Teaching Education

ISSN: 1047-6210 (Print) 1470-1286 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cted20

Becoming creative practitioners: elementary

teachers tackle artful approaches to writing
instruction

Jamie Simpson Steele

To cite this article: Jamie Simpson Steele (2016) Becoming creative practitioners: elementary
teachers tackle artful approaches to writing instruction, Teaching Education, 27:1, 72-87, DOI:
10.1080/10476210.2015.1037829

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10476210.2015.1037829

Published online: 15 May 2015.

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 Teaching Education, 2016
Vol. 27, No. 1, 7287, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10476210.2015.1037829

Becoming creative practitioners: elementary teachers tackle artful

approaches to writing instruction
Jamie Simpson Steele*

College of Education, University of Hawaii at Mnoa, Honolulu, HI, USA

(Received 1 July 2014; accepted 28 March 2015)

The creativity gap is a distressing discrepancy between the ostensible value

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educators place on creativity and its absence in schools. How do teachers take
on the attributes and skills of a creative practitioner? What struggles do they face
in doing so? This case study examines the practices of six early elementary
teachers who embarked on a professional development experience through which
they learned arts-based strategies for prewriting activities. They purposefully
practiced cultivating an environment in which student imagination would feed
the generation of ideas and details in prewriting exercises. Findings indicate
some teachers embraced this departure from the norm, recognizing how loosen-
ing their reigns emboldened voice and choice in student writing. Others
experienced difculty taking risks and developing spontaneity for accepting and
responding to student ideas. Finally, teachers grappled with converging creative
practice with everyday practices in the classroom.
Keywords: professional development; creativity; imagination; writing
instruction; drama

Creativity crisis
Over 30 million Internet viewers have watched Sir Ken Robinson boldly assert
schools kill creativity: Our education system has mined our minds in the way that
we strip-mine the earth: for a particular commodity. And in the future, it wont serve
us (Robinson, 2006). This is the most viewed TedTalk ever produced (May, 2013)
implying a widespread anxiety for the prosperity of creativity in the US. From a
psychological perspective, Kim (2011) describes how IQ scores have been on the
rise over the past 20 years while creative thinking (as measured by Torrance Tests of
Creative Thinking) has declined, especially among young children. She dubs this a
serious creativity crisis (p. 285) which also has social implications; as American
schools struggle to increase achievement indicated by test scores they are losing the
characteristics of a system that has yielded productive, divergent thinkers who have
historically struggled with our worlds most pressing problems (Wagner, 2012).
Zhao (2012) submits a call to shift our orientation from educational reforms driven
to increase employment to developing an education that enhances human curiosity
and creativity, encourages risk taking, and cultivates the entrepreneurial spirit in the
context of globalization (p. 60).

*Email: jamiesim@hawaii.edu

2015 Taylor & Francis

 Teaching Education 73

If creativity can indeed be taught (Azzam, 2009; Gow, 2014), it is not done so
without signicant barriers. Magiera (2014), a Chicago public school classroom tea-
cher, responded to Robinsons challenge to revolutionize education by describing
her struggle. She explains:
As a classroom teacher, with all of the other things on my plate, I had no idea where
to start. It was one thing to be inspired to take a journey, and another thing all together
to know what road to take to begin that journey. (Magiera, 2014)
Teaching for creativity is a messier act than teaching discreet learning objectives and
creativity is often unbiddable, unconforming, uncomfortable, and quintessentially
idiosyncratic (Saunders, 2012, p. 218). Other barriers include desires for conformed
behaviors, systemic pressures, overcrowded classrooms, and lack of training
(Rinkevich, 2011). Dynamics such as these have contributed to a creativity gap,
an incongruity between the ostensible value educators place on creativity and its
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absence in schools (Makel, 2009). This study seeks to construct understanding about
how teachers develop (or falter) when provided professional development with
creative strategies for teaching young writers.

