expressive activities

This is the most artistic form of teaching - teachers literally orchestrate lessons by preparing a field, developing an immersion experience or investigation, and then allowing students to actively explore and discover ideas and connections. Learning takes place within the context of students' investigations, as they engage in activities and conversations, or within the context of their own active experimentation. It is a cause and effect relationship.
Although initial or immersion experiences may be planned or structured, these merely serve as triggers, or contextual entry points. It is students' curiosity and intrinsic motivation that are the forces which carry learners toward undetermined or unplanned ends. Flexibility, adaptability and preparedness are key to the success of this type of teaching. When teachers take advantage of a teachable moment, this is the most common form of this type of teaching. Yet, very few teachers add credibility to these types of learning experiences by reflectively or actively evaluating them as formal learning.
Due to the open-ended nature of this form of teaching, learning and actual achievement must be evaluated for achieved objectives after the activity is completed or portions of the activity are completed.
The teacher has the obligation to the students to inform them of their accomplishments and achievements at the end of each activity or session. This can be done through discussion or through openly charting progress.
Formal assessment may be achieved through annotated records, checklists, observations, projects, portfolios, or presentations.

The logistics are simple:

The teacher plans an introductory or exploratory lesson knowing and projecting what types of skills may be needed, or which skills might arise during the course of the lesson.
The teacher then watches the children's reactions, and waits for questions or related interests to appear. At this point he/she may expand the original lesson based on children's questions and evidence of their curiosity. ( this type of planning is highlighted in constructivist teaching, and is closely akin to what teachers do in taking advantage of a "teachable moment." )
The actual formal writing process notes in detail the initial exploratory or investigative experiences, and includes a projection of possible skills which might be needed, and a projection as to where the lesson might diverge.
In the event that students don't respond as predicted, the teacher might note possible prompts.
The teacher also should include sample types of assessments that might prove helpful in evaluating the lesson. These samples may be included in the initial plan.

Example:

Drawing in a sand tray -- knowing students and their developmental stages.

In this exercise the primary teacher plans a simple letter recognition exercise as a trigger activity. Students are given their names printed on a piece of cardboard and asked to duplicate them in the sand tray. In the context of justifiable instructional objectives, the purposes of this exercise are to have students:

recognize and replicate individual letters,
recognize and replicate their names,
exercise left to right visual progressions needed for beginning reading, and
to exercise eye-hand coordination and both small and large muscle coordination.

Being a veteran in observing children, this primary teacher knows that many of her students are highly inquisitive. Off the sand tray she hangs magnifying glasses so that the children can look at the sand in more detail when they have finished writing their names. If they do not do this on their own, she will ask them to do it. She also has a microscope set up and has collected a number of books about the sea, beaches, tides, oceans and marine life, and glass, and so forth. The trick here is for the teacher to either provide an educational environment that is so rich in stimuli that students are propelled by their own senses of inquisitiveness to ask many questions, or to offer gentle prompts so that the students respond with questions.

One child goes to the table and gets sand on his hands. Being curious he picks up a magnifier and begins to examine the sand particles more closely. His friends begin to do the same and they start to notice that the particles are different shapes, sizes and colors. These observations initiate a series of questions about the source and nature of sand. The teacher charts the children's questions and these form the basis for a two week long investigation into sand formation, beaches, types of ocean life, tides, weather conditions, vacations and even the formation of glass. The culmination of the unit is a trip to a glass blower. The unit has been extremely interesting for the students because it was initiated by their own curiosity and questions. Unfortunately, like many such spontaneous experiences, the teacher fails to communicate to the students what exactly they have learned.

Closure:

Although this lesson was a great success, and anyone observing these students could not fail to notice their educational growth, this teacher devalued the credibility of this experience by never providing her students with some sort of closure or summation. In this instance, the children leave the classroom thinking that they had fun playing in the sand tray and observing the glass blower.

This form of teaching is highly artistic and very valuable in maintaining children's levels of intrinsic motivation, but as seen in the example, the fault of the teacher was that she failed to appropriately evaluate the experience. Indeed, many teachers using this form of teaching fail to communicate to students exactly what they have learned. Sometimes they also fail to annotate students' specific achievements, thus causing this form of teaching to be greatly devalued. Teachers committed to this very student-centered, constructivist form of teaching should always create evaluative experiences as part of the expressive activity. Students have a right to know what they have achieved and what they have gained from the experience.

What is involved in creating expressive activities?

The expertise and jobs of the teacher in planning expressive activities that will lead to expressive outcomes are multi-leveled. In this form of teaching the teacher acts as a master orchestrator, devising and planning trigger activities that have the potential to lead in many directions and to many different or unique learning processes and experiences. This method of teaching and curriculum development is the most artistic and complex form of teaching.

Knowledge of Developmental Stages: First, the teacher must have knowledge and expertise in students' developmental stages and with the process expectations that govern the general curriculum.

In the example of the sand tray, the teacher knows that letter recognition and reproduction are baseline essential skills for her students. She also knows that in order to achieve the cognitive and physical functions related to her trigger exercise students must be physically and developmental ready. Her knowledge of their readiness extends to the fact that in order to be successful in this emersion activity students must have some eye-hand control and some fine and gross muscle coordination. They must be able and willing to see something and then to attempt to reproduce it. Also, students must have the cognitive maturity to realize that the basis for understanding written language requires knowing that text travels from left to right and that letters are merely abstract representations of concrete spoken sounds.

Knowledge of Curricular Expectations: In planning this activity the teacher's general knowledge of the curriculum includes knowing that in addition to letter and name recognition and rudimentary writing skills, there is a general district expectation that students will be able to ask and answer their own questions. In the context of her knowledge about students at her grade level, she knows that the pathway of questioning can lead to the emergence of general research interests and skills.

Knowledge of Students' Skills and Talents: From these perspectives the teacher has noted that several of her students are naturally very inquisitive about things in their environment. In devising possible extensions of the baseline activity of letter tracing, she uses all of this knowledge to create an environment that supports students' questions about the nature and sources of sand, thus encouraging students' naturally occurring questions and innate inquisitiveness. In preparation and anticipation, this teacher has collected both literary and reference materials that relate to sand or to its formation. And she had positioned magnifying glasses near the sand tray, as well as a microscope in order to invite questions and chart paper for scribing students' possible questions. If students don't literally "take the bait," the teacher is prepared to ask leading questions in order to get students interested in researching the formation of sand.

Ability to Relinquish Control to Students' Intrinsic Learning: Thus, the fourth skill needed to be successful at teaching through expressive activities is that of actively encouraging students to take command of their own learning. Teachers adept at this form of teaching must be able, not only to organize general immersion activities that are age-level appropriate, but they must be willing to relinquish control to students' educational agendas and natural senses of curiosity.

Predictive Talent: The next talent needed by teachers adept at expressive forms of teaching are those of being able to envision, imagine, anticipate and predict possibilities and possible outcomes. They must be prepared that students questions and initiatives might take them in many different directions.

Ability to Evaluate in Different Ways: The last component that makes this form of teaching legitimate is that the teacher must be prepared to annotate and evaluate the results of the emergent activities. Results must also be communicated to participating students so that they can begin to make the connections between their questions and their abilities to complete and be engaged in research.

(The premise of expressive outcomes as a legitimate form of curriculum design was conceptualized and briefly discussed by Elliott Eisner of Stanford University. For additional information on this concept see: Eisner, E.W. ( 1994, 3rd ed.) Educational imagination: On the design and evaluation of school programs. New York: Macmillian.118-123)