If you set up the right conditions in a school amazing things can happen. Today was one of those days at Mosaic. This year, we opened the school year with mini projects. The remarkable thing I observed today was our students’ ability to provide insightful observations, work collaboratively, and present their ideas in front of others. If today was any indication of the year we will have, it will be a great year for learning using the creative process.

Essentially, we asked our students to create a day long project using the creative process. For our schools, the creative process is ideation, guided inquiry and creating. Our ideation phase had our students go to the John Michael Kohler Arts Center and look at professional art work within the galleries. They used thinking routines to analyze artistic intent and contextualize their work within a theme. From here students chose a way to exhibit their theme through the arts or engineering.

This work leads to two essential parts of our school. First of all, it leads to the introduction of our Project Seminar which asks students to engage in the creative process throughout an entire semester. Secondly, it provides a foundation for the project based work in each subject in our school. This characterizes how student learning at Mosaic mirrors the processes used by professionals in their fields.