Category: Research

Director of teaching and learning American School of Madrid 2015 – present

April Stout is responsible for  teaching and learning practices from k-12 at the American School of Madrid. She is responsible of making sure the school is practicing the most relevant and research based education. Her goal is to align ASM’s practices.

How has education changed over the years?
As a teacher you must stay current on what’s going on in education and while thinking there’s always the best that we know works with kids and just gets packaged in a new way there’s also a lot of different things that we need to be up on because the world is changing. Education should change with the world, that’s my job,  to keep us research based and in a forward motion.

What does your day look like?
I work with consultants and design professionals learning and researching what I feel teachers need and what they don’t know yet they need. It is my responsibility to make sure that people are learning from each other, coaching teachers and making sure most importantly that our teams are strong. The cornerstone of creativity and Innovation for me is not the individual person as a loan creator and a loan innovator, it is that individual person working alongside the teams and usually nested teams. I work on 20 different teams in a month. The most important part of  innovation and creativity is it’s done in concert and with feedback, with multiply ideas from others 

What do you think is the biggest challenge as a teacher?
I worked for an NGO called the New Teacher Center and our job was to work all over the United States to train new teachers, particularly those working in the toughest areas. Our goal was to get teachers to be good fast. Teaching is one of the only professions where they expect you to come in, recently graduated, and be a veteran on day one. You really need to, and it’s nearly impossible to do so. 

Young inexperienced teachers are sent in with 6 weeks to two years training that includes no practicality. They’re supposed to know what to do with 38-40 Xth graders who have reading gaps and all kinds of difficulties.  For these people to stay in the profession is not enough to keep someone in their workplace, they have to have a passion for it and part of that is showing them the agency they have over creativity, innovation and growth. When you get people in the profession who see learning and growth as their core skill you develop  incredible educators.

And this is when you succeed. Creativity and Innovation is knowing how to learn so that you generate your own learning. You don’t necessarily always need this expert because you know how to learn from the world and from other people. 

What are you creating at ASM?
I’ll  tell you what I’m most excited about, as far as the changes. I’ve tried to change things and part of creativity and  innovation is that I take risks, sometimes those risks don’t work out and sometimes something I really believe in fails. I’m willing to learn from those failures and teach others how to learn and sometimes let it go and know that it isn’t the right time and it can always come back on the table later.  There’s a lot of things I would like to do that I haven’t, but the biggest change is the level of access to professional learning for teachers. I think that every professional on this site, whether or not they will tell you, has access to both an expert person in the field, awesome colleagues to collaborate with, professional books and people who can support them. When I came here eight years ago  that was not in place, basically we shut down ASM and we started over. ASM was part of MAIS (Middle Association of International Schools),  which in my opinion was atrocious. I felt we were back in 1990.

How was MAIS different from what you were implementing? What do you use to make it different?
MAIS was lectures and conferences. Teachers were being taught at. Not to say conferences aren’t great but in order for learning and creativity to stick it has to be job embedded. There has to be a relation to the students and be easy to apply tomorrow or else teachers are not able to introduce it into their day to day.  I think one of the key aspects of professional learning is to seek tangible aspects teachers walk away with. Something that will affect their students immediately.

Another technique we use includes watching each other teach, and watching other people teach our kids. This is purely observational, and after we discuss what we thought was good and what could be better and we deconstruct the class together.  We just did a Japanese lesson study that brought structures for collaboration that are beyond sitting in a room in a meeting and are actually experiential.

How do you measure your success?
My objective is always for the teachers to take one single thing away. For instance, we went to a workshop yesterday where we used poetry written by other students. Initially teachers don’t see a connection to their classes but by the end of the workshop through reflection we are able to find a connection together. 

We also expect the learnings to be woven into teachers setting goals for themselves in the beginning of the year that aren’t just supervisory, but are learning. This has to be included into the system of supervising and it has to include action research and inquiry as an actual goal. No one who writes a statement like: I’m gonna do X Y or Z is passionate about that, but if we could switch to doing action research and starting to see it as part of our professional growth as far as  supervising professional goals I think the teachers could then anchor some of what they were learning and try things out.

I see teachers trying things out all the time that they learn in very small ways, but oftentimes those small ways aren’t seen as actually applying because they want to do exactly like the workshop.