Creative teaching/creative writing

Learning to write is a complex and mysterious journey; hence, learning to teach
writing can be an equally puzzling path (Graham, Gillespie, & McKeown, 2013).
Teachers endeavoring to teach writing creatively report how self-judgment leads to
discomfort, and the risk associated with multiple possibilities provokes insecurity
(Cremin, 2006). Teachers need both pre-service and in-service training to develop
their knowledge and skills for teaching creative writing (Horng, Hong, ChanLin,
Chang, & Chu, 2005) as well as time and space to engage in creative writing them-
selves (Akkaya, 2014). If teachers are typically concerned with the mechanics of
spelling or penmanship in student writing (Cutler & Graham, 2008), they may grow
to undervalue creative possibility (Barbot, Tan, Randi, Santo-Donato, & Grigorenko,
2012). Orthodoxy in the writing process may damper the exibility and artfulness of
student response (Graves, 2004). Freire (1985) theorized:
Teaching kids to read and write should be an artistic event. Instead, many teachers
transform these experiences into a technical event, into something without emotions,
without creativity but with repetition. Many teachers work bureaucratically when
they should work artistically. (p. 79)
Although creativity in writing is often relegated to the domain of the ctional
narrative, some contend a creative process may contribute to writing prowess across
genre (Barbot et al., 2012; Root & Steinberg, 2011). McVey (2008) goes so far as to
suggest, all writing is creative writing (p. 289). Moreover, studies show how
engagement in creative writing boosts academic skills such as language acquisition,
organization of ideas, and vocabulary development (Temiskan, 2011; Tin, 2011).
Interdisciplinary perspectives identify key ingredients for creative writing:
observation, intrinsic motivation, imagination, and description (Barbot et al., 2012).
Of these, imagination ranks as a critical factor (p. 218). Writers neither automati-
cally nor systematically draw relationships between their acts of imagination and the
words they commit to the page: At worst, novice writers may regard visual
thinking as irrelevant or taboo, considering pictures and words to be opposites
 74 J. Simpson Steele

(Fox, 1995, p. 123). Explicit teaching strategies employ imagery to draw out sensory
descriptions and originality that might otherwise lie dormant in the creative writing
process (Jampole, Konopak, Readence, & Moser, 1991). Effective literacy instruc-
tion involves connecting the natural imaginative capacity of children to intentional
written expression. Gallas (2003) contends a marriage between literacy and imagina-
tion, can lead to joy, ecstasy, and encounters with the sublime, and that that is what
education ought to be about (p. 167).

Drama and writing

When novice writers shape their own bodies into concrete images, abstract ideas are
made real, vague notions are given body and voice. In addition, drama strategies
can generate positive attitudes and intrinsic motivation for writing (Erdogan, 2013),
key variables for students engaging in a successful writing process (Graham,
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Berninger, & Abbott, 2012). Research shows positive effects on both quantity
(McNaughton, 1997) and quality (McKean & Sudol, 2002) when comparing the
writing of children with drama experience to those without. Role play and
improvisation seem to have a powerful impact on children who, create, cultivate
and effectively communicate their own and each others ideas in written text
(Cremin, Gouch, Blakemore, Goff, & Macdonald, 2006, p. 289). In drama structures
like tableau (Neelands & Goode, 2000), collaboration is essential; the collective
imagination makes it possible for students to envision the psychology of characters
and the contexts of situations, exploring complex layers of meaning and detail in
their writing (Gallagher & Ntelioglou, 2011). Student interaction develops writing
skills (Graham et al., 2013) capacity for imagining multiple solutions to writing
problems (Leverenz, 2014) and both oral and written expression (King, 2007).
Finally, young people can learn behaviors through the arts by exploring, persisting,
observing, and revising (Hetland, Winner, Veenema, Sheridan, & Perkins, 2007);
habits of mind also quite useful for developing writers (Reagan, 2009).

Creative facilitation
In the context of this study, teaching creatively is part and parcel of teaching for cre-
ativity (Makel, 2009; Tanggaard, 2011). Craft (2005) suggests student creativity is
most likely to thrive in a learning environment where a teachers creativity is fully
engaged; a teachers creative development can be the key to unlocking student cre-
ativity (Hosseini & Watt, 2010). This studys denition of creativity involves both
originality and task appropriateness (Beghetto & Kauffman, 2013) shaped by u-
ency, exibility, originality, and elaboration (Torrance, 1979). Creative practitioners
are more likely than traditional teachers to: (a) give students planning time; (b) take
risks; (c) extend classroom discussions with open-ended questioning; (d) offer
precise feedback through mutual adjudication; (e) help students extend their own
ideas through student-centered approaches; (f) provide task related scaffolds; and
(g) engage students in consistent management of behaviors (Gallagher & Ntelioglou,
2011; Galton, 2008; Rinkevich, 2011).
While studies indicate numerous benets to learning when a teacher is a creative
facilitator, they highlight just as many roadblocks (McKean & Sudol, 2002;
Rinkevich, 2011; Tanggaard, 2011). Teachers struggle with denitions and language
surrounding creativity; they may hold conicting views about the nature of creativity
 Teaching Education 75

