Why Creativity in Schools is so Slippery

For every international school, developing creativity in students is a major selling point: innovative thinkers, creative problem-solvers, students who think outside the box. It’s such a reliable fixture of admissions brochures you could build a drinking game around it. What’s rarer is a school that can tell you, specifically, what structures in its building are […]

“You Weren’t Really Doing Anything Special”

An administrator once observed one of my classes and told me afterward, not unkindly, that I hadn’t really been doing anything special. Students were focused and working. I was moving between tables, asking questions, mostly staying quiet. Nothing was being explained at the front of the room. From where they sat, it looked like a […]

What David’s Death of Socrates Can Teach a Biology Teacher

Put a biology teacher in a room with a printout of David’s The Death of Socrates and ask her to analyze it, and you’ll watch a very specific kind of discomfort settle over her face, not because she can’t see what’s in front of her, but because nobody’s asked her to argue about what something […]

How Art Teachers Can Help the Rest of the Faculty

There’s a distinction that art teachers learn to make early in their careers, and that most other teachers never encounter at all. It’s the difference between what something is about and what it’s really saying. When students are learning to analyze works of art, they need to understand the distinction between subject matter and theme. […]