the "inward urgency" of the artist

"The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive.

To him...
a touch is a blow,
a sound is a noise,
a misfortune is a tragedy,
a joy is an ecstasy,
a friend is a lover,
a lover is a god,
and failure is death.

Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create - - - so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating."
-Pearl Buck-

New Skills for a New Century

Project-based learning teaches kids the collaborative and critical thinking abilities they'll need to compete.

By Bob Pearlman

Let's assume the No Child Left Behind Act works fine and that by 2014 every student meets the targeted standards and passes his or her state's exit exam. Will those students be successful as citizens and workers in the twenty-first century?

Not a chance.

Let's further assume that each state's governor gets the one-on-one computer bug and equips all of each state's students with top-flight portable PCs. Will these students now be successful as citizens and workers in the twenty-first century?

Again, not a chance.

No matter how sophisticated the tools we put in classrooms, the curriculum designed to educate students to meet the new standards is sorely inadequate to help them after they leave school. In short, learning -- and schooling -- must be totally transformed.

"Today's graduates need to be critical thinkers, problem solvers, and effective communicators who are proficient in both core subjects and new, twenty-first-century content and skills," according to "Results that Matter: 21st Century Skills and High School Reform," a report issued in March by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills.

These include learning and thinking skills, information- and communications-technology literacy skills, and life skills.

Students of today enter an increasingly globalized world in which technology plays a vital role. They must be good communicators, as well as great collaborators. The new work environment requires responsibility and self-management, as well as interpersonal and project-management skills that demand teamwork and leadership.

Enter project-based learning, designed to put students into a students-as-workers setting where they learn collaboration, critical thinking, written and oral communication, and the values of the work ethic while meeting state or national content standards. Homewood School, in Tenterden, England, in that spirit, calls its PBL program Total Learning.

In traditional classrooms, students typically work on simple assignments that emphasize short-term content memorization; they work alone, write for the teacher alone, and rarely make presentations. But don't confuse PBL with simply doing activities injected into traditional education to enliven things as a culminating event for a learning unit. Real PBL, by contrast, is deep, complex, rigorous, and integrated. Its fundamentals are fourfold:

Create teams of three or more students to work on an in-depth project for three to eight weeks.
Introduce a complex entry question that establishes a student's need to know, and scaffold the project with activities and new information that deepens the work.
Calendar the project through plans, drafts, timely benchmarks, and finally the team's presentation to an outside panel of experts drawn from parents and the community.
Provide timely assessments and/or feedback on the projects for content, oral and written communication, teamwork, critical thinking, and other important skills. ?????SOUND LIKE SRM???????



Instructors start each unit by throwing students into a real-world or realistic project that engages interest and generates a list of things they need to know. Projects are designed to tackle complex problems requiring critical thinking. The strategy is simple:

To learn collaboration, work in teams.
To learn critical thinking, take on complex problems.
To learn oral communication, present.
To learn written communication, write.
To learn technology, use technology.
To develop citizenship, take on civic and global issues.
To learn about careers, do internships.
To learn content, research and do all of the above.

PBL gets even stronger when projects, and courses, fully integrate two or more subjects, such as English and social studies or math and physics.

Good projects engage students on their own need to know in tackling complex problems and working in teams to generate solutions, products, and presentations. In every project, they touch all the bases the Partnership for 21st Century Skills considers fundamental outcomes of a successful PBL program.

Measuring Results How do we know PBL is working? Project- and problem-based learning doesn't work unless learners obtain feedback. Current assessments don't do the job. State testing and accountability are aimed at schools, not individual student learning, and reports are released once a year, after students have moved on to other teachers. Periodic assessments in managed curriculums mainly provide information to teachers. Students can't improve or become managers of their own learning without constant, real-time assessment and feedback, referred to in PBL instruction as assessment for learning, as opposed to assessment for school, district, or classroom accountability. (See "Healthier Testing Made Easy,"April/May 2006.)

Assessment for learning starts with outcomes, proceeds with projects, products, and performances that map to the outcomes, and completes the loop with assessment and feedback to students.