as an innate gift possessed by few, vs. a set of skills and attitudes that can be taught,
practiced, and developed over time (Beghetto & Plucker, 2006). Teachers must be
able to balance planning with uidity, and cultivate joy with purpose in an environ-
ment with unpredictable outcomes (Das, 2011). For example, some teachers avoid
modeling spontaneity and risk, preferring to demonstrate well-crafted text rather than
embracing mistakes as learning opportunities (Grainger, 2005). The many shapes
and forms of the imagination are difcult to evaluate (Trotman, 2006) and creative
performances daunting to assess (Brookhart, 2013; Sternberg, 2012). Teachers also
express concerns about time, materials, space, and pressure to teach prescribed cur-
ricula as reasons for not teaching disciplines aligned with the arts (Oreck, 2004;
Simpson Steele, 2013). It is a practical concern that integrating creative strategies
throughout a curriculum requires teachers to invest time, labor, and passion to
develop both capacity and repertoire.
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Before pencil touches paper

Honolulu Theatre for Youth (HTY) regularly offers arts-based professional develop-
ment workshops for in-service elementary teachers who do not generally consider
themselves creative practitioners. This study took place within an HTY workshop
built on the premise that imagery feeds the writing process, and drama strategies
help students brandish skills essential to writing even before the pencil touches the
paper. The workshop endeavored to support teachers prior to writing to: (a) facilitate
visualization through imagination and movement; (b) create a supportive, collabora-
tive writing environment; and (c) help students play with and trust their imaginative
impulses. Evidence from experimental and quasi-experimental research demonstrates
how practices aligned with such goals bolster effective learning in writing, including
creative development of imagery, the use of prewriting as a scaffold for gathering
details or information (Graham, McKeown, Kiuhara, & Harris, 2012), and the estab-
lishment of an enthusiastic writing community (Graham et al., 2013). The profes-
sional development occurred over the course of three days, once a month for three
months, totaling 20 h. Twenty elementary school teachers, grades K-5, from both
general education and special education settings, completed the workshop. Through-
out, participants engaged in prewriting strategies as their own students would,
experiencing what the learner might think, do and feel in each situation. The teach-
ers reected upon these experiences by deconstructing procedures, analyzing learn-
ing outcomes, and theoretically applying to various grade levels. They practiced
facilitating the new strategies with their peers: scaffolding, coaching, and communi-
cating feedback as if in their own classrooms. Between sessions, workshop facilita-
tors independently visited each of the teachers classrooms and demonstrated the
strategies with children. Finally, workshop participants developed and implemented
at least three lessons in their own classrooms, collected evidence of student learning,
and reected on their experiences in a portfolio. Upon successful completion, teach-
ers received credit toward highly qualied status and with that, advanced pay scale.
Using the traits of writing as a point of reference (Culham, 2003; Spandel,
2012), this professional learning focused primarily on the trait of ideas, tangentially
referenced organization and voice, and did not address word choice, sentence
uency, or conventions. The facilitators chose to focus on development of ideas to
pursue rich options for interdisciplinary intersections, personalization, and problem-
solving. In contrast to other traits, such as conventions, the ideas trait offers broad
 76 J. Simpson Steele

opportunities for the exploration of creativity. One of the workshop facilitators

