Education Innovation in the Slums

Listen to this new TED talk by Charles Leadbeater on education.  One of the most important, encouraging talks I've heard in a long while.   Tell me what you think. http://bit.ly/9KiKP5     

A Pink Minute

The message can’t get much shorter or much more succinct.  Now, how do we get it into schools?  Or spread it outside schools as we currently know them?  What are your thoughts about this?   Check out this short video  by Kevin Brookhouser for Google Teacher Academy.   Let me know what you think.  Let me hear from you. 

http://bit.ly/bQdDR0

Encountering The Big Shaggy

Having been without full-time work for two years now, I found reading Bob Herbert’s New York Times
June 8^th column, ‘A Very Deep Hole’, depressing.  Herbert maintains,  “…the No. 1 problem facing the U.S. continues to fester, and that problem is unemployment.”   No argument here.  It is small comfort to learn that I am but one of 15 million Americans out of work, that many of my fellow unemployed have been jobless for six months or more, and that recent college graduates are taking on jobs requiring only a high school education.  Finally, for me, a career teacher, the coup de grace.  “Teachers are facing the worst employment market since the Depression.”   In short, things are bleak.  Knowing that the knot in my stomach is somehow tied to 15 million other Americans only serves to heighten my anxiety.

On the same day, on the other side of the page (Herbert appropriately the column on the left of the page, and David Brooks the column on the right) Brooks began his column, History for Dollars, with “When the going gets tough, the tough take accounting.”  He goes on to describe the decline in the study of humanities in our colleges and universities.  His column is, however, a defense of the liberal arts.  Brooks writes:  “Over the past century or so, people have built various systems to help them understand human behavior; economics, political science, game theory, and evolutionary psychology.  These systems are useful in many circumstances.  But none completely explain behavior because deep down people have passions and drives that don’t lend themselves to systemic modeling.  They have yearnings and fears that reside in an inner beast you could call The Big Shaggy.”  Brooks goes on to describe The Big Shaggy at work in the hubris of politicians who succumb to romantic indulgence, or “when self-destructive overconfidence overtakes oil engineers in the gulf, when go-go enthusiasm intoxicates bankers or when bone-chilling distrust grips politics.”  There is also a tender side to this beast, Brooks points out, that can bring out the best in us: determination, grace, courage, and selflessness, to name a few.  Technical knowledge, says Brooks, stops at the outer edge and remains insufficient to fully comprehend and explain The Big Shaggy. 

Brooks concludes, “But over the centuries, there have been rare and strange people who possessed the skill of taking the upheavals of thought that emanate from The Big Shaggy and representing them in the form of story, music, myth, painting, liturgy, architecture, sculpture, landscape and speech.  These men and women developed languages that help us understand these yearnings and also educate and mold them. They left rich veins of emotional knowledge that are the subjects of the humanities.

“It’s probably dangerous to enter exclusively into this realm and risk being caught in a cloister, removed from the market and its accountability.  But doesn’t it make sense to spend some time in the company of these languages – learning to feel different emotions, rehearsing different passions, experiencing different sacred rituals, and learning to see in different ways?”

In the most basic way, as a theater teacher and director, I’ve made my living as a storyteller.  I delight in being told, dreaming about, reshaping, and retelling the tales that make our culture; tales that outlive their tellers, tales that wrestle with The Bit Shaggy.  I’ve spent much of my time helping adolescents learn to decode, compose, illuminate and narrate these tales.  Trying to get my students to see in different ways. 

I kept a quote from Peter Brook on the wall of my office and shared it with my students:  “In everyday life, ‘if’ is a fiction, in the theatre ‘if’ is an experiment.  In everyday life, ‘if’ is an evasion, in the theater ‘if’ is the truth.  When we are persuaded to believe in this truth, then the theatre and life are one.  This is a high aim.  It sounds like hard work.  To play needs much work.  But when we experience the work as play, then it is not work any more.  A play is play.”

In an Opinion Online piece for The New York Times, Stuart Brown wrote:  “...play reinvigorates not because it is down time, but because it gets us in touch with our core selves and the joy of life. 

“The differences in levels of playfulness when adulthood arrives validates this importance.  Play-deprived adults are often rigid, humorless, inflexible and closed to trying out new options.  Playfulness enhances the capacity to innovate, adapt and master changing circumstances.”   Brown’s book, PLAY, How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination and Invigorates the Soul might be thought of as a kind of guide to encountering The Big Shaggy.