Rubrics, or scoring guides, delineate the criteria. But they are not just a way for teachers to evaluate student work. In the best PBL classrooms, students see the rubrics when they start the project and deploy them as tools to both self-appraise their work in progress and direct their own learning.

Most schools give students a single grade for a course, often losing important data about their skills and abilities. At New Tech, by contrast, the grade report shows separate grades for content, critical thinking, written communication, oral communication, technology literacy, and any of the other Learning Outcomes appropriate for the course.

New Tech has developed unique ways to assess certain modern skills. At the end of every project, students assess their team members, anonymously, using the online Peer Collaboration rubric. Scores go into a database, where students, through a secure password, can see them. Students can then publish these scores as evidence in their digital portfolios. Teachers and visiting community experts, meanwhile, score the similar online Presentation Evaluation rubric.

PBL comes alive when schools go beyond one-to-one computing and provide a technology platform that serves as a collaborative learning environment. ????????FACEBOOK???????? At New Tech, that environment, the New Tech High Learning System, includes the curriculum and the standards, as well as assessment, reporting, and collaboration and communication tools.

The Learning System immediately and dynamically publishes all project materials to the Internet. And because all projects are housed online, they are available year to year even if teachers leave. Also, instructors can share projects between schools. Fourteen schools throughout the nation based on the New Tech model are doing so. That number will nearly double this fall.

The PBL Challenge

PBL has one factor in common with traditional education -- it takes good teachers to make it work well. It's hard work designing effective projects, scaffolding activities, benchmarks, rubrics, and culminating products and events. And it's a challenge to manage the PBL classroom and orchestrate all phases of the project. But PBL leaves traditional education in the dust. It sets students to work on their own juices, as self-directed learners. It enables them to master state standards and a lot more.

Today's new efforts in PBL are fully standards based and methodologically sound and utilize some form of technologically based collaborative-learning environment to support these students-as-workers classrooms and schools.

New research demonstrates that PBL makes a difference. A recent study of eight New Tech graduating classes shows that 89 percent attended a two-year or four-year postsecondary institution, 92 percent applied some or a great deal of what they learned at New Tech to their postsecondary education or career, and 96 percent would choose to attend the school again.

Researchers in Singapore, who published the book Engaging in Project Work, have found a significant value add in student learning achieved from PBL since its nationwide implementation in 2000.

NCLB tells students that mastery of core subjects will lead to success. By contrast, Thomas L. Friedman, author of the bestseller The World Is Flat, tells his daughters an updated version of the old eat-your-supper-children-are-starving story: "Finish your homework. People in India and China are starving for your job."

What do you tell your children, and your students? Just this: Globalization is flattening the world and challenging the United States as never before. Students here and in other advanced countries must move up the value chain and lead a new era of global cooperation as twenty-first-century learners.

Tell them this, too: You, students of today, need a lot more than core academic subjects. You need to also learn teamwork, critical thinking, and communication skills. Look for a school where you can do real-world projects, where you are given assessment and feedback on all the skills essential in this century, and where you and your fellow students are provided with the workspaces and technology tools to become successful citizens and knowledge workers.

‘Virtue Is Not Its Own Reward’ and Other Lessons for a Life in Art

April 24, 2007

By KATHRYN SHATTUCK
Edward Albee likes to tell about the time when, at 18, having fled his adoptive parents’ stiflingly conservative household to begin a more expansive self-education in Greenwich Village, he knocked on W. H. Auden’s door. Mr. Albee, frequently referred to as America’s greatest living playwright, thought himself a poet then.

“I thrust my poems in his hand and said, ‘I’ll be back in a week,’ and then I ran,” he recalled. “A week later I showed up, and he invited me in. He spent two hours talking about my poems.”

Thus began the Gospel According to Albee, a two-hour master class on Sunday evening at the Museum of Modern Art’s education building for four high school seniors in the writing division of YoungArts, a program of the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts.

Mr. Albee had joined a who’s who roster including the artist Julian Schnabel, the musician Wynton Marsalis, the dancer Desmond Richardson and the filmmaker Martin Scorsese for this weekend’s inaugural round of mentoring sessions offered to YoungArts participants in New York.

