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Champion Creatively Alive Children™

FACilitAtor’s Guide

Collaboration

Collaboration Champion Creatively Alive Children

Welcome to Champion Creatively Alive Children, a program designed to empower school leaders, teachers and communi-ties with inspiration, knowledge and tools that can unleash the imagination and develop the originality in every child.

Crayola and the National Association of Elementary School Principals, in partnership with the National Art Education Association and the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, have teamed up to help you champion creatively alive children. This program will help you build support for arts-infused education, which develops the “4 Cs” skills all students need to succeed today and in the future.

How Can You Use Materials to Fit Different Schedules?a full day or several half days of professional development? Present all five training modules.

a 90-minute workshop? use one training module—or parts of all five modules.

a 30- or 60-minute presenta-tion to your school board, parents or community members? show one or two of the videos that fit the group’s interests or needs and modify the pre-sentation and activities to meet partici-pants’ needs.

a 15- or 20-minute opportunity in a staff or parent–teacher gather-ing? show one or two of the videos and engage participants in one of the hands-on exercises.

Who Could Lead a Workshop or Presentation?• art teachers who serve as the

“Chief Creative officers” in schools and are experts in the “why to” and “how to” deliver arts-infused education

• Principals and other school leaders who champion creativity as an essential skill throughout the school community

• Curriculum coordinators and academic coaches who present promising practices, help foster cre-ativity and broaden the instructional repertoires of other educators

Customize the Program for Your School Champion Creatively Alive Children is a comprehensive training program that you can adapt easily to your schedule and your school or community needs. the training modules can be used separately or as a series to spark the interest of faculty members, parents and the community.

Free Download of all Five Facilitator’s Guides, Videos, PowerPoint®

Presentations and Handouts

The complete Champion Creatively Alive Children program is available at no cost to educators from Crayola and the National Association of Elementary School Principals.

Crayola.com/CreativelyAlive

NAESP.org

FACilitAtor's Guide Collaboration page 3

Champion Creatively Alive Children Seriesthe 4 Cs: 21st Century Skills

CreativityDiscovering novel ways to think, learn and do

Critical ThinkingUsing original ideas to solve problems

CommunicationExpressing thoughts and feelings effectively

CollaborationWorking in partnership with others toward a common goal

plus

Arts-Infused Education AdvocacyChampioning the integration of the arts across the curriculum and school-wide to build the 4 Cs

Mitchell elementary School in Chicago, IL, expanded the notion of a traditional art classroom by transforming the classroom into a child-centered studio where students behave like artists, explore creative problems and collaborate to create art together. Art teacher Julie Toole created a professional learning community with other Chicago Public School art teachers to share ideas and strategies. Professional artists mentor students and teach them sophisticated skills. Collaboration extends to teachers as well.

Photo courtesy of Mitchell Elementary School , Chicago, IL


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Arrange to have your supplies and equipment on hand:

• Art supplies

• Handouts

• Evaluation forms

• Equipment to play the short video and show the PowerPoint slides (e.g., an interactive whiteboard, computer, DVD player, TV and/or projector)

• Timer or clock for the timed hands-on exercise (Team Sculpture Challenge)

• Refreshments (optional)

Planning a Workshop or Presentationthis facilitator’s guide provides all the information you need to engage different audiences in your school community in exploring Collaboration, one of the 4 Cs.

this guide provides a step-by-step plan for facilitating a 90-minute workshop. You can modify this plan to fit the schedule and needs of your participants.

Planning StepsGet up to speed. review the short video, PowerPoint presentation and resources that accompany this guide to learn more about the role of collaboration in education.

Customize your presentation. Craft your presentation to engage specific audiences, to work within your time constraints, and to fit your personal style. Practice your presentation to help it run smoothly.