How do you help teachers have continuity?
Conversations, coaching, asking teachers about  having them identify one thing they’re going to take away, then following up. Encouraging that to be part of meetings.

We are going to do a learning day for the first time in June.  We’re gonna do a big share of things that we have learned. 

• Continuously sharing with other people 
• Articulating for ourselves 
• Working in teams, collaborating.

Getting more access to strategy and coaching is a big goal. I think that people need their colleagues and other people to come and talk to them about what they’re doing and see how it’s going in the classroom.

Who do you get resistance from? 
I get resistance every time I walk out of my office. I know that resistance isn’t actually resistance, there’s an emotion of fear to change behind it.  It comes across as: get away from me ,don’t ask me one more thing.  But that’s not really what it is, it’s just an emotion and it’s a reaction so I don’t really worry much about resistance. I don’t let it stop me. It most often shows up in complaining and gossip, it shows up in human Dynamics. There is a sense of this is being done to me, instead of this is being done for me.  Eventually they realise: I could do something different or I could have agency and I would like to be part of the solution.  I deal with resistance with compassion while still holding firm. I try to get people to imagine a possibility other than what they are thinking and doing right now. They think it will not work in their classroom, my kids will never change. I ask them, do you think it will help with one child? Let’s try and go from there. 

Who have you been inspired by, your mentors?
My biggest Mentor is Elena Aguilar. She runs an organization called Bright Morning in Oakland California. I’ve also worked with Diane Sweeney I’ve worked with Jim Knight.

 I’ve been so lucky to work with many people. I am a cherry picker, I will never follow one person, I don’t ever fall for one religion, I will never follow one program. I like to take it and pick and then create something that’s very bespoke for the people and myself or the situation.  I think that’s also part of creativity,  reflecting,  processing and applying what you’re learning in different configurations to a context that is unique. I have to have a toolkit that I use flexibly.

You have implemented many things at ASM, what would you say have been the most effective?
You can implement change on a human level and it goes from the Big Wide thing like how our students are learning according to all different measures of standardized tests and data. But I think hearing people’s stories and having conversations with them and actually pulling out patterns and trends around focus groups and things is what has been most helpful to them.

Every conversation I have with a teacher I have a log ,and I keep patterns in terms of what people are saying to me. I know I am succeeding the less a teacher needs me, the less I am pulled into meetings, when a team starts functioning more and needing me less and less.

I think the thing that has worked the best is the work that I’ve done to train teams to function how to learn together. Also the work I’ve done around emotional intelligence with the teacher leaders, team Dynamics, boundaries and about effective conflict resolution.

I have a rubric for professional learning and a rubric that I use for myself and I self-reflect and ask two or three teammates who were closest with me to give me feedback. 

How do you see the future of education?
I see the focus being high level towards how to navigate life and towards helping adults who work with high schoolers to navigate this ever changing world. There’s some skills that are future proof skills: Habit, Grit, Resilience, Relatedness, Self-efficacy, Motivation, Goal setting and Trust.

It’s the most comprehensive and best articulated list of the type of skills that we should be teaching kids. I think we have to teach what’s worth learning and we have to honor contents, role and education and we have to move away from straight up teaching content into teaching these skills.

I think we have some learning gaps across the world and if we know what skills we’re teaching kids we can fill those because, for instance walking is a skill and crawling is a skill within walking and it is not the absence of walking it’s the step to walking. This is why I think we need to be able to go skill-based so that we can be helping kids with all different types of content and we can test some differently and the skills that are so multi  really academic and skills that are social emotional like collaboration and perseverance and what about your opinion on terms of

How do you replace the visual arts after 5th grade? Where are kids learning problem solving, collaboration, creativity, innovation?
I mean the Arts are essential. Anything humans ever left behind is art, that’s all we have left. 

I would love to redo our CAS Program to be a truly service learning project because I think that’s where you start creativity. Then you can solve problems from all different lenses and also in looking at the social sciences in discipline collaboration and units. 

Could you share a list or of people that have inspired you?

Current big thinkers in education

Bright morning Elena Aguilar

Marc Brackett

Brene Brown  Dare to Lead and Daring Classroom

IIRP  Restorative Practices

IDEO design thinking

Adam Grant  

Learning for Justice

Facing history and ourselves

Cult of Pedagogy

Cathy Berger Kaye  Service Learning

CASEL  Social Emotional Learning

How to Navigate Life (book)

Emily Meadows

The Big Questions Institute

Lead Inclusion

The Culture Map

Masters in International Education
Art Teacher for 27 years
Current position: Lower School Art  teacher at the American school of Madrid

How has education changed in your 27 years of teaching?

