detail, including the current education climate; the Every Student Succeeds Act and the changing policy landscape; a systematic approach that supports great teaching for all students; and recommendations and strategies for moving teaching and learning forward. The report itself issues a call to collective action — ultimately in order to ensure that all students have access to great teaching.
Schwab, who has served as a NCTAF commissioner since 2001 and on the board of directors since 2009, also was involved in developing No Dream Denied: A Pledge to America’s Children, NCTAF’s 2003 report calling for schools, districts, and policymakers to address the chronic conditions that make schools hard to staff. Schwab’s fellow NCTAF commissioners include former U.S. Secretary of Education Richard W. Riley; Ted Sanders, retired president of the Education Commission of the States; as well as educators; activists; leaders in education reform; and others.
“We must move the focus from doing things to teachers that have no effect, or worse, make their jobs more difficult, to providing support that is research-based, consistent, and focused, and that fully engages teachers in designing the support they need and deserve,” adds Schwab.
The newly released “What Matters Now” report comes more than 30 years after the release of the National Commission on Excellence in Education’s 1983 report, Nation at Risk: The Imperative of Education Reform.
“While we are not the first group to suggest the education system needs to change, we are recommending that action be taken based on many years of collective research and experience,” says Melinda George, NCTAF president. “We strongly believe that we have reached a moment in time where we need to muster the collective will to make that change happen. We know what great teaching and learning should look like. Now we need to stop saying it, and actually do it to ensure every student is prepared for college, career and life.
Access the full report — titled What Matters Now: A New Compact for Teaching and Learning” — here.
Audley Named President of CAPSS
West Hartford News (Neag School alumnus, Alan Addley, was named president of the Connecticut Association of Public School Superintendents)
New Strategies For Old-School Vocational Training
WBUR (Neag School’s Shaun Dougherty was a guest panelist on vocational training, referring to his Fordham Institute Study)
Early Standouts May Not Make Future Champions
UConn Today (Neag School’s Jaci VanHeest, employed by U.S. Swimming in the early ’90s to identify young swimmers who might become champions, says U.S. sports focuses too much on early success)
Moving the Conversation Forward: Upstander Academy
Editor’s Note: This story — written by Ken Best — originally appeared on UConn Today, the University of Connecticut’s news website.
Middle and high school teachers are on campus this week learning how to use genocide and human rights education to address complex historical and current issues.
The program – The Upstander Academy: Intellectual Humility in Public Discourse Summer Institute – was developed by the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center and the Upstander Project, with assistance from secondary educators in Connecticut.
The week-long session is part of the Humanities Institute’s Public Discourse Project, a research and engagement program examining the role that intellectual humility can play in meaningful public dialogue, and the initial activity sponsored by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation for research on balancing humility and conviction in public life.
The Upstander Academy at UConn is associated with the national Upstander Project, which aims to overcome indifference to social injustice by using learning resources, including documentary films, to motivate individuals to move from being “bystanders” to becoming “upstanders” – people who take action in defense of those who are targeted for harm.
Glenn Mitoma, director of the Dodd Research Center and assistant professor in the Neag School of Education, says the week-long institute focusing on human rights and genocide will be followed by future summer sessions on philosophy and on American Studies. He notes that early secondary education – middle school – is when geography and world history become part of the public school curriculum, providing the opportunity to introduce conflict resolution issues to students.
“The strategy is to focus on student capacity for deliberation rather than debate,” Mitoma says. “Particularly in an election season, we see a style of public discourse that is about the clash of view A versus view B. It’s different from an emphasis on deliberation, which is to say: we have this problem on the table; now let’s all come together and try work through this solution together. Our strategy in the Upstander Academy is to cultivate those skills to help students figure out what the right question is to ask about a particular problem, learn democratic discussion skills, and how to work together in both small groups and a classroom to think through difficult problems in a way that is productive to coming up with a common response.”
Two recent issues were selected by teachers as subjects for the session this week – post-genocide in Rwanda, which occurred in 1994; and the forced removal of Native American children from their homes that began in 1978 and the Maine Wabanaki-State Child Welfare Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Both incidents are the subject of documentary films, a key resource in the workshop program. Faculty will include scholars and activists involved with both subjects.
During this week’s session, the 20 participants will have the opportunity to:
- Explore new content about post-genocide Rwanda and cultural genocide against Native Americans through forced removal of children;
- Understand and implement methodologies designed to provide exposure to intellectual humility for learning and justice;
- Test innovative teaching techniques that support the Inquiry Arc, and critical and creative thinking;
- Practice instructional strategies that bridge the social studies to social and emotional learning;
- Practice and model the skills of upstanders in their classrooms, schools, and communities.
Core faculty include Chris Newell, museum education supervisor at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center; gkisedtanamoogk, co-chair of the Maine Wabanaki-State Child Welfare Truth and Reconciliation Commission; and UConn alum Jacob Skrzypiec ’14 (ED), social studies/global relations teacher at Manchester High School and a teacher consultant to Upstander Academy.
Brendan Kane, an associate professor of history and assistant director for public humanities who also serves as co-principal investigator for the Public Discourse Project, says one of the goals of the program is to help young people learn how to discuss issues that affect them daily and engage with people they disagree with.
“We’re trying to take academic research on issues like implicit bias, immigration policy, deliberative democracy, and see it translated into a series of skills that people take beyond the classroom, so when they’re at the Thanksgiving table with the uncle who wants to go off on XYZ, they have the experience and skills and understanding of different modes of conversation,” he says. “We’re teaching the tools we have to try to move conversation forward and get people to the table. It’s not about resolution. It’s about comprehension, communication, and understanding.”
The Upstander Academy: Intellectual Humility in Public Discourse Summer Institute takes place at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, 405 Babbidge Road.
Assistant Professor Glenn Mitoma is also leading a statewide initiative to offer college-level courses in human rights to high school students. Read more here.
