If you only think there is one answer, then you will only find one. Scottish Consultative Council on the Curriculum 1996
We made a mistake. That’s good. We just learned something… In life, most of us are highly skilled at suppressing action. All the improvisation teacher has to do is to reverse this skill and he creates very ‘gifted’ improvisers. Bad improvisers block action, often with a high degree of skill. Good improvisers develop action… Many teachers think of children as immature adults. It might lead to better and more ‘respectful’ teaching, if we thought of adults as atrophied children. Keith Johnstone
Continuing the story of a headteacher and an artist – part 2
An artist once said to me that the art of workshop was the art of anomaly. She illustrated her point by drawing a straight line in the air with her finger and then drawing another line that dipped away from the straight and narrow of the first. “This is where you find things out”, she declared about the dip in the second line. And it’s true that even as I write that little anecdote, it becomes a springboard for many other thoughts. It opens the synapses and memory banks to related incidents and accidents from which luminous moments arose. The premise of our project about The City of Fools at Kings Park was that we would ask the children to be fools, to make mistakes and to find the wrong answers.
In educational terms, we call this the zone of proximal development; the distance between what a child can do without help and what a child can achieve with support (Vygotsky). Children, through social interaction and working with experts, start to make sense and solve problems independently. We can advance teaching and learning by giving children experiences that are within the zone. Getting the challenge just right is the skill of the teacher.
The idea to do this was led by the coincidence of three provocations. The first was Ori asking us do make a show on a Jewish theme with the children at Kings Park. The second was that at the time I was performing a show which I had written called ‘A Sackful of Souls’. The third was that I was teaching improvisation and much inspired by the work of Keith Johnstone and he suggests that making mistakes is much more interesting to watch than trying to get everything right on stage. He shows this by getting two teams to mime winning a tug of war and then getting them both to try and lose. The losing example is much funnier and more interesting to watch as all sorts of invention and mayhem ensues as teams try to outdo each other to lose the battle. All in all, both Ori and myself were taking a leap of faith and trying something new.
The desire to create a show based on a Jewish theme stemmed from the community the school served. We were a community school, surrounded by denominational schools Catholic, C of E, with a vibrant and longstanding Jewish community. I think what Tony forgets about this first encounter is that there were three schools involved in this performance and it was about bringing a disparate and religiously divided community together. I recall there were 180 children involved.
As in most things, the idea of trusting the process is paradoxical. When we were going to make A City of Fools with 180children, we didn’t know exactly what was going to happen or how it was going to turn out. We would have been fools ourselves to just say,” We have done our bit, we’ve had a good idea and it’ll work out somehow.” We sat down, Martin, Ken and me, and looked at the possibilities and potential of the process. We imagined the puppets and props that could be made. We thought about how each stage might work for the children and we bought and prepared materials. This includes breaking the schedule down workshop by workshop, considering how we will pack and the amount of time we need to set up each part of the making, rehearsing and staging. In short, we put our whole selves into planning the process to create the process. However, there’s a point when the process starts taking over.
The shared imagination of Martin, Ken and Tony surpassed anything I had seen before. But what became increasingly transparent was that they were realizing the imagination of the children. What had begun as the plan created initially by Ken, Martin and Tony, became the children’s. Their ideas and imagination took over.
Tony always meets with the staff first to share what the aims are. He tells a story, describes a vision. The vision he described when we first met in King’s Park did not fit into anything we had seen before; flying angels, houses that speak, acrobats and mice.
When he meets with the children, there is always a carpet. I think of it now, having seen it many times before, as the magic carpet. It is interesting to see how staff and children approach “the carpet” should they sit on it, walk round it, what is it doing in the middle of the hall? But King’s Park was the first journey and the first magic carpet ride.
So here we are, it seems like yesterday; at King’s Park. The children and staff walk into the hall. There is the carpet, Tony is wearing an outrageous shirt, and he starts; Good Morning King’s Park – the showman, the performer steps up to the platform.