explained the reasoning behind his focus on idea generation: If you are trained to
set the table, but the food gets neglected, then it is meaningless. And this is what
this kind of thing is. Its the food.
Two Kennedy Center teaching artists conducted the workshop, alternating
instruction. A creative writing teaching artist focused on generating multisensory
details with a variety of stimuli such as found objects, colors, or images. He intro-
duced teachers to a strategy he coined pestering asking simple questions in rapid
succession about the characters, settings, or actions of a new story, extemporane-
ously growing the narrative with specic and often elaborate, multisensory detail.
There are two major tenants to pestering: (a) You Cant Go Wrong; and (b) You
Have to Choose. While pestering asks students to apply two common comprehen-
sion strategies, clarifying and visualizing, it is unique in its collectivity (all students
contribute details) and the rapid timing that requires improvisational skills from a
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facilitator who must listen closely, making and accepting offers with lightning
response to weave details together. With respect to creativity, pestering emphasizes
the elaboration of original ideas.
The second facilitator, a teaching artist with a background in drama and theatre,
focused his strategies on physical expression. Among other strategies, he provided
instruction in snapshots frozen physical images composed and performed sponta-
neously by individuals. With snapshots he introduced specic vocabulary of physi-
cal traits for providing specic feedback to students. The traits included: (a) shape
(e.g. strait, angular, and curved); (b) space (e.g. size, level, and dimension); (c)
action (strong, large, and smooth); and (d) attitude (e.g. subtext, feeling, and mean-
ing). Again, the snapshots required teachers to engage students in collaboration,
facilitate spontaneous choice making, and provide observations with immediate
feedback. As a creative strategy, snapshots emphasize exibility and uency in the
generation of ideas.
Within a typical writing workshop process, both pestering and snapshots are
forms of rehearsal (Graves, 1983; Jasmine & Weiner, 2007); children talk, draw, and
act in order to generate ideas as the raw materials for writing before moving on to a
drafting phase. The collaborative strategies presented within the workshop provided
teachers with options developing images with children, fueling key ideas, and details
about the character, setting, and action of a story. Following this creative prewriting
period, students nally embraced their pencils (or wiggle sticks as one workshop
facilitator called them) to translate their ideas into written words. Elementary teach-
ers combined and adapted strategies presented by both facilitators to meet the
developmental needs of their students with respect to the grade levels content goals.

Method
This exploratory case study endeavors to describe and explain a situation that may
have multiple and contradictory outcomes (Yin, 2003). How do elementary teachers
grapple with creative strategies for teaching writing? This study proposes a tension
between the rewards and difculties of developing creative pedagogy. By examining
the real-life contexts of the teachers in their own classrooms and describing their
perspectives through their own words, I hope to interrogate explanations for how
elementary teachers develop capacity as creative practitioners, along with constraints
that hold them back. This study is limited to the voices and actions of teachers; the
 Teaching Education 77

student perspective, along with a content analysis of student writing, would add a
rich sequel to this investigation.

Participants
I selected 6 of the 20 workshop participants through purposeful sampling (Creswell,
2007) based on a set of criteria. The studys six participants: (a) experienced the
complete set workshop activities and instruction; (b) practiced the pedagogy with
commitment by following through in their own classrooms; (c) came from a range
of school environments in lower elementary grade levels, kindergarten through third
grade; and (d) had indicated this was their rst professional experience with arts
integration. The participants were all female (no males enrolled in the course), and
had a range of experience in the classroom (as few as two years of teaching and as
many as 25). See Table 1 for the specic context of each participants school and
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teaching assignment. All participants agreed to contribute to this research through

informed consent and all names of schools and individuals have been replaced with
pseudonyms.

Data
The data are composed of ethnographic observations, interviews, and portfolio
analyses. I observed 18 h of the workshop sessions, interviewed the six teacher par-
ticipants privately about their experiences in approximately half-hour audio-taped
interviews, observed the teachers use the strategies in their own classrooms a total
of ve hours, and conducted a detailed analysis of the six portfolios the research
participants submitted which included student work, assessment, lesson plans, and
reections. For the interviews, I followed a semi-structured interview protocol ask-
ing teachers to comment on how they experienced change, benet, struggle, and
interdisciplinary connection. For each focused observation, I used a tablet to type
detailed descriptions of what the teachers said or did, and how the students reacted.

Table 1. Study participants.

Name Grade level School characteristics
Sally Kindergarten Rural
Title 1
Restructuring under
Race to the Top
Gertrude First grade Rural
Rosie Third grade Urban
High percentage of
military dependents
Drucilla Second grade Located on a military
base
High percentage of
military dependents
Elizabeth SPED, multi-age, self-contained, and inclusion Urban
Title 1
Bobette SPED, multi-age, fully self-contained Urban
Title 1
 78 J. Simpson Steele

Following each classroom observation, I informally debriefed with the teachers to

gain insight about other conditions or choices I may not have been aware of through
observation. I used Dedoose software to easily store, organize, search, and source
the data (Wickham & Woods, 2005).