Promote participation. schedule the event, reserve your meeting space and plan how you’ll arrange the room (e.g., semi-circles promote discussion). Plan where you’ll engage in hands-on activities. several weeks before the event, post the invitational fliers, and reach out to people to encourage participation. Consider communicating via school e-mail, newsletters, Web or social networking sites.

engage a team to help. Collaboration is key. Who can you count on to help set up the space, handle invitations, assist you with the technology for showing the video and PowerPoint, and arrange refreshments? recruit a team to help with these tasks. if the workshop leader isn’t an art teacher, ask for the art teacher’s help with the presentation. As “Chief Creative officers” in schools, art educators’ expertise is invaluable for presenting the content, helping participants benefit from hands-on creative experiences and succeeding in infusing art across the curriculum.

Many educators believe they are good collaborators already—and they may well be. Your role is to up the ante by inspiring them to be creative collaborators. This workshop will help you challenge educators to broaden and deepen collaboration by including the arts and arts educators in their efforts to improve student performance.

Collaboration can be a sensitive topic in schools without a history or culture of working collaboratively. Some exercises in this workshop, which are designed to qualify and quantify the creative collaborative culture, can evoke strong emotions. For some participants, the exercises turn into “art therapy.” That’s a positive sign. Once people face the realities of their current situation, they’re open and ready for inspira-tional change. Your role is to reas-sure participants that, regardless of where your school is now, you can decide together the steps you can take to become a highly creative, collaborative team.

Two Points of Advice for Facilitators


Framing a Workshop or Presentation

ObjectivesAfter completing this workshop or presentation, participants will:

• understand why collaboration is an essential 21st century skill for students and faculty

• Know the 4 Cs of collaboration:

Common GoalContributionsCompromise–ConsensusCreative, Collaborative Culture

• understand their role in promoting arts-infused education to foster a creative, collaborative culture and develop collaboration skills

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(Add your own objectives above. For example, if you assign any next steps, such as a “try it in your classroom or at home!” activity for teachers or parents, you might want to capture the expected outcome.)

Customize the Presentation

Sample Outline and Schedule for a 90-Minute Workshop*

10 minutes introductions and Warm-up exercise

10 minutes Video and Brief discussion

10 minutes Group exercise: Four Cornerstones of Collaboration

15 minutes Hands-on exercise: team sculpture Challenge

15 minutes Hands-on exercise: draw Your Collaborative Culture

20 minutes Assessment tool: Collaboration Culture

10 minutes summarize Key Points and Plan Next steps

90 minutes * to modify for a shorter session, select the components that fit your schedule and needs.

this presentation works as a stand-

alone workshop or as one module in the five-part series. the five workshops could be delivered in any order and over any time period. Here are some forums where you could present this workshop or share the video and lead a brief discussion:

• Professional develop-ment for the entire fac-ulty at staff meetings or training sessions

• Gatherings of grade-level or subject-area educators

• Parent–teacher, school board or community meetings

• school leadership and innovation meetings—particularly for audiences interested in 21st cen-tury skills and education transformation

You can mix and match the presentation components to fit your needs and your audience. For example:

• use the short video only as the springboard for a 15- to 30-minute discussion.

• skip one hands-on exer-cise to shorten the pre-sentation to 60 minutes.

• use the handouts to brainstorm ideas to develop creativity in your school community.

• develop your own hands-on exercises.


Delivering a Workshop or Presentationuse the PowerPoint to support the workshop, keep the audience focused on discussion points and introduce the exercises. the PowerPoint is a framework enriched by information and exercises you will share as the facilitator.

Introductions and Warm-Up Exercise discuss the objectives and the planned activities. Per-sonalize this introduction so that it is relevant to your audience and shows your passion for collaboration.

explain that collaboration is a highly valued 21st century skill. in school, in work-places and in everyday life, teams of people often work together to accomplish their goals. People need to learn to collaborate effectively to succeed.

