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What About “Make Sure You Draw All Your Work” On The Test?

December 16, 2019

by:

Joe Patti

Hey all. Dan Pink linked to a round up of education research that came out in 2019. There were studies on how good teachers were better than awards when it came to raising attendance rates; the benefits of sleep on learning; gender differences in math ability are social construct; black students get fewer warnings before heading to the principal’s office, and many others.

As you might expect, among the “many others” were studies on the benefits of arts:

As arts programs continue to face the budget ax, a handful of new studies suggest that’s a grave mistake. The arts provide cognitive, academic, behavioral, and social benefits that go far beyond simply learning how to play music or perform scenes in a play.

In a major new study from Rice University involving 10,000 students in third through eighth grades, researchers determined that expanding a school’s arts programs improved writing scores, increased the students’ compassion for others, and reduced disciplinary infractions. The benefits of such programs may be especially pronounced for students who come from low-income families, according to a 10-year study of 30,000 students released in 2019.

Unexpectedly, another recent study found that artistic commitment—think of a budding violinist or passionate young thespian—can boost executive function skills like focus and working memory, linking the arts to a set of overlooked skills that are highly correlated to success in both academics and life.

The one that drew my attention most was a study that found while doodling distracted from learning, intentional drawing reinforced learning and memory better than reading and note taking. The way I read it, this approach may be the easiest way to integrate creative expression and the arts into any subject AND improve test scores.

In a follow-up experiment, the researchers compared two methods of note-taking—writing words by hand versus drawing concepts—and found drawing to be “an effective and reliable encoding strategy, far superior to writing.” The researchers found that when the undergraduates visually represented science concepts like isotope and spore, their recall was nearly twice as good as when they wrote down definitions supplied by the lecturer.

Importantly, the benefits of drawing were not dependent on the students’ level of artistic talent, suggesting that this strategy may work for all students, not just ones who are able to draw well.

[…]

Why is drawing such a powerful memory tool? The researchers explain that it “requires elaboration on the meaning of the term and translating the definition to a new form (a picture).” Unlike listening to a lecture or viewing an image—activities in which students passively absorb information—drawing is active. It forces students to grapple with what they’re learning and reconstruct it in a way that makes sense to them.

It made sense to me that drawing was beneficial because it forces one to take the information they are receiving, process it and then execute it into a meaningful depiction. Reading and writing down lecture notes don’t require that you be able to process the concept, only that you recognize and understand the individual words. If you have studied a foreign language you may have had the experience where you can pronounce the words flawlessly and know what each word means separately, but can’t translate the meaning of an entire sentence accurately.

The article discusses other reinforcing actions in of the increased number of steps and synaptic connections which are required to execute a drawing which helps to solidify concepts in memory, but that is how is how I conceptualize I read.

If you are interested in putting this into practice either for your own note taking or to assist students, there are suggestions of implementation – student created learning aids, interactive notebooks, data visualization (which apparently can be applied to literature); book/comic book making; and one-pagers where students visually show the teacher their understanding of the concept.

Art(ist) Education, Building Public Will For Arts And Culture, creativity, State of the Arts, Working In The Arts

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Lessons From The Arts: Providing Direction To Experts

December 11, 2019

by:

Joe Patti

I neglected to note who had posted it on Twitter, but an article in The Economist about what the arts can teach business came across my feed today.

One of the first examples was an exercise used by a professor at the Saïd Business School at Oxford which asked MBA students to try their hand at conducting a choir.

The first to take the challenge was a rather self-confident young man from America. It didn’t take long for him to go wrong. His most obvious mistake was to start conducting without asking the singers how they would like to be directed, though they had the expertise and he was a complete tyro.

…The session, organised by Pegram Harrison, a senior fellow in entrepreneurship, cleverly allowed the students to absorb some important leadership lessons. For example, leaders should listen to their teams, especially when their colleagues have specialist knowledge. All they may need to do, as conductors, is set the pace and then step back and let the group govern itself.

It was noticeable, too, that the choir managed fairly well even if the conductors were just waving their batons in an indeterminate fashion. The lesson there, Mr Harrison said, was that leaders can only do so much damage—provided they do not attempt to control every step of the process. The whole exercise illustrated it is possible for a lesson to be instructive and entertaining at once.

While these lessons seemed to be laid on with a heavy hand, I couldn’t help think back to the video I posted yesterday which showed the first opera rehearsal with the singers and orchestra together.

There, the discussion of the role of the conductor and prompter was all about helping the artists to maintain pacing and remind them where they were in the process. That is pretty much what the passage I cited above discussed, so heavy handed or not, the use of a music ensemble to illustrate groups can be productive if left to govern themselves is valid.

I have come across the idea that performing arts groups can be used as examples of teams joining together to execute complex projects before. However, there was an example of the value of acting lessons I had never come across or considered:

But Mr Walker-Wise says that middle managers are often delivering words that are not their own (because they were devised by head office) or trying to inspire staff to meet an objective that was set by someone else. “The lesson from acting is how do I connect to this message without betraying my own personality,” he argues.

I am not sure that I would want acting to be valued for helping people to become better liars, but there are definitely times when we all need to learn to subsume our personal feelings in order organize others to accomplish a task. The military does this by instilling a sense of discipline and obedience, but their methods are not ones the general public will easily accept. Acting and other skills derived from performance training present an alternative method to get people working together as teams.