Analysis
This qualitative study utilizes constructivist grounded theory analysis methods
(Charmaz, 2006). I began line-by-line analysis with open coding which allowed me
to expose assumptions, develop meanings, and compare the perspectives of the par-
ticipants (Charmaz, 2006). As concepts emerged, I proceeded to create anchor codes
with a focus on patterns and themes, connecting and reconceptualizing previous
categories while returning to my main proposition (Yin, 2003). My analysis was
subjective and interpretive (Stake, 2010), informed by my own perspectives and
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experiences as an arts educator at a university teacher preparation program. I

checked the legitimacy of my analysis with the workshop facilitators by sharing my
descriptions, codes, and discussion of ndings with them.
Typical of a qualitative study, this report does not strive to meet research criteria
of reliability or transferability (Stake, 2010). Limited to a small sample of local tea-
chers, and bound to a single professional development experience, this research may
not be generalizable to other school districts, professional development programs,
locations, or populations. Findings do, however, contribute to a growing understand-
ing about how teachers develop as creative practitioners; may be counted among
other case studies addressing teacher change, and may inform other efforts to
prepare teachers with arts-based teaching strategies. With this in mind, I seek to
establish analytic generalizability (Yin, 2003) to the development of creative practice
as a phenomenon. As this body of research and knowledge grows, patterns of
ndings among the studies will become increasingly transferable.

Findings
Teachers navigated through both success and struggle as they implemented the cre-
ative strategies introduced during the workshop. They grappled with what it means
to have No Wrong Answers divergent thinking in a place where right answers
usually reign. Teachers wrapped their minds and tongues around new language in
order to provide students with precise feedback for creative vision and revision.
Finally, they worked to become comfortable with expressive modes of communica-
tion, sometimes taking risks to facilitate their students own risk taking, but other
times succumbing to the need for controlled outcomes.

No Wrong Answers
Offering and accepting ideas are central to the pestering strategy rules essential to
the art of improvisation. The skill of actually asking a No Wrong Answer ques-
tion, encouraging students to go down that path, and then facing the consequences
of student responses were all challenges for teachers. In the workshop setting, the
creative writing teaching artist took ample time to describe, explain, provide exam-
ples, and coach for No Wrong Answer questions. He explained his reasoning
behind the rule; clarifying how right answers are ckle. He held up two ngers
 Teaching Education 79

and asked for the answer, How many ngers am I holding up? Holding up a nger
and a thumb, he suggested the question suddenly had two right answers. He
explained how students need a break from the tyranny of the right answer so that
they can learn to think for themselves.
At rst, teachers struggled with this concept. One asked, When you do this, do
you already have an image in your mind and guide the students to go there?
Another teacher challenged: The rules of your game are no right and no wrong
but in some instances, when we are talking about sequence, there are choices that
are way off, and I want to say No. Teachers wanted to steer the story, seeming to
fear the surrender of control or the possibility of an imperfection.
Upon introducing this paradigm shift within their classrooms, teachers noticed a
similar discomfort from their students. Bobette described hesitation:
The rst lesson, students were a little bit apprehensive about they werent really quite
sure when I said, You cant be wrong. They didnt believe me. And so it took a little
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while for them to understand that, Oh, wait. I cant be wrong.

Other teachers also explained it took students some time to warm up to the idea,
likely because they were accustomed to the routine of answering questions to
demonstrate knowledge and understanding rather than answering questions with the
intention to elicit creative detail. Teachers and students both had to shift expectations
in order to engage.
After these initial apprehensions, I noticed teachers embrace this new model.
Elizabeth felt these explicit expectations stimulated reluctant participants to join in
collaborative story construction:
There are usually two students who rarely share their thoughts in class and seeing them
involved in this was terric. Having the rules, You Cant Go Wrong & You Have to
Choose enabled them to just try and see.
Similarly, Gertrudes shy students joined the collaborative storytelling:
But with the pestering, because its so easy to answer the questions and theres no
wrong answers, theyre more willing to interact, and they dont get shy and they dont
want to pass on their answers. So then because of that, theyre not scared.
Bobettes experiences echoed these:
Students felt safety in numbers and were not shy to give their responses. Most
importantly, students were more than willing to offer their peers suggestions and
supported each other during the creative process.
The participants learned to encourage broader classroom participation, enliven their
classrooms, and value interaction between students within a prewriting process. In
my observations, I experienced classrooms with diverse learners where students
energetically supported each other throughout collaborations: Yes! Nice one,
good idea Ill help! Can I share mine next? The environment seemed like a
sports game in some instances, with the players cheering each other on.
Teacher participants welcomed this departure from the classroom norm, recog-
nizing how it encouraged voice and choice in student writing. The teachers I
spoke with universally found the ideal of No Wrong Answers compelling. Several
began to repeat You Cant Go Wrong during instruction as if a magical mantra,
and others allowed the philosophy to permeate their practice. For example, when I
observed Rosie side-coaching students as they began their independent writing a
 80 J. Simpson Steele