 I feel as if I’m one of 15 million out-of-work Americans trying to compose something for the middle of the page, smack between Herbert’s and Brooks’ columns.  Trying to create the next work in our lives.  In my case, devoted to encounters with the Big Shaggy, and tenaciously faithful to the notion that when the going gets tough, the tough get to playing.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/08/opinion/08herbert.html?ref=bobherbert

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/08/opinion/08brooks.html?ref=davidbrooks

   

Teaching Witchcraft

If you teach Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (or Macbeth or Caryl Churchill’s Vinegar Tom or anything else having to do with witchcraft), you’ll find this article by Graeme Wood useful.  We tend to think from our own perspective, of Salem as long ago and primitive.  This might give the kiddies AND their teachers something to think about, to talk about and to investigate further.  Depending upon your local school board and current administrators, of course.    http://bit.ly/ciCIFz

STRIKE NOW!

Jack  Uldrich, The Chief Unlearner, posts a blog that I find whimsical and spot on, Unlearning 101.  Go to it to find out why Teachers Should Go On Strike:  For Innovation.  Join me on the picket line.   Now!  http://bit.ly/d2saXB

ANNOUNCING A CREATIVITY WORKSHOP

Exploring Creativity

Creating Solutions for Teachers and Classrooms

“We don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it.  We get educated out of it.”    Sir Ken Robinson

This workshop is the result of over thirty-five years of classroom experience teaching public speaking, writing and theater; nurturing and developing artists. It is a workshop in problem solving.  Creativity comes from practiced, sustained engagement, with people and with ideas. The workshop is an opportunity to refresh and nourish childlike curiosity, to experiment, and to stimulate the imagination.  Participants will leave better able to communicate, collaborate, make connections, and create the solutions our schools and our lives demand in the years ahead.  A must for teachers and anyone dedicated to helping ordinary people achieve the extraordinary.  Led by Bill Williams.

WHEN:           Wednesday, June 30^th   9:30 – 4:00

WHERE:          Symphony Space – 2537 Broadway, 95^th Street, NYC                                                                      #1,2,3 IRT Trains stop at 96^th Street

COST:         $75.00 per participant

SPACES LIMITED – REGISTER NOW!

FURTHER INFORMATION:         Contact bill@billwilliamsfortheater.com

                                                           

About Bill

Bill Williams is a director, teacher and private acting coach.  While teaching acting in the highly regarded theater department at Trinity School in Manhattan, he also directed over 60 productions at Trinity and in New York.   Many of his students have gone on to professional lives as working actors in film, on television, on Broadway, Off-Broadway and in regional theaters across the country.  More are working as successful writers, directors, composers, and stage managers, acting teachers and in arts management. They frequently cite Bill as an inspiration in their artistic lives. 

Early in his career in New York, while working as an actor, Bill discovered his real passion was teaching and directing.  He studied directing at Columbia University with George Ferencz and later at NYU with Carl Weber.  More recently Bill was part of the Teacher’s Development Program at The Actor’s Center where he had the good fortune to study with Ron Van Lieu, Christopher Bayes, Slava Dolgachev, William Esper and Michael Miller.  He followed that with further clown and commedia under Christopher Bayes. 

Bill studied acting at The Warren Robertson Studio with Larry Moss, Warren Robertson and Michael Karm.  He took musical comedy class with Larry Moss and Betty Buckley.

At Trinity Bill was given a Creative Teaching Grant and a Paul Balduc Faculty Fellowship.  He was selected for two NEH Seminars:  A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Bowdoin College led by Prof. Herb Coursen and Shakespeare’s Hamlets at Columbia University with David Scott Kastan, a general editor of the Arden Shakespeare.  He was also chosen as a participant in Multicultural Shakespeare, an NEH Institute at Columbia University with Profs. David Kastan, Richard McCoy and James Shapiro.  He graduated from Bowdoin College with a B.A. degree in Psychology.

Other work in New York includes teaching theater with the National Dance Institute founded by Jacques d’Amboise, on camera instruction at both Weist-Barron School of Television and Actors in Advertising, and as a production advisor for the Peter Rosen Productions Cine Golden Eagle award-winning Sing Joyfully.

