If you could be a fly on the wall when entrepreneurs, engineers, or researchers come up with innovations, you might see a pattern emerge: Identify problem, Explore parameters of problem, Use the skills necessary to solve problem, Find a solution, test it. Test it again. Refine, and reflect.
When children engage with the arts and physical activity through a Sparkplug Dance Educational Resources program, they learn to identify problems, to process, and to find solutions.
Our students reach out as innovators. They possess the inner drive to keep running the long race, motivated from within. We don't see our students along a continuum, with children with "special needs" on one end, and "gifted" kids on the other: We accept that every child has a social, physical, and emotional self.
Every day, our students demonstrate how the human being has an innate desire to learn, to relate, to create, and to reflect.
Why should learning pull away from the idea that the whole person is engaged in it?
Developmental Psychologist Robert Lerner, in his new book, The Good Teen, offers traits he calls the five C's: competence, not just academic competence but social, vocational and health competence. Confidence. Then character, that it's fundamentally important to do what's right. Connection, or working collaboratively with parents, peers, siblings, teachers, coaches. Finally, caring, a sense of compassion and social justice."
Engagement with the creative process can nurture and develop competence, confidence, character, connection and caring.