few had their hands raised with questions: What if I have the same title as my
friend? How do you spell this word? Can I write something we didnt talk
about? Rosies responses were uniformly consistent and persistent with her focus
on ideas rather than mechanics. She continued pestering as she side-coached: What
else were they doing? What were they collecting? What was in the sand? Its
okay, you decide. She coached them to remain in No Wrong Answer mode
beyond the prewriting phase.
Despite their positive inclinations for the No Wrong Answer rule, teachers
wrestled with it within the reality of the classroom. They noticed silliness, talking
out of turn, and high levels of excitement that came with increased interaction.
Bobette observed, So then of course, the horse was out of the gate, right? Its like,
I can do anything now, and Im not going to be wrong. So we had to rein them
back in. The license to be right emboldened students to give way to their
impulses and made classroom control more challenging. On the whole, teachers
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noticed these behavior management challenges without seeing them as an

impediment to learning. Their attitudes were similar to Rosies, who said: Just they
got a little noisy but, thats ne.
One more important obstruction to the creative process occurred in several
instances when teachers found student ideas unacceptable, despite the No Wrong
Answer rule. In one classroom, students consistently made suggestions that were
unrealistic, possibly because they werent listening closely to their peers, possibly
because their ideas were simply at odds with the already established details, or possi-
bly because they were still working on basic cognition. For example, in one story, the
main character was a man (How old?) 8 years old. No. In another story, an oncom-
ing car had people inside (How many?) 100 passengers. No. In a different class, a
boy was a main character (What is he wearing?) a wedding dress. No. In each of
these cases, the teachers did not accept these details as right and asked the students
to try again. Other cases of wrong answers reared as students repeated what their
teacher modeled, or what a neighboring friend whispered in the ear. One class had a
few boys who wanted to explode, crash, and stab things. The teacher blocked the
offers, explaining how the ideas were scary, gory, and unsafe. Sometimes if a stu-
dent called out of turn, without the requisite raised hand, the teacher would not accept
the answer. Teachers opened the doors to freedom, but still wanted to control the
direction of the story according to the accepted rules of logic, taste, and behavior.
In one instance, I observed a teacher who chose a learning goal that did not bene-
t from the creative ow of ideas. She struggled to draw out accurate, right answers
from informational text through No Wrong Answer pestering. This teacher wanted
to create a story based on the characteristics of a real rainforest setting, but her kinder-
garten students had neither the prior knowledge nor the desire to strive for accuracy;
some were more interested in adding details about bridges, boats, or fairies. As they
developed the front cover of the story, the teacher corrected the colors of the trees
leaves and the peacocks feathers, and even controlled the development of the title to
make sure it had certain mechanical qualities. As a result, the class was not interested
in the learning and continuously presented her with behavior challenges.

Coaching for quality

Teachers also practiced creative facilitation by providing specic, immediate feed-
back on snapshots based on quality traits of powerful physical expression: shape,
 Teaching Education 81

space, action, and attitude. In essence, this approach required teachers to do what
football coaches do call out feedback on the spot and offer new challenges but
rather than commenting on the skills of passing and blocking, the teachers coached
for commitment to detailed acts of imagination. Facilitators quickly observed,
assessed, and described student performances in the moment, spontaneously prompt-
ing for revisions to develop the details of ideas.
This proved to be initially challenging for the workshop participants who were
new to drama and were attempting to remember the traits while observing and
assessing the students. One teacher practiced during the workshop by coaching:
Good ngers, good extension of your leg, good, good, good, good. She laughed
and looked at the handout for guidance, Good facial expression wait are we sup-
posed to say that? Later after discussing with her peers, she reected, That was
the hardest for me because its hard to go fast and think of what to say.
Once back in their own classrooms, teachers continued to struggle with this
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technique of providing rapid-re, verbal feedback. Elizabeth wrote in her