Founded in 1981 by Ted Arison and his wife, Lin, YoungArts offers six-day intensive workshops in Miami each year to 140 or so creatively inclined high school seniors from around the country and has distributed more than $84 million in prize money.

Beginning in 2006 the top students have been sent to New York for an additional four-day session, capped by a performance and an awards ceremony. Tonight at 6:30, the students are to present a variety show at the Ziegfeld Theater, after which Mr. Albee, Mr. Schnabel, Frank Gehry and Mikhail Baryshnikov, among others, will hand out achievement awards of $5,000 and $10,000.

“For the students, it’s not so much the money as it is the master classes in helping them to decide whether these are paths they want to pursue for the rest of their lives,” Ms. Arison said. “This is what really impacts them.”

Whether Mr. Albee’s young listeners — Asher Frankfurt, Michael O’Brien, Phoebe Rusch and Kristofer Wellman — will be writers for life is anyone’s guess, but he had plenty of advice for them.

“I think every writer has a different time when they decide they’re a writer,” he said. “George Bernard Shaw wrote his first play at 42. He was a music critic until then. For that matter, Mozart knew he was going to be a composer at 4, but he was special.”

Mr. Albee was a sage 8 years old when he began writing poetry as an escape from a household in which he said he never felt quite at home. By his teens he had completed what he called two very bad, very lengthy novels, now hidden among the theater stacks at the New York Public Library.

In his early 20s, he carted along a trunk full of his poems to the MacDowell Colony, where on a late night over a bottle of bourbon, Thornton Wilder asked him if he had ever considered writing plays.

“I’m not suggesting Wilder saw a playwright in me,” he said. “I think maybe he was just trying to save poetry from me.”

Mr. Albee said he stopped writing poetry at 28: “I was a better imitator than a poet. I never felt like a poet. And you can’t do what you don’t feel.”

“I think all of us have a moment when we figure out what kind of writer we are,” he went on. “Should I have started writing plays sooner? No. Everyone has a different age when they are capable of writing what it is they’re meant to write.”

For Mr. Albee, that was his first play, “The Zoo Story,” which he completed in just three weeks in 1958. Still, not even William Inge and Aaron Copland were able to help him get it produced in the United States. It wasn’t until after the play’s German premiere, when a critic from The New York Times happened to comment that it was a shame a young American playwright couldn’t get attention back at home, that it made it to Off Broadway.

“Virtue is not its own reward,” Mr. Albee went on. “There is a huge difference between popularity and excellence. As playwrights you are going to be encouraged not to hold the line, to simplify, to make things not the way you intended. You are going to be encouraged to make plays perfectly happy at three and a half hours into two hours.”

How long should a play be?

“As long as it should be,” Mr. Albee said, nearly roaring. “Everything has its duration, which has nothing to do with commerce. Do what you have to do to make a living, but figure out if you’re going to be a hack or your own person.”

“Can’t writers be allowed a certain amount of creative fluidity?” asked Ms. Rusch, whose own efforts waver between poetry and prose.

“Yes, but people are generally better at one thing than another,” Mr. Albee said, ticking off a list of offenders. “Henry James was a great novelist but a rotten playwright. Arthur Miller wrote a novel. Don’t go near it. Sam Beckett was a great novelist and a great playwright. He reinvented both forms, which is why people can’t touch him.”

Did he think that true art and true writing came with experience and life, Mr. Frankfurt asked?

“You’re using terms I don’t understand,” Mr. Albee said.

Mr. Frankfurt began again. “I mean coming out the way we want to say it,” he said.

“Then say it,” Mr. Albee said. “That’s your job, to change things and bring people around to your point of view. You’re either right or wrong. Creativity begins in the unconscious. Don’t write too soon. Get to know your characters. You should be writing absolutely real people in real situations. That’s the only way actors can act your stuff.”

There were practical matters, too: never lecture, don’t be obscure, never become someone’s opinion of you, and remember that every line has two purposes — one, to delineate character, and two, to advance the plot. Everything else is a waste.

There was also a reading list of the four essential 20th-century playwrights (Chekhov, Pirandello, Beckett and Brecht) and a warning.

