ARTS MENTORING

Creative Mentoring
(Just what is alternative learning anyway?)

Leonardo da Vinci and Albert Einstein ... "alternative learners"?

Leonardo da Vinci: an illigitimate, poor, left-handed boy who drew constantly and loved to challenge conventional thought.

Einstein's teachers labeled him a "lazy dog" - and here's what he had to say about his Theory of Relativity: It occurred to me by intuition, and music was the driving force behind that intuition. My discovery was the result of musical perception.

Isn't it time for a new approach to education?

Most of today's educational settings simply don't empower students to learn.

Merge offers specific tools to help you move into the mostly uncharted territory of creative mentoring, creative education, and creative living. Get started with Venturing Together: Empowering Students to Succeed.

The Rossi Approach is based on the following understandings:

• we should teach how, not what, to think;
  
• we should model our life experience;
  
• we should strive to be in a personal state of inquiry and creativity;
  
• creating a mutual learning relationship through mentoring is a very effective way to teach;
  
• strengths-based education, responsive to the student’s learning style, provides a very effective way to learn.

Learn More!

To learn new ways to empower students to learn, read Bill Rossi's book Venturing Together.

To learn more about developing or fine-tuning your own creative mentoring program, whether in-school or out (OST): Contact us today.

Endorsements:

Venturing Together author Bill Rossi developed and managed arts mentoring programs for almost two decades in Seattle, WA, Albany, NY, and Chester County, PA in such diverse settings as city art museums, homeless shelters, therapeutic treatment facilities, peer support centers, and after school programs.  The Rossi Approach has been recognized for excellence by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the Gates Foundation, Paul Allen Foundation and many others.

This experience and success established the Rossi Approach as a best practice for challenged youth and adults.

The Rossi Approach:

For a person who learns creatively, life is an ever-unfolding and interrelated process that leads to a greater understanding and experience of being human. The Rossi Approach stimulates, develops and nurtures this process in everyone - teachers, mentors and students alike.

Three of the most important characteristics of a successful human being are a well developed sense of ethics, the ability to think independently, and the desire to deeply understand oneself.

Rossi’s methods were designed to develop these characteristics by improving skills, cultural awareness, character, and psychological health. The integration of these elements creates the unique gestalt that lies at the heart of the approach.

The Rossi Approach is founded on the following understandings:

• good teachers teach how, not what, to think
• teachers should model their creative and life experience
• teachers must be in a personal state of inquiry and creativity in order to transfer that state
• creating a mutual learning relationship through mentoring is a very effective way to teach
• strengths-based education, responsive to the student’s learning style, provides a very effective way to learn.

This method stimulates teachers’ creativity so they teach from the same perspective from which they want their students to learn. As a driving force in the creative process, teachers become mentors and guides, providing students with supportive relationships that build trust and a sense of belonging.

These relationships are beneficial to all students. They can also provide the turning point for at risk students by freeing their innate desire to grow out of their cocoon of isolation, self-consciousness and fear of failure.

This approach also helps teachers and students jointly discover the areas of student strength, thus ensuring the early successes that promote further creativity and motivate further study. Inspired by progress and guided by mentors, students develop their abilities and learn to apply these to other life areas.

Here's an example of the approach in action:

Imagine a student and teacher together at the piano. The teacher is 100% present with the student, concentrating fully on the music and sensitive to where the student is at that moment.

A teacher working with this orientation is so involved that he almost hears the music the same way the student hears it. He’s listening, tapping, placing  his hands at the keyboard next to the students’ to express an articulation or a rhythm, or a phrase for the student to respond to, sometimes playing the exact phrase or an accompanying part.

The student begins to move with him, and for some time they're moving and playing together. It's at that moment that real learning begins. Not from the teacher showing, explaining, or outlining the theory involved, but from the experience of doing together. The student has jumped into learning the next step, and her awareness has been expanded in such a way that she will not only grasp the skill of playing but also the musical principle involved.

At this point the teacher can teach the principle (or theory) involved by relating it directly to the where the student is, giving the student a very meaningful and practical way of “getting it”. What's needed for that moment to happen is a high degree of sensitivity on the teacher’s part. It also requires that the teacher jump in and "get wet" with the student, not stay in the safe role of teacher.

When the teacher participates in this way he actually re-experiences the music and re-experiences the principles of the music, so he’s able to transfer that experience with a freshness and newness that are exciting for the student. This vulnerability and healthy, creative expression allows for a feeling of positive relationship that many students today need so badly.

Ready? Get Venturing Together: Empowering Students to Succeed today.