Symphony and Pink

According to Webster, symphony refers to an elaborate composition for orchestra, usually in four movements of contrasting tempos, but if one reads on further a harmony of sound is also expressed. Pink describes the sense of symphony as "the ability to put together the pieces" or to "synthesize rather than analyze". As teachers, we aim for this level of thinking every day, but I feel we easily get bogged down in the understand and demonstrate levels of Bloom's taxonomy first. Maybe that is because we approach our students with the misunderstanding that they don't already posses the information we are feeding to them. What if we start with the big idea questions first and then work on the skills to get them there, only if they don't already have them.

With students accessing web 2.0 technologies today and becoming their own creators of media, I ask are teachers helping or hindering? Are students really using the web to create meaningful knowledge and ideas or are they just socializing? And which kids are we talking about? I argue that these kids are those of upper-middle class status, not the ones in rural communities (that probably still operate on dial-up) or inner-city minorities. Today we still have the underlying bias of the governing and the governed, those who have all the toys/technology and those who don't, those who can post to YouTube and those who have never even heard of it.

Pink brings out several points in this chapter of the book, including the idea that "like drawing, symphony is largely about relationships". How are we teaching kids to understand and create analogy? If one were to listen closely to kids, I argue that this is something they do every day. Kids naturally make connections. I have heard them often say, "Oh, that's like when...". Unfortunately as a teacher, I often cringe because their analogy refers to something they have seen on television, but as we all know it is a medium most kids are all too familiar with. 

So to encourage teachers to make better use of symphony in their classrooms, I am suggesting we do these three things:

1. Listen to our students ideas with open minds,
2. Consider their strengths, not their weaknesses, and 
3. Ask yourself what you can do for them, not what they can do for you.

Maybe our kids are really big picture thinkers, and it is us as teachers, that constantly want to take things apart to analyze them, forgetting to put them back together in the end.