Warm-Up Exercise explain that four kinds of creative collaboration are critical for schools to make the most of the arts in education:

• Creative collaboration among students (to build teamwork skills needed for success in school, careers and personal life)

• Creative collaboration among faculty (to leverage the expertise of every educator and draw upon the unique role that art educators can offer by infusing creativity across the curriculum and school-wide)

• Creative collaboration between educators and parents (to communicate the value of creative experiences and involve them in supporting and sharing creative expertise)

• Creative collaboration between the school and the broader community, particularly the art and creative community (to help develop, share and implement promising practices)

As they introduce themselves, facilitate a brief discussion by asking participants what collaboration looks and feels like in each of these areas.


Common Goal • Do collaborators understand the shared objectives and their roles when

they work as a group or on a team?

Contributions• Are the talents and skills of everyone in the group leveraged?

• Is everyone given the opportunity to make contributions and shine?

• Are roles and responsibilities that play to individual strengths assigned?

• Are diverse points of view solicited and welcome?

• How is feedback used to improve collaboration?

• How are individual contributions and individuals’ ability to work as a team assessed?

Compromise–Consensus• Do collaborators know how to compromise and reach consensus?

• Is the decision making process clear?

• If no compromise or consensus is reached, who makes the ultimate decision?

Creative, Collaborative Culture• Do collaborators have opportunities to share constructive feedback?

• Does the group have strategies to make sure everyone contributes—without some people dominating or others being left out?

• Is there a culture of creative collaboration—an environment in which people respect one another’s ideas and nurture creative expression?

• How is conflict handled? Are disagreements handled respectfully?

introduce the 4 Cs of collaboration that you will explore.

4 Cs oF Collaboration

Video and Brief Discussionshow the collaboration video. Facilitate a brief discussion. Ask for reac-tions and questions. Ask what resonates. use this opportunity to introduce some common myths about collaboration and ask participants what they think about them:

Dispelling Myths

Myth: When students study or work together, it’s “like cheating.”

reality: When students work together, share ideas and build on others’ contributions, they learn valuable skills.

Myth: Collaboration means that assertive, popular students take over and shy, less popular students are left behind.

reality: With skilled instruction, collaborating enables children with various work styles and abilities to share what they know and can do with others with whom they might not interact.

Myth: Collaborative learning experiences are difficult for teachers to grade, since it’s not always clear who did the work.

reality: self- and peer assessments of collaborative projects provide useful information about how students handled conflicts, distributed workloads, gave feedback and made unique contributions.


Hands-On Exercise: team Sculpture Challenge

this timed, eight-minute exercise gives participants a practical experience for probing the collaborative process.

As an educator, you know that some of the best learning emerges from trial-and-error, reflection and personal “epiphanies.” this exercise is designed to work this way. to make it happen, don’t offer any guidance beforehand on how participants should plan, work together or meet this challenge. simply give these instructions and watch the magic unfold:

Ask participants to break into teams of four. Give the teams eight minutes to:

• use Crayola Model Magic® (a unique modeling material that’s soft and pliable) to form four types of three-dimensional shapes—spheres, cubes, cones and pyramids. Participants can make as many shapes as they want in any size they choose.

• Work together to assemble their shapes into the tallest sculpture possible, making sure that it stands upright.

At the end of eight minutes, stop all teamwork, regardless of where the teams are in accomplishing their goal. Compare the structures. Ask the team with the tallest, most upright sculpture to share their collaborative process with the full group. Here are some guiding questions:

• did all team members understand and work toward a common goal?

• Were roles clearly defined?

• Were individual contributions respected and fully used?

• How were conflicts handled?

• Was any compromise or consensus reached?

• Who was the ultimate decision maker?

• How would they rate their collabora-tive culture?

Ask other teams to share their process. typically, some teams dive right into the work without planning, distin-guishing individual roles or coming up with a shared strategy for organizing the teamwork. the importance of all four cornerstones of collaboration is the “epiphany” you want to highlight in the wrap-up of this exercise.

