innovation and education

The most innovative thing I have ever seen in a classroom happened around 20 lines from a Walt Whitman poem. The poem was from Leaves of Grass and students took turns reading sections and they became the voices of Whitman's America. They heard, in each other, the real history, the real diversity, the real joy and pain, the wonderful and awful of the 1890's post-war United States. They did not need the internet or a smart interactive white board. (And let me just interject, the smartest thing in the classroom should not be a white board.) They needed the community of thinkers. They needed a teacher who would set-up the learning space to allow for that magic to happen through a powerful poem. Did the teacher plan for that magic to happen, no. Did that teacher know that the voices in the poem would echo off the walls and through the students, no. What this teacher did was create the space and time, where it could happen. Those students became essential to that class.