 

Before coming to New York Bill was a founder/producer/director of Andy’s Summer Playhouse, in New Hampshire, www.andyssummerplayhouse.org.  Among its many proud achievements, Andy’s commissioned and produced four pieces by Pulitzer Prize winning playwright (Rabbit Hole), David Lindsay-Abaire.

MORE ABOUT THE WORKSHOP

 Exploring Creativity  is a workshop to rediscover and reawaken imaginative play and to enhance facility in  problem solving.  It provides a safe atmosphere where participants can abandon preconceived notions of their limitations and explore their creative potential. It is based on the conviction that creativity can be encouraged, nurtured, and developed.  Creativity results not just from thinking with our heads, but from moving our bodies and feeling with our hearts, the joyful abandon of play. The workshop is about making and taking the time to give ourselves up to openness and wonder.

Theater is the medium, because it asks us to think, communicate and create with our whole bodies. The workshop employs theater games, improvisation, movement and acting exercises. Participants are presented problems, questions.  The solutions take the form of dramatic pieces, shared with other workshop participants. Although participants will be asked to perform, this is not an acting class. Actors and non-actors alike will profit from it.  The workshop takes advantage of the synergy that occurs when people with different professional skills, people from different walks of life, work together.

Exercises are arranged in a progression to help build confidence and freedom of expression as the workshop moves along.  Participants collaborate in the generation, organization, and presentation of each solution, each a bit of play, each a bit of a play.  While everyone takes turns as originators, performers, and audience throughout the workshop, the focus is on creation: the generation of new ideas and original solutions.  The process and the freshness of response are as important as the product.  Humor, laughter, and fun are important components of the process.   The goal is a revived sense of spontaneity, flexibility, resourcefulness and generosity to sustain us in both everyday life and whatever the workplace may hold.

June 30 Session Schedule

9:30 – 10:00                        Arrive, meet & greet, settle in

10:00 – 12:30                      Morning session, including short break part way through

12:30 – 1:30                        Lunch Break

1:30 - 4:00                           Afternoon session, including short break part way through

4:00                                     Opportunity to socialize

What People Who Have Worked

 With Bill Say

Your workshop was a good brain push for me this summer. I am teaching very differently this year, for a variety of reasons. I am giving students more room for creativity and exploration. I am differentiating instruction and more often than not, telling them I don't know what to do, what do they think? Class is a workshop of ideas, and we work together. It's messier. It works in part because my school head happens to have made the commitment to differentiation and is not afraid of the messiness, and because our drama teacher is supporting workshop activities in the classroom. Anyway, I want to thank you for helping to give me the push and inspiration.   Kim Allen

Bill Williams deserves single-handed credit for bringing me into the world of acting.  He scooped up an injured ballerina, brushed her off, and recruited her for plays and acting classes, changing the course of her life forever.  His fearless, passionate, magnanimous approach to teaching and his tireless dedication to his students make him one of the great teachers of all time.  His daring as a director exposes young people to exciting works that broaden their frames of reference and give them precocious polish.  Working with him helped me get into Harvard and the Yale School of Drama.  To this day, what I learned in his classes serves me as an actor. I owe him an eternal debt.  Lucia Brawley

Bill Williams was my first and, I believe, most crucial teacher. The environment that he created for his acting students was simultaneously rigorous and free - the lessons and examples designed to help each individual find their unique artistic voice. Professionally, I believe these formative experiences allow me to approach role after role with a sense of intense curiosity and personal freedom. If you are lucky enough to have a teacher or director like this, you know you are going to have a great opportunity to succeed.  G.M. Gianino

Bill is not only an excellent acting coach, but a truly beautiful human being who genuinely loves the theatre, actors, and teaching acting.  He fully appreciates how hard the art of acting is - but never for a second when learning from him, do you fail to remember how fun it is to play.  I came to Bill after deciding to quit my job as a