portfolio, The feedback portion of strategy was difcult to do. With a couple of
tries, I am still not sure if I made any improvement in this area. She seemed
overwhelmed trying to make a comment for every single one of her learners for
every snapshot. Sally faced a different challenge with her young students: I have
difculty explaining the different body traits to them. I will need to nd a way
to clearly explain to them the different body traits so they can use them effec-
tively. She recognized how it is not enough to speak the drama language; a tea-
cher must also make sure the students understand that language. Gertrude
experienced yet another struggle:
I have a hard time doing, I guess, multiple things at the same time. Im looking at them
trying to make sure that theyre being managed, so theyre not acting all crazy, but still
being able to respond to them and pointing out what theyre doing.
Gertrude felt torn in two directions between managing student behaviors and coach-
ing for imaginative details.
When I observed the teachers practice in the eld, I felt they had a rm under-
standing of how this style of coaching could help boost student creativity, but the
skill to support exible thinking was still emerging. For example, one teacher still
said good often and generically, but also started detailing specics, like I see
arms up, bent legs, leaning forward. Several teachers discussed a need to practice
more in order to operationalize multitasking while providing specic feedback in the
moment. However, teachers were able to identify specic ways to help students
make more interesting choices, asking them to adjust with attention to the size,
shape, and attitude of their characters. In response, students showed multiple forms
of a single idea, applying the traits in the creation of the image. With each revision,
they improved their skills for communicating through drama while improving capac-
ity for exible, uent thinking.

Comfort
Although the participants of this workshop voluntarily enrolled, they were not uni-
formly comfortable with self-expression through the arts. Some teachers expected
the controlled environment of visual arts when they heard of the phrase arts
integration, and others may have simply enrolled for the credits. Elizabeth wrote:
 82 J. Simpson Steele

When I heard that we would be moving around and working on drama strategies, I
cringed. Oh no! What are we going to do? Will we be performing in front of the class?
This is out of my comfort zone.
Other teachers made similar comments, or reacted to exercises with the kind of self-
consciousness exemplied by Rosies chagrin, My face was probably so red the
whole time. They did not expect the challenge of becoming creative practitioners;
they did not explicitly sign up to take risks.
A shift occurred when teachers practiced facilitation during their time together,
simulating classroom instruction with their peers. They noticed how practice in the
workshop setting helped support them by providing a safe space to rehearse and
analyze facilitation from multiple perspectives. Elizabeth explained, It is easier to
watch another person and observe what works and what does not vs. doing a self-
observation. Alternatively, other teachers preferred to practice behind closed doors
in their own classrooms, nding success only after multiple endeavors. Either way,
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practice was a key ingredient for increased condence.

Teachers also felt having models to observe in their own classrooms emboldened
them, as Drucilla explained: This was helpful to me because practicing it in class
with our peers is one thing, but seeing how things are done in the classroom is dif-
ferent. Teachers were able to observe the performance capabilities of their own stu-
dents, get ideas about what to do and how to prompt, and developed positive
attitudes about the potential of each strategy.
Finally, when teachers saw successes in student learning, it encouraged them to
take risks and keep trying. One teacher described her student successes as a valida-
tion of the strategies. Another compared student writing from before she imple-
mented workshop strategies with writing after and described improvements in the
quantity of writing and level of detail. Elizabeth noticed increased engagement,
The kids seem a little bit more excited about it, and that makes me a little more
excited. These reports suggest teacher comfort, condence, and commitment to tak-
ing risks grew when they saw evidence of impact on student learning.
As the teachers gained competence and condence, they created environments in
their classrooms that would do the same for their students. Aspects of the creative
workshop strategies and facilitation approach encouraged students who were eagerly
participating and excited about it. Several teachers, like Bobette, felt the open-ended
nature of this work shifted the student attitude and energy about learning:
And really, when I was implementing the strategies in my classroom, it got to the point
where I would say to kids, Okay, stop giving me so many answers. Now, when does
that ever happen, right?
Reports from teachers held the pestering strategy particularly responsible for this
shift; by questioning for simple details with no wrong answers, even the typically
struggling students wanted to contribute. No longer did only elite few with the
condence and ability receive the teachers attention. In a way, pestering had a
democratizing effect in the classroom, with everyone equally capable and willing to
contribute to the whole.

Discussion
At the completion of the study, my observations suggest three different levels at
which teachers had come to embrace the creative practices introduced during the
 Teaching Education 83