“If you only read the great writers, you’ll be in trouble,” he said. “Read junk. It’s enormously encouraging to tell yourself, ‘I can do better than that.’ ”

And finally, a word of encouragement.

Mr. Albee recalled his dismay in 1962 at finding 75 people — actors, understudies, stage managers, costume designers — in the room on the first day of rehearsals for “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

“There’s only one reason that there are 75 people sitting here,” Mr. Albee said the producer told him. “Never lose sight of the fact that the play begins with you and that it can never be done without you.”

Class dismissed.

Canceled by Principal, Student Play Heads to Off Broadway

April 12, 2007


By ALISON LEIGH COWAN
Students at a Connecticut high school whose principal canceled a play they were preparing on the Iraq war are now planning to perform the work in June in New York, at the Public Theater, a venerable Off Broadway institution, and at the Culture Project, which is known for staging politically provocative work. A third show at a Connecticut theater is also being discussed.

“We are so honored and thrilled, there’s no words to describe how excited we are,” Bonnie Dickinson, the teacher whose advanced theater class at Wilton High School put the play together, said yesterday.

After barring the scheduled performance of the play, a series of monologues mainly from soldiers titled “Voices in Conflict,” school officials have cleared the way for an off-campus production. In a letter Tuesday, Thomas B. Mooney, a lawyer for Wilton’s board of education, wrote that the district and its superintendent, Gary Richards “have no objection to students privately producing and presenting the play on their own.”

While defending the school’s initial decision to halt production pending “concerns about balance, content and copyright,” Mr. Mooney wrote that “school officials have no interest in interfering with the private activities of students.” The letter goes on to say that the teacher of the advanced theater class that initiated the project, Ms. Dickinson, could also participate in an independent production “as long as she makes clear that she is acting as an individual and that the play is not sponsored in any way by the Wilton Public Schools.”

In canceling the play last month, the school principal, Timothy H. Canty, cited concerns about political balance, sourcing, and the possibility of hurting Wilton residents “who had lost loved ones or who had individuals serving.”

But administrators have said in recent days that they might yet allow the play to be performed on school grounds in some modified form, but probably not this spring, when about half the 15 cast members are scheduled to graduate.

The Public Theater, which is tentatively scheduled to stage the show June 15, and the Culture Project, where it is slotted for the prior weekend, were among scores of off-campus venues, including church basements and college auditoriums, that offered the students a platform after the play’s cancellation.

“We started in the school, but we don’t have to finish in the school,” Devon Fontaine, 16, a cast member, said yesterday. “Wherever we do the play, I think we will all be happy and grateful that that venue has allowed us to do so.”

The students were also awarded a “Courage in Theater” award last month for their “non-performance” from Music Theater International, a New York agency that licenses many high school productions. And last week, theater greats including Edward Albee, Christopher Durang, John Weidman, Marsha Norman, Doug Wright, John Guare and John Patrick Shanley, under the auspices of the Dramatists Guild of America, joined the National Coalition Against Censorship in calling for the school district to allow the play to go on.

Martin Garbus, a First Amendment lawyer who has been working pro bono with Ms. Dickinson and several parents of cast members said yesterday that schools are allowed to regulate speech that has the potential to disrupt learning. But canceling the initial production only increased the likelihood that its eventual performance on school grounds might stir up trouble, he said. “Had the school not done any of this stuff, it would have just gone through uneventfully,” Mr. Garbus said.

Ms. Dickinson said the script was a work in progress, and that students would now be rushing to polish it and rehearse amid other spring concerns, like the prom.

“We’re looking forward to finishing writing the play or putting it together, as it were, and coming up with some kind of ending that feels right with the kids and then rehearsing it,” said Ms. Dickinson, adding that the show may be performed on-book, with the cast reading from scripts, to relieve anxiety about memorizing lines before their Off Broadway debut.

Good Day, Mr. Kubrick...

This is a real audition video - funniest thing you'll ever see! MUST WATCH!

