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At a recent book event at Friends Select, renowned author Sir Ken Robinson exhorted the audience to pay attention to fostering creativity in schools. His enormously entertaining lecture was based on his new book, The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything. The dynamic British lord mentioned, among other things, a longitudinal study on “divergent thinking,” his term for the ability to generate ideas based on a given stimulus. Given the study’s disheartening results -- a steep decline in creativity with increasing age -- Robinson’s emphatically stressed the immediate need to engage students in discovering their more artistic passions since, “…human talent is buried deep within us. It must be discovered through a great deal of digging.”
The study Robinson cited tracked children’s ability to think creatively at different ages. At ages 3 to 5, 98 percent of the students studied operated in the “genius” range of divergent thinking. By ages 8 to 10, only 32 percent were at that level, and by 13 to 15, only ten percent fit the genius category. The decline of one third in each age group strongly suggests, according to Robinson, that traditional-track education fails to properly nurture the creative side of students.
How is Friends Select attempting to buck this trend? As we continue to learn and teach through the digital revolution, the middle school faculty has been working to understand and experience for ourselves the types of creative learning and discovery that we ask of our students every day. During a recent meeting, music teachers Dan Capecchi and Heather Fortune gave the faculty a chance to discover their “inner musicians” without even having to pick up an instrument or sing a single note.
Using a program called “Garageband” on the newly acquired iMac lab in the music room, each of us had the chance to work with musical concepts and theories without any prior musical knowledge. As faculty and students manipulated everyday sounds to create compositions, we each had the opportunity to begin to discover our musical creativity by exploring rhythm, blend, and audio synthesis.
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