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Group Exercise: Four Cornerstones of Collaboration

use this exercise to help people identify the 4 Cs of collaboration in everyday situations.

distribute the Four Cornerstones of Collabora-tion Worksheet. Ask each participant to think about a collaborative team they know. offer some examples, such as a family, a classroom or student group, a sports team, a scouting group, or a music or dance ensemble. Ask some ques-tions to help participants think about the team they will portray on their worksheets:

• Which cornerstone is the team’s strength?

• Which needs the most improvement?

• What challenge has the team experienced?

• Could that challenge be overcome by strengthening one of the four cornerstones?

• What are the characteristics of a great team?

do a quick sketch demonstration on a worksheet using a team from your personal experience. Ask par-ticipants to sketch the strengths and weaknesses of their teams on the Four Cornerstones of Collabo-ration Worksheet. Ask a few people to share their insights with the group. summarize their com-ments to set up the next exercise.

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Hands-On Exercise: Draw Your Collaborative Culture

use this exercise to help participants ground their understanding of collaboration in their own school (or organizational) culture. Ask them to think about the overall culture of the school or a specific experience that involved multiple collaborators. Prompt their thinking with these questions:

• do members of the group share a common goal?

• Are individual contributions respected and fully used?

• How are conflicts handled?

• is there a process for compromise and consensus building?

• Who are the decision makers?

• Who has input into decisions?

• does the culture feel supportive or divisive?

Ask each participant to draw a picture that depicts the culture. Have participants share their drawings with someone else, preferably someone they don’t know well or at all. Ask each person to “read” their partner’s drawing, discuss the culture and offer ways to improve it.

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Key Points• Collaboration is a fundamental 21st

century skill in school, work and everyday life.

• the arts give people a context for collaboration—and an engaging way to learn together.

• the 4 Cs of collaboration—a Common Goal, Contributions, Compromise–Consensus and a Creative, Collaborative Culture—help us understand the key elements of collaboration for students and adults.

• the role of educators, parents and community members is to collaborate for students’ success, develop stu-dents’ collaboration skills and foster a culture of collaboration.

Next Steps (Optional)

• introduce your own collaborative, arts-infused education initiative.

• discuss objectives.

• Assign tasks and deadlines.

this is a flexible activity that can be used during the workshop only or, if you want to sustain the focus on this topic, as the beginning of a longer-term effort to plan for continuous improvement.

• distribute the handout, Assessment tool: Collaborative Culture.

• Give people 10 minutes to complete the assessment. Customize this to fit your audience and your schedule. For example, you could ask your group to focus only on one section, or only on column A, B or C.

• Ask participants to share their reac-tions with a partner or with the whole group.

• (optional) tally the group ratings of one or all of the sections of the assessment tool (1. Focused on Com-mon Goals, 2. open to Contributions,

3. Comfortable with Compromise–Consensus to effect Positive Change, 4. Committed to a Collaborative Culture). or ask for a show of hands for scores of 1–5 on each statement on the assessment. the actual score is less important than for you and the group to get a sense of strengths to celebrate and build on and weak-nesses to address together.

• Point out that people can have multi-ple perspectives on their collaborative culture. discuss areas that the school, group or team could work on. this discussion could set up next steps to build a more creative, collaborative culture or commit to a collaborative, arts-infused education initiative.

• (optional) Bring the whole group, or select members of the group, together to follow up and plan for next steps.

Assessment Tool: Collaborative Culture

use this activity to extend the draw Your Collaborative Culture exercise. this exercise encourages deep reflection and honest responses about the collaborative culture of the school—or a group or team within the school, such as a group of grade-level or subject-area teachers or parents. or, if people in your group are from different schools or organizations, they can reflect on the culture to which they belong.

Summarize Key Points and Plan Next Steps


engage in a Creative, Collaborative experience

Many schools are getting the message that collaboration matters. Zane north elementary School in Collingswood, NJ, pushed the envelope into creative collabo-ration with a yearlong, “out-of-the-box learning” project. Kindergarten teacher Kathy Keller partnered with art teacher Lisa Winkler at Collingswood High School to develop an arts-infused mentoring pro-gram between kindergartners and high school art students.

