HowlRound: Walk into a science classroom and ask a group of fifth graders what comes after “Construct a Hypothesis” in the scientific method? You’ll get some blank stares and maybe a couple of reluctant hands from the usual suspects. Alternatively, walk into the auditorium at Pittsburgh Public School’s Sunnyside Elementary School on a day that Attack Theatre is teaching the music class, and you’ll hear shouts of answers. Some of them right, some of them wrong. Being correct, however, isn’t what’s important.
4 comments:
These schools are using people to visually represent physical principals and mathematic concepts while integrating art and theater into the science and math curriculum. This peaked my interest because I had to take physics online in high school and there was no visual representation of any concepts and therefore I didn't do as well as I'd hoped because I didn't understand the material in motion.
To build upon that, there was a kid in my high school geometry class who, every single day, asked the same exact question: when am I actually going to use this? The worst par was, the teacher never gave him a good answer. It's important to connect classroom topics with the real world because students can process and apply the knowledge to their own life instead of let it go in one ear out the other thinking "I'll never use this". So the techniques in this article do not cover this hole in the education system but I think they can be used to.
This is incredible. Science and the arts are so closely related, and teaching it to students in an over lapping way is really special. I personally don't believe that the normal classroom atmosphere of seating students at a desk while a teacher talks up front is not very effective in young children. This idea of creating a theater atmosphere is a safe and comfortable place where students also are more engaged allows for a much easier learning process. The author really drove home a point where he said it starts in your community, which I highly agree with. Looking to the education system at large and all the higher ups that enact laws and policy's on teachers who have never even taught a child a day in there life is not where things change. Just putting in the work for one school for one system is where it starts. I admire this author a great deal for the work he did and I am sure that those children will remember that feeling at his lesson over anything else, I really hope others follow.
This article has a lot of merit to it. I have a friend who is a ballet dancer and her understanding of ballet helped her understand the math and physics behind her dancing. While this may not be the best example, but I think it is appropriate. I think the author of the article, however, needs to be careful about how they use the word “wrong.” The importance of this article is in using ‘non-classroom’ teaching methods. In theater, a lot of what we do is trial and error. Though that may be misleading because there are can be many solutions to any given situation. Just because there are different methods of doing something, it doesn’t mean that one is right and others are wrong. As educators, we need to be just as focused on solving problems, thinking outside the box, and the process by which we go about coming up with and implementing a solution as we are on the purely math or science based answers. This article is a great start at getting people to think about teaching purley academic subjects in different ways.
I wish my high school did that - then I wouldn't have struggled to keep my eyes open every single math class in high school. Also, then I probably would still remember what I learnt in my chem bio and physics classes that I had to take. This way of teaching fosters an appreciation for both the STEM subjects as well as the performing arts among the youngest generation today, which is exactly what we need. One thing I didn't really agree with the author about is that my high school left me with the impression that science is all about trial and error while you can't really afford to fail in the arts (instead of the other way around), but either way the interdisciplinary combination of the arts and sciences can definitely foster a strong sense of encouragement. Most importantly, it teaches kids that it's okay to like both the arts and sciences, and you can do both if you want to instead of telling them that the two are exact opposites that will never cross paths which I think is a huge stigma among older generations right now. Hopefully, more schools will follow suit because this is really cool.
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