I am going to tell you a story, a story about the fools of Chelm… Chelm was a village of fools, fools young and old…
At this moment I am a writer. I am creating a piece. At the same time the piece is creating me. I have a thought and start shaping it and as I do that, the next thought emerges. I had no conscious idea that I would write the last sentence until it began to take shape. In a workshop this symbiotic process between creativity and receptivity is necessarily more than a process of individual authorship. In a workshop the authoring of what is made is done collectively. Not only are there twenty, thirty, a hundred minds and hearts involved also there is the single group mind and heart at play. This process is set in motion from the impetus created in the early moments of the workshop when the group come together for the first time and meet the workshop leaders. This moment is like the beginning of a small universe. Everything emanates outwards from the initial energy imparted.
At this moment Tony is the performer. As Tony begin to tell the story; he weaves in the ideas of the children, they begin to take control of the events and imagine their own foolish tales. He involves the children in repetition and actions so that they can retell the story themselves by the end of the session.
Mistakes are important in my profession, they are the point of challenge, the moment when a child learns something is; when they take risks, make mistakes. Too many children are fearful of making mistakes. To have a city of fools and for the children to be able to imprint their own foolishness and mistakes onto the Fools of Chelm was liberating. This has left a lasting impact on my position as a headteacher.
In each school we introduce these things at the beginning of the workshop: the challenge for the group, the story and content of what they will do, who the group are going to work with and puppetry. This is not about blandly telling them but finding a way to energise the group so that they embrace a common purpose. Like a team going into a sports event, the group will only achieve great things if there is a general agreement of what the purpose of the game is and how they are going to support each other to play it. These are the vital qualities we are trying to establish at the outset of the group’s journey: that it is their journey, that we are there to help them and attend to their needs, that this is something they can do and that they will need cooperation and imagination to meet the challenge. We do not do this by telling them. We show them and get the group to identify what they need to do. When all that pre- arrival preparation is done and the introduction is delivered that is when the process in the workshop starts breathing and pulsing.
A key to the immersion of the children in the idea and the imagining of the story is the telling of the tale and the introduction of a puppet. From behind the screen emerges a character. With skill, Tony and the team show the children how, in moving the puppet, they can express emotions and feelings. The puppet converses with the children. The children witness the skill of the performer and can’t imagine they can do that. How a movement, an action can convey a story. They know the story and have been asked for their input and ideas. They are emotionally invested. Then there is a pause.
The workshop at King’s Park about The City of Fools began with the children thinking up problems and deliberately getting the answers wrong. The children proved to be incredibly adept at this. A roof in a house would spring a leak. It would be fixed by taking the roof off. Problem solved! The bathroom door wouldn’t close properly. Screw it permanently shut. Problem solved! And so on …a whole host of problems were created and sorted with all sort of absurd solutions. As we watched this process unfold, we realised that deliberate mistakes were liberating. For one thing, you couldn’t imagine wrong answers without imagining the opposite; otherwise you wouldn’t know it was wrong. For another, the imagination was set free without the anxiety of being wrong or stupid as the idea was to create a world of fools. And that was also happening, a world of fools was being created. And the big thing about that world was that it was nobody else’s world but those children’s’ – it belonged to them. They had ownership.
The children are asked to collect cardboard and newspaper. Some weeks later a timetable is sent out. Year groups, and making is allocated. The workshop begins. This time with a class or group and they retell the story sitting on the magic carpet. They remember the tale it is embedded. They recall their foolish ideas and find that they have been included in the new version. Their ideas and imagination counts.
There is a whole hoo-ha about process versus product. When it comes to creative process, this is a big red herring. Each part of the process is a product and, as well, each part of the overall process is a whole process. Each moment leads to the next. Our job is to observe and listen to the process. We, the facilitators, the story guides, the midwives, the prospectors are prospecting for the gold that is being tapped by the individual’s and group’s imaginations. There is a lustre and luminosity about the gold of the imagination. It shines because it does not separate self-discovery from learning. Its light extends because in following the unfolding moments and responding to them, something incredible can be made by the whole group. In Kings Park the children began by creating all sorts of wonderful situations for their City of Fools. We went away and they wrote a rhyming narration that would accompany the action on stage. Here’s a section of the text that they wrote:
- NARRATOR ONE:
The angel came but we don’t know why
Spreading souls down from the sky
One sack for ‘fools’, one for ‘wise’ to scatter
Half and half everywhere, a simple matter
But one sack snagged upon a tree
So Chelm got ALL the fools for free!
