Curriculum

The Fine Art of Slowing Down

By Anthony Rebora — May 19, 2010 1 min read
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In preparation for a future project, we’ve been doing some reading recently on so-called 21st-century skills, so this story about an art teacher in Louisiana who teaches students how to draw from the right (non-verbal) side of the brain caught my eye. The idea, according to the teacher, Paulette Purser, is to get the students to slow down in their representational drawings and examine problems from different perspectives. This ultimately helps them become better problem-solvers, she says—one of the key 21st-century skills, incidentally.

Several times during the course of a class Purser will reportedly exhort her students to slow down, not to work so quickly. That’s something you don’t see very often in education news stories these days.

No word yet on how this technique has affected the students’ test scores or academic performance—but their drawings have apparently improved dramatically.

A version of this news article first appeared in the Teaching Now blog.