Mergers and Acquisitions lawyer to follow my dream of living in the shoes of other people on stage, in front of a camera - and sought out his help in preparing my monologue for entry into a two-year acting conservatory program...I was proud, crazed, and really, plain scared. Bill has an amazing intuition for people and human behavior - he

sensed my racing nerves and in a hot second had an uncanny ability to get them to just shut up already so that we could work and so that my talent and spontaneity could soar through the arch of the monologue. I distinctly remember leaving my meeting with him with a feeling of other-worldly confidence, and most importantly, with two feet firm on

the ground.  Thank you Bill!   Nelle Watkins

I was so shy as a child that I pretty much never opened my mouth in public.  My dad had this brilliant idea to send me to theatre classes on Saturdays.  I was 8. This man who taught the classes, Bill Williams, decided to give me the lead part in the very sophisticated play we were doing (about a worm) and somehow I came to life! I don’t know how he knew what to do but he did. He changed my life, no question. Bill opened me up to the world that was to become my home: the stage. I was lucky enough to work with him through high school as well and he has since supported all my professional work since. To have a mentor who you know made you into the person you are is no small thing. I am indebted to him forever.    Najla Said

Bill Williams taught me how to be authentic as an actor-- which is probably the most important lesson I ever learned.  Any performance that is not rooted in truth and authenticity will inevitably fall short.  His methods are charmingly unorthodox, but that is what made the learning process memorable and the lessons stick.  He sees artists as gifts and is therefore willing to tirelessly work with them to achieve what he wants and/or what they want.  His belief in his students is palpable and--in the face of the industry and its challenges--invaluable.  I love Bill Williams.  He is one of the best teachers I have ever had.  He possesses a rare mixture of intellect and passion and acting is as much as a science as it is an art.  The best acting, for me, requires this balance that Bill possesses.   Lena Georgas

Bill Williams is one of the most supportive, enthusiastic and inventive directors and teachers I know.  I've seen him get Broadway-caliber performances out of people who I previously thought might've had no business being on a stage.  I've seen plays and musicals he's directed, sometimes of even the most problematic scripts, reduce an audience to tears and get them on their feet cheering by the end.  And as a songwriter, I literally owe my career to him, since it was for one of his productions that I first took a shot at writing my own original music.  I can't remember whether I had the temerity to suggest it, or if he had enough confidence in me to ask (more likely it was the latter), but I wound up composing about 15 minutes of incidental background score for a play he was directing... and even before I won a prize for it a few weeks later, I already knew this was what I wanted to do with my life.  Bill's like that - he helps you tap into talents not only that you never know you had, but in some cases, that you never had an inkling you even wanted to pursue.  There aren't that many people in any field, let alone one as competitive and risky as theatre, who have that kind of unwavering belief in others, and who can have that kind of powerful, transformative effect.  

David Kirshenbaum - Composer

Bill Williams is a pleasure to work with as a director.  A consummate

professional, he approaches the text with openness and creativity,

and his collaborators with sensitivity and respect.  His generosity of

spirit conveys his true love of theater and the benefits it can bring

to the world.  I hope to work with him again soon.

Anne Nelson  Journalist, Author, Playwright

             

Test Results

I recently had an informative, though discouraging, discussion with a sixth grade teacher who works in a New York City Public School.  I was asking him about the ability of kids in his class to work autonomously. I was curious to get his assessment of where his kids stood in regard to their ability to take responsibility for and to direct their own learning.  Were they on or near the cusp of being able to pursue their interests independently?

Sixth grade is the entry level at his school, a middle school.  The kids all arrive in the fall from other schools.  What discourages him, and me, is the fact that the kids are unable to do any significant work independently. Their ability to find information on their own is limited.  They simply don’t know how to go about it.  Where to look or how to ask.  Their curiosity is already stunted.  They are passive learners, waiting for the teacher to tell them what to do.  Given a chance to observe this class, I found them to be poor listeners, not well equipped to collaborate on even the simplest project, and easily distracted.  They lack the kind of composure needed to do meaningful work on their own or with others.    

Their teacher places the blame squarely on testing and the learning environment it creates. Teaching to the test. These kids seldom have a chance to think for themselves in school.  They’re taught to “think for the test.”  Ironically, those kids whose test scores are the best, are among the least inquisitive. They are not the risk takers, the ones most interested of learning on their own.  The message that standardized test results are paramount is clear.  That is what school is about for these kids.  Small wonder attendance in this school plummets once tests are over for the year.  This teacher is faced with trying to overcome a “fill in the blank” mentality.  His work involves resuscitating a questing spirit. These kids may be well schooled, but certainly they are not well educated.

One school.   One classroom.  One small sample, I know.  One small sample poorly served by testing meant to make their education better. Instead they’ve gotten a mis-education.  At least they’ve got a teacher who recognizes what has happened to these children and cares enough to do something about it.   Let’s hope it’s not too late.