workshop. Three teachers internalized the strategies and made them a part of their
writing instruction pedagogy, demonstrating ease, and condence in their reactions
to both student ideas and physicalizations. Two of the six participants appreciated
and embraced the strategies but felt the urge to maintain control over student behav-
iors and responses that were sometimes wrong in their eyes. These teachers also
had some trouble responding quickly to snapshot images with prompts to explore
new and different aspects of an idea. Finally, one teacher misunderstood how to
effectively apply the strategies to complementary learning goals, placing serious
constraints on her students creativity as well as her own. Each teachers school con-
text, prior experience, and tolerance for the unknown may have had a role to play in
this variety of responses. It is important to recognize that teachers themselves are
not often afforded the luxury of No Wrong Answers in an educational culture that
links their performance to student test scores, values conformity of student behavior,
and prioritizes information over imagination.
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The creative strategies introduced in the workshop diverged from the systematic
norm for these public school teachers, often requiring them to work against their
instincts or act in opposition to routine. Asking questions with no right answers,
allowing students to control the direction of their learning, and tolerating a degree of
unusual behavior that comes with high levels of engagement seemed foreign to
them. Yet, teachers embraced these avant-garde strategies as they grew in con-
dence. This is no small feat; teacher attitudes, particularly those related to self-image
and self-efcacy, have a strong relationship to frequency of arts use in teaching
(Oreck, 2004, 2006). At the same time, they had trouble relating the creative strate-
gies and skills to the ordinary business of school. Drucilla wrote:
I am always having a difcult time tting in the writing strategies into my schedule.
There are so many things to teach. There are common core standards to focus on.
There is a curriculum for reading and math that WE NEED to use and follow. It makes
it difcult for me to have the freedom to teach all of this.
Teachers like Drucilla needed help seeing how creative teaching is not a proposition
to teach one thing more, but a way to teach required curriculum differently.
The teachers commented often on how much fun the students were having,
but had trouble citing appropriate standards or learning targets aligned with state
expectations. At the time of the study, they were just learning newly adopted Com-
mon Core State Standards in English Language Arts, and had difculty connecting
them with the skills and strategies from the workshop. This is consistent with litera-
ture that suggests creativity and joy are perceived as opposites of hard work and
intellect (Das, 2011; Wolk, 2008). Moreover, I collected a variety of evidence based
on observations and teacher reections indicating students were able to generate
ideas, visualize, and elaborate on the details of those ideas in their writing but
teachers struggled to provide analysis of student work to support such anecdotal
evidence.
Teachers most frequently cited time as their most pressing challenge during this
work. They recognized how creative processes are not always efcient; students
benet when they have time to talk, draw, act, write, reect, and revise. Elizabeth,
for example, was often concerned about how much time was required to complete
an activity. She was clearly apprehensive about applying the level of detail the
teachers were practicing in the workshop within her classroom setting. However,
when she pestered her own students for detail, she observed: I think focusing on
 84 J. Simpson Steele

the details of a character, the setting, I didnt realize it takes so much time but well
spent, I feel like. I think the kids are noticing. Teachers ended up hungry for more
time to practice building images before sending their students off with their pencils.
Again, a stronger understanding of integrated learning goals might help teachers
justify carving out that time within the curriculum.

Conclusion
While the development of creativity through interdisciplinary endeavors continues to
be a clear and present need in the modern classroom, this study suggests it is neither
easily nor uniformly achieved. The trajectory of teacher development detailed here
indicates a number of individuals were both willing and able to learn how to engage
divergent thinking through open-ended questioning, stimulate uency by coaching
through the language of the arts and ultimately develop a degree of comfort in doing
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so. Though still developing, these teachers experienced a change that they felt would
benet their students.
Yet, other teachers needed more practice with creative structures, especially
developing skills for embracing student ideas. Perhaps a grown man who is only
eight years old, a gentleman wearing a wedding dress, or an oncoming car with 100
passengers could provide excellent fodder for story, but teachers needed time to set-
tle into the world of possibility and practice saying yes. These teachers require a
connection with the spark of spontaneity jazz musicians bring to their work, trusting
their own impulses, and listening carefully to their group when outcomes are
unknown. This would necessitate further development of aptitudes related to instinct
and risk, simultaneously more basic and more complex than instruction at the strat-
egy level. Teachers in this category must shift their entire culture of practice.
Finally, this study indicates a necessity for more focus on integrating creative
work with the everyday work of school in order to make authentic connections with
learning targets and assessments in writing curricula. Teachers should not have to
choose between readiness, achievement, and creativity. It is possible to meet stan-
dards without sacricing the spirit of creation, but perhaps all writing genres and
skills do not lend themselves to the same creative possibilities. Analytic selectivity
is an essential ingredient to meaningful integration, and teachers would benet from
a course in matchmaking.

Acknowledgments
Special thanks to Daniel A. Kelin, II and Paul Wood.

Disclosure statement
No potential conict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding
This work was supported with partial funding by Honolulu Theatre for Youth.

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