Can Creativity and the Common Core Exist Simultaneously?

              If you know me at all, you know that I am a huge supporters of the arts.  In college, I filled my days with dance classes and short story writing classes.  I attended poetry readings at book stores regularly and made friends with people who wrote their in class essays using a feather and a jar of ink.  I was an English major and if anyone ever asked me what I was going to do with my life, I would smile wryly and tell them that I was going to "flip burgers and write about it."  

        My undergraduate graduation from Northern Illinois University arrived faster than expected, and flipping burgers suddenly didn't seem as endearing as it had once seemed in that late night coffee house.  I'd spent four years living and breathing modern dance, tap, and poetry.  I wanted to share my love of the arts with others.  So I decided to continue my education and become a high school English teacher where I was convinced I would be able to spend a lifetime sipping lattes and  discussing the hidden meanings in the works of Chaucer and Shakespeare with students and colleages.  I devoted two and a half years to post graduate work, eventually earning a whopping one-hundred-and-eighty undergraduate credits (clearly, I had never heard of graduate study) with the idea that I would continue to celebrate my love of poetry and the arts with future generations of students and get paid while doing it. 

        Fast forward fourteen years.  Two kids  and a masters degree in literacy education later, I am currently a reading interventionist and literacy coach in a middle school that is implementing the new Common Core Standards for the first time.  Because the media has recently criticized these new standards, saying that they leave little room for creativity and appreciation of the arts, I feel a strong need to disagree.  While it may be true that the Common Core requires teachers to emphasize argument writing, academic vocabulary, informational text reading, and critical thinking skills,  I stand strong by my belief that  these skills are essential if we wish to create students who are well-equipped to participate in the work force of the 21st Century.  I ran across a short video by R.N. Gutierrez that reminds us of just that.  

Why We Need the Common Core? I choose C. 

    
                While the video is obviously poking fun at standardized, multiple choice testing, it also makes the case that future employees need strong disciplinary literacy skills.  So does that mean we must do away entirely with the arts in education?   Education Week teacher, Amy Benjamin, makes a solid point that "Creative and analytic thinking are not mutually exclusive."  I would go so far as to say that you cannot have one without the other.  Thinking analytically requires students to synthesize material in a new way which is ultimately the definition of creative thought.  Teaching is and always will be an art form.  Creative teaching and lesson planning leads to creative product. 

               To critics who suggest creativity and the Common Core cannot exist simultaneously,  I would have to disagree vehemently.  I see fabulous examples of the two joining forces in my profession daily.  An eighth grade English teacher, Mr. Keenon, recently taught a lesson to help students achieve the following Common Core target using the play Romeo and Juliet:  CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.8.4 Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including figurative and connotative meanings; analyze the impact of specific word choices on meaning and tone, including analogies or allusions to other texts.   While he could have easily given students a portion of the play and had them analyze the impact of specific, bold-faced words on a worksheet, he did not.  Instead, he created his own Shades of Meaning variation where he gave students several different synonyms for two words:   sad and angry.  He then asked students to rank them on continuum of least intense to most intense.  For example, the word irrate might fall closer to most intense and the word irritated might fall near the other end of the continuum.  Students engaged in thoughtful dialogue about the different words, using specific words from the definitions to state their case for why one word was stronger than another.

          Once this work was done, Mr. Keenon revealed his own "Wheel of Intensity" on the board which looked very similar to the Wheel of Fortune Wheel but with the students' words instead of prizes.  One at a time, students were given an opportunity to throw a ball at the wheel.  Whatever word the ball landed on was the tone the students needed to use to read a speech from Romeo.  The class was actively engaged throughout the lesson and left the room with a strong understanding of connotation of a word as well as knowledge of how the tone can impact the meaning of passage. 
          
                Although teaching English requires more than helping students to appreciate the arts in today's world where oral and written communication skills for jobs are a must, I can rest soundly knowing that not only am I helping students to develop their inner voices and become life long readers,  I am also working to provide them with skills that will enable them to have more choices in their lives.