The Angel (3D and shadow)
The angel flies across the shadow screen and then the 3D one appears and flies around and moves from 3D and back into shadow.
The hill appears in shadow and the sack gets snagged. The foolish souls drop down and on the front stage below half the men do their entrance.
When they are on: Let’s build houses! Lots of disagreement, going up and down, muffled dismay and curses, tools coming up and down on the shadow screen and slowly
- The Houses – The houses arise on the stage behind the men. (men going to sleep and house arising behind them and the shadow town coming up on the shadow screen.)
NARRATOR TWO:
The foolish men tried to build the houses
The women cried: Not fit for mouses!
- Enter the Women on the upper stage around the houses: NOT FIT FOR MOUSES!
NARRATOR TWO:
The walls were crooked, the windows too
The doors were green and the roof was blue
The man -made town was one big mess
This was problem for the women to address
complaining about the men and the houses they have built. They decide they need to exert some control. The women put up the stop/ go signs)
The group has genius when the individuals can amplify each other, when the power is working with rather than against each other. So, seventy or so ten and eleven-year old children took to the stage with puppets they had made; animal puppets, table-top puppets, houses with eyes that move, a huge flying angel and a motley crew of rod puppet fools. They rehearsed for one day and then made a show that was original, relevant and high-quality theatre and theatre that was theirs. They raised the bar and they raised the roof. This was the first show that Ori asked us to make and it opened up a universe that was going to extend for many years, in different places with all sorts of discoveries.
This was my first encounter with Tony, Ken and Martin. I had hoped we would be able to continue the learning journey at King’s Park. It was not to be. However, the outcome and the impact of, that first encounter left a lasting memory. Not just for me but for the children and staff who took part. It led me to find Tony years later and to ask for his help in another school and in a different community.
Now in this piece, I have talked about “us” and “we” a lot. This plural is a large part of what has made this expanding journey of discovery possible. In this first encounter, the team consisted of myself and two other men. Martin and Ken. All the devising and design of the process was done in tandem with the three of us working together. As was the leading of the workshops. It was collaborative, just as we were asking the children to be. Mirroring matters. The deeper this mirroring goes, the better the process and product and next potential process will be. The more everybody is involved the better; teachers, ground maintenance staff, cleaners, teaching assistants, school office… all matter, all play a part, all these relationships support the quality of what is made and what the children can do. Kings Park is too far back for me to remember these relationships but I do know that Ori wrote to me and asked for a proposal that would take the process of the first event with further integration into the school curriculum. This was not to happen at Kings Park but it did mark the next phase of our journey together. And here are some of the lessons those children who made a City of Fools helped me begin to learn:
40 Lessons Learned from Making Mistakes
- Point us to something we did not know.
- Reveal a nuance we missed.
- Deepen our knowledge.
- Tell us something about our skill levels.
- Help us see what matters and what does not.
- Inform us more about our values.
- Teach us more about others.
- Let us recognize changing circumstances.
- Show us when someone else has changed.
- Keep us connected to what works and what doesn’t work.
- Remind us of our humanity.
- Spur us to want to better work which helps us all.
- Promote compassion for ourselves and others.
- Teach us to value forgiveness.
- Help us to pace ourselves better.
- Invite us to better choices.
- Can teach us how to experiment.
- Can reveal a new insight.
- Can suggest new options we had not considered.
- Can serve as a warning.
- Show us hidden fault lines in our lives which can lead us to more productive arrangements.
- Point out structural problems in our lives.
- Prompt us to learn more about ourselves.
- Remind us how we are like others.
- Make us humbler.
- Help us rectify injustices in our lives.
- Show us where to create more balance in our lives.
- Tell us when the time to move on has occurred.
- Reveal where our passion is and where it is not.
- Expose our true feelings.
- Bring out problems in a relationship.
- Can be a red flag for our misjudgements.
- Point us in a more creative direction.
- Show us when we are not listening.
- Wake us up to our authentic selves.
- Can create distance with someone else.
- Slow us down when we need to.
- Can hasten change.
- Reveal our blind spots.
- Are the invisible made visible.