Creative Teachers & Michelangelo

Creative teachers "see" the students they work with in very special ways.

Throughout history the most successful youth workers have been able to see beyond the problems of young people to a vision of their great potential. ( Reclaiming Youth International )

I recently stumbled upon a blog post @ Leading and Learning by called the "David Factor" that reminded me of how important our vision is a teachers!!

It is a great way to think about what "Turnaround Teachers" do for kids that are struggling to find themselves.

‘In the museum of the Academy of Florence, there is a passage leading to Michelangelo’s magnificent statue of the young David. On either side of the passage stand four large blocks of marble and from each, a heavy shape emerges, roughly carved and unfinished. They are Michelangelo’s ‘Prisoners’.

We can see these unfinished blocks of stone as evoking the meaning of education.

‘Each human being arrives in this world trapped in a block of marble and it is the job of the educators – parents and teachers- to free the individual from the imprisoning stone and reveal its true form without disfiguring or damaging it.’

Such teachers, as with Michelangelo, do not like to work within prescribed programs and targets passed down by distant authorities.

Michelangelo was an artist and so are creative teachers.

He was also a self willed individual. Too many teachers, due to social pressure to comply, become trapped in a marble block not of their own making and lose their individual creativity.

Creative teachers have, what I like to call, the ‘David factor’.

What our profession ( vocation ) needs are teachers with the courage and creativity to see new possibilities – the ‘David factor!’

All children and youth need to have a possible vision of their hoped for future. In Lisa Delpit’s Other People’s Children, the author describes her experience with hope and “turnaround teachers” this way:

“They [teachers] held visions of us that we could not imagine for ourselves. All children need to see new possibilities, and all children need a reason to come to school the next day.”

In all affairs it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.  —Bertrand Russell

Turnaround Educators are beginning this process now! In small pockets in many school districts you will find these teachers and educational leaders.  They are keeping alive the vocation of teaching and learning as the old story of schooling with its testing and measuring slowly ( too slowly ) begins to die.

From our recent book:

 Schools are living systems, and they are alive. Viewing our schools as living systems creates space for seeing our role within them much differently. We do not need to restructure schools or reconstitute them. We do not need to remediate or fix them.

What we need is a Re-visioning of our schools.