Art(ist) Education, Leadership, Management Philosophy, Working In The Arts

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Making Singing “Ah” For Six Minutes Sound Interesting

December 10, 2019

by:

Joe Patti

Last week Vox had a backstage video on the Metropolitan Opera production of Philip Glass’ Akhnaten. What I loved about it and wanted to call attention to was the way in which they made elements of the production that would be barriers for both new and existing audiences intriguing, potentially piquing curiosity.

I mean, if I told you the opera was sung in four different languages; featured a six minute period where everyone sang “ah!”; had a minimalist set; a costume festooned with baby heads; a cadre of professional jugglers; and period of full nudity, you might be a little wary about going.

Though that might sound more appealing than the description on the Met site:

Director Phelim McDermott tackles another one of Philip Glass’s masterpieces, following the now-legendary Met staging of Satyagraha. Star countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo is the title pharaoh, the revolutionary ruler who transformed ancient Egypt, with the striking mezzo-soprano J’Nai Bridges in her Met debut as his wife, Nefertiti. To match the opera’s hypnotic, ritualistic music, McDermott has created an arresting vision that includes a virtuosic company of acrobats and jugglers. Karen Kamensek conducts in her Met debut.

Please be aware that this production contains some full-frontal nudity, which may not be suitable for young audiences.

The video starts out addressing the 6 minutes of “ah” pointing out that it is harder than it sounds, and showing the stars tackling it with grinning gusto and periods of frustration. Charismatic star Anthony Roth Costanzo references the pharaoh, Akhnaten, the first to embrace monotheism, as a “totally fascinating, weird, complex guy.”

The video makes the whole idea of the trained voice accessible by having light hearted conversations about vocal warm ups disturbing the neighbors, working with Castanzo’s vocal coach in a living room–and then seguing to the importance of the first tone when the singer opens their mouth to deliver.

Then they talk about what sets composer Philip Glass’ minimalist approach apart from other operas.

They aren’t afraid to use unfamiliar terms like “sitzprobe” because after defining it, they talk about why it is important — the singers and musicians come together for the first time after weeks of working apart–and it is an exciting time. They also illustrate how much work it is to bring all these pieces together – how easy it is to fall out of time and how the conductor and the prompter keep the musicians and singers synchronized with each other.

The reason for having 12 jugglers is explained. The viewer gets a sense of how the swiftly moving balls are a counterpoint to the music and slow movement of the rest of the performers and how the balls and massive sun are tied symbolically.

Even the nudity is addressed with Costanzo discussing the experience of descending 12 steps over the course of three minutes staring directly at 4000 people while completely naked.

Actually, at the end of the video Costanzo discusses the whole challenge of the opera:

“If I told you you’re going to come see a minimalist 3.5 hour opera about ancient Egypt, where there is no real story and it is sung in ancient Egyptian, you’d think ‘Man, there is no way I am going to that.’ And yet, I bet you are going to love it.”

I will be the first to tell you, whoever put this 10 minute video together spent a lot of time and money on it.

However, it succeeded in making the show seem interesting and accessible due to the way it framed the information it was presenting, not because of the high production values. You are interested in learning more because you like the people and they talk about what they are doing in a relatable way. There is nothing in the video to refute a claim that the nudity is gratuitous, but there is probably going to be a part of you that is cheering Costanzo on because he is literally manifesting the nightmare about walking into work naked.

I offer this as an example of how to talk about your work and diminish the intimidation/ perception of strangeness newer audiences may experience.

Art(ist) Education, Audience Relations, Marketing/PR

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Feeling Less Conflicted About Conflicts of Interest

December 9, 2019

by:

Joe Patti

As the year comes to a close and you start attending parties hosted by different non-profit organizations, it may appear that the same people seem to be involved with every non-profit organization in town. With the flurry of fund raising appeals that are made this time of year, you may rightly wonder how these people balance their advocacy among all the groups with whom they are involved. Someone must be getting the short shrift, right?

It is with those types of questions in mind that I recently wrote a piece on ArtsHacker covering a conflict of interest article that appeared on Non-Profit Quarterly (NPQ).

There were a couple points I took away from the NPQ article by David Renz:

Where US conflict of interest rules address private benefit and financial gain, European rules take a broader view encompassing conflicting influences associated with being involved with many groups as in my example.
Not all conflicts of interests are equally severe. Openly recognizing, evaluating and accepting the risks involved can be beneficial to a non-profit organization.
It isn’t enough for a person to abstain from voting on an issue with which they are involved, they must abstain from exerting influence on others. And the organization must actively guard against the exercise of said influence
Disclosures of conflict should be made on an ongoing basis to the whole board rather than an annual ritual to be filed away or evaluated separately by an individual or small committee. In my mind, this contributes to organizational culture that has a constructive and educated understanding of conflicts of interest.
As is the case with policies and bylaws, don’t copy yours from another organization or the IRS boilerplate. Create a conflict of interest policy that meets the particular needs of your organization.

This post is an abridged version of my ArtsHacker post which only excerpted part of the excellent NPQ article. If your New Year’s resolutions are going to include taking a pro-active, less anxiety-driven approach to conflicts of interest, it may be worth taking a deeper look at both.