Colin Graham, Opera Theatre's artistic director, dies

By Sarah Bryan Miller
POST-DISPATCH CLASSICAL MUSIC CRITIC
04/06/2007

Stage director, librettist and Opera Theatre of St. Louis artistic director Colin Graham, 75, died Friday of heart failure. He had more than 400 opera, theater and TV productions to his credit, including 48 works staged for Opera Theatre. He was awarded the Order of the British Empire at Buckingham Palace in 2001 for service to British and American opera.

He did not want a funeral; a memorial concert is being planned for June. He had no survivors.

"Colin was not only a mentor for me but a good friend," said renowned soprano Christine Brewer, who is honorary chair for the concert. "I was always inspired by working with him. Those experiences were among the best of my life, and I will miss him."

The day before he died, he was working on the world premiere of composer David Carlson’s "Anna Karenina," for which Mr. Graham wrote the libretto. He had turned over stage directing duties to his assistant, Mark Streshinsky. "Anna Karenina" will be performed this month at Florida Grand Opera and in June at Opera Theatre.

"His presence will be very much felt in the production of ‘Anna Karenina,’ and for several seasons to come," said Opera Theatre general director Charles MacKay.

Mr. Graham was born in London in 1931. He attended Stowe School and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. His first ambition was to be an actor; his second was to sing opera. On his third try, directing, he got it right.

He started as an assistant stage manager at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. In 1953, he began a long association with composer Benjamin Britten and the English Opera Group, quickly working his way up to directing. Britten’s "Noyes Fludde" was the first of the 56 world premieres Mr. Graham directed. Opera Theatre spokeswoman Maggie Stearns said that’s an operatic record.

Mr. Graham had a keen interest in Japanese theater and studied its forms in Japan. He commissioned Minoru Miki's kabuki opera "An Actor's Revenge," directing both the world and American premieres (London 1979, St. Louis 1981). That led to "Joruri," which had its world premiere in St. Louis in 1985 and its Japanese premiere in 1988, and of "The Tale of Genji," which premiered in 2000 in St. Louis and in 2001 in Tokyo.

"I find working on a new piece very challenging and stimulating, especially if one is involved a little bit in the creative process, not just taking a fait accompli and being told to get on with it," Mr. Graham said in a 2005 interview.

He worked at the Aldeburgh Festival, Sadler's Wells Opera/English National Opera and Santa Fe Opera, and staged productions for the Metropolitan Opera in New York, Lyric Opera of Chicago, the Washington Opera, San Francisco Opera and New York City Opera, among others. He came to Opera Theatre of St. Louis as director of productions in 1978, becoming artistic in 1985.

He directed a new production of Britten’s "Gloriana" for Opera Theatre’s 30th season in 2005, which starred soprano Christine Brewer. Other major Opera Theatre productions included "Beatrice and Benedict," "Il Viaggio a Rheims" (in its U.S. premiere), operas by Britten including "Paul Bunyan" (in the U.S. professional premiere) and the U.S. premiere of Bernstein’s final version of "Candide."

Mr. Graham was a prolific author of librettos, for composers including Andre Previn, Britten, Stephen Paulus, Bright Sheng and Miki.

He designed and directed a new production of Britten's "Death in Venice" for the Metropolitan Opera and Covent Garden; it was nominated for an Olivier Award in London.

Mr. Graham, who wrote a training handbook for opera singers, made a specialty of training them. He was a U.S. citizen, lived in St. Louis and held honorary doctor of arts degrees from Webster University and the University of Missouri.

Mr. Graham became a body builder relatively late in life, in 1991, and a champion in his age category soon after.

"I always used to laugh at the huge and hideous trophies they gave out" at competitions, he told the Post-Dispatch in 1999. "Now I’ve got four of them standing in a corner of my living room."

Donna Wilkinson, chair of the Opera Theatre board, said: "He leaves a legacy of creativity and excellence, and we will miss him terribly, both personally and artistically."

MacKay added: "He’s given us so much. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of opera, and there isn’t anyone else like him in the world."

Along with his knowledge of theater, "he was such a kind man, in addition to being a forceful, and at times demanding, presence. … He was a kind and generous man, and to the end he had a twinkle in his eye."