Both groups of students read the book Life Doesn’t Frighten Me, a poem by Maya Angelou illustrated by artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. They spent the year exploring the literary and artistic theme of overcom-ing life’s fears and challenges, using the arresting language and visual brilliance of this book as a springboard to studying other artists and artistic media.

Kindergartners talked of being afraid of the dark, swimming in the deep end of the pool and meeting new people. High school students remembered how they overcame those fears as they faced new ones, such as preparing portfolios for college admission. The high school mentors and their kindergarten “bud-dies” shared problem-solving strategies to address their personal fears, drawing and painting individual and collaborative artwork to express themselves creatively. They painted a “Life Doesn’t Frighten Me” canvas, exchanged back and forth several times between the schools, and wrote notes to one another as well. They engaged in community service projects, including a shared, common experience of making valentines for residents of a local senior citizen home.

This project stretched the boundaries of collaboration across classrooms, teachers, staff, schools, grade levels and disciplines.

Administrative and secretarial staff got involved in coordinating teamwork between the two classes at both schools. Even the cafeteria workers commented on the creative collaboration between the “17- and six-year-old students.” The excur-sions beyond their own schools sparked dreams of high school for the kindergart-ners and discussions of service opportuni-ties for the high school students.

Zane North Principal Thomas Santo cham-pioned the arts-infused collaboration on a local TV program. In that broadcast, he explained that the collaboration process deepened as the year went on and it is now woven into the fabric of the school. Parents come into school to collaborate with educators, teaching students how arts are used in their careers. Some par-ents showed how theatre jobs are based on visual and performing arts. Fine artists helped children see art in new ways. And parents with graphic arts backgrounds taught students how to create “personal logos”—visually showing their interests and talents.

To implement an idea like this in your school, start brainstorming creative, col-laborative challenges and planning how to organize the experience.

Evaluatedon’t forget to distribute evaluation forms to collect feedback that will help you plan your next workshop.

Facilitator’s Tools• Collaboration Video

• Collaboration PowerPoint

• evaluation Form

Handouts for Printing or Photocopying• Collaboration

• Four Cornerstones of Collaboration Worksheet

• Assessment tool: Collaborative Culture

Art SuppliesHelp participants explore collaboration in hands-on exercises with an assortment of art supplies. Choose colorful, tactile supplies that make group activities memorable. try these Crayola products:

• Model Magic®, a unique modeling material that’s soft and pliable (8 oz. for each team of four people), for the team sculpture Challenge exercise

• twistables® colored pencils

• Pip-squeaks™ markers

• Paper

Student painting courtesy of Zane North Elementary School, Collingswood, NJ


About the Sponsorsthe Champion Creatively Alive Children program is a collaboration between Crayola and the National Association of elementary school Principals, with support from the National Art education Association and the Partnership for 21st Century skills.

http://www.crayola.com/

http://www.naesp.org/

http://www.arteducators.org/

http://www.p21.org/

Pittsburgh Carmalt Academy of Science & Technology, Pittsburgh, PA. Photos by eMedia Works.

A Creative, Collaborative Culture in Action

What if students could see the impact immigrants had in the creation of their communities and meet with community historians to identify the rela-tionship between architecture and the community? Inspired by this “what if?” question, Pittsburgh Carmalt academy of Science & technology collaborated with the city’s Mayor’s Office and Car-negie Mellon University to study the history, arts and architecture of their community, develop site plans and design their own community. They created 3D replicas of buildings and a video that relates art and social stud-ies. They also wrote and video-taped a commercial promoting their “new” community, which they shared with other schools in the district and throughout the United States via distance learning.

Program Concept and development by Cheri sterman, director, Content & Consumer relationships, Crayola

Writing and Design by Vockley•Lang

Photography except where noted by John Pinderhughes

Not for sale. Available for free at www.Crayola.com/creativelyalive

© 2011 Crayola llC. serpentine design® PowerPoint is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation.

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