Education has become more about documenting student results. I’m talking generally. I’m not talking about teaching arts specifically but I see that in schools the emphasis is much more about keeping records. All that happens needs to be documented and children’s scores are constantly being documented and tracked and compared. I feel the biggest change is that it has become very much about documentation. In art class, it means that we are being asked to grade as if it were a subject like math or Reading so we’re being asked to break it down into standards and score it.  Essentially score  creativity, score a creative endeavor . This is not as alarming as it sounds. For  example if you’re assigning a portrait you know to say, well has the child included the features has the child made an attempt to include detail 

What change have you seen in children when they’re evaluated like that versus not being evaluated at all.

Children have always been evaluated in art but now the evaluation is broken down into categories and steps and I I don’t know if it’s a result of this, but over years I have seen that kids are less imaginative, they are less free with their expression and it takes them a while to get past all the first things that occur to them. We have always encouraged them to go past first ideas and to get to something that’s a bit deeper and more meaningful to them.  It may be because of this type of evaluation, but screens have had a big impact on kids’ creativity and learning. They have a lower tolerance for frustration in trying to do something with their hands.

Interestingly I do projects with kids that are computer-based with Procreate or Paint and curiously, kids are not used to saving stuff because they use Google.  They’re just not used to certain things that we kind of take for granted.

I do think screens have quite a lot to do with it with their sort of lower tolerance using their hands and getting frustrated and persevering when something doesn’t come out right the first time. In Lower School kids are not tuned into their grades, especially the art grades. I don’t see kids being that hampered by awareness of grades, that starts in middle and gets accentuated in high school.

Would you say that children’s creativity or imagination decreases over time?

Yeah, that’s developmental. That’s just the way children develop when they’re much younger. When they’re three and four a line can represent a subway station with you know thousands of people standing on the platform. They’re so conceptual about that age and then as they get older they become more aware of their environment, they’re much more self-critical.

This is just developmental, it has nothing to do with art, it’s just the way kids are. They become more self-conscious.

First, it’s just all about me and the world and then they become aware that they’re not the only ones in the world, there’s all these other people that are competing for the same kind of attention. And then children who feel their fine motor skills are less developed they’re going to be even more self critical of their skills.  I feel like it’s happening sooner, I feel like by second grade kids are already saying:  oh I can’t, I can’t draw, I’m not good at drawing whereas maybe years ago it was third grade before they started this type of thinking.

How would you say in your experience that creativity, imagination etc is perceived by parents?

I think it depends, I definitely experience parents who seem very aware of a child’s potential and are eager to have it developed and fostered and encouraged. I’ve also seen parents who are critical of their kids’ work.  For example, fine motor skills develop up through middle school. You know that’s not a given that by a certain age kids can even do good handwriting. I’ve seen parents who’ve been critical of their kids work, I try to counter because I don’t see it that way. I don’t equate fine motor skills and the ability to draw something realistically with creativity or at all in fact sometimes they’re diametrically opposed.

Do you feel you teach creativity?

I aspire to create an environment where kids are encouraged to be creative and where they feel safe to take risks.

How would you define creativity?

 I guess listening to yourself and trying to draw out what’s inside you and let it take form.

Are teachers at ASM in subjects like math or science incorporating creativity into their classes?

I think so because I think they teach different ways to do things. I do think that it is definitely valued. You know that there’s more than one way to solve a math problem. I mean you can use manipulatives or you can use pie graphs, there’s many many ways of doing it and I feel like they do a pretty good job of that, so I would say yes I think it is valued and included in lower school.

Do you feel in Lower school teachers are teaching problem solving?

I definitely think it’s needed. In Lower School there’s so much data collection and teachers feel quite pressured to produce that data that the time that it takes to implement problem solving or creativity…… because it takes time to be to be creative and it also takes getting bored and that’s something – I know I’m not directly answering your question-  but I think that there’s a general fear of downtime.  Kids are scheduled down to the last minute and that does not allow for just wandering of the mind and I don’t think there can be much creativity if that’s the case. For example, at ASM they’ve just adopted this new play,  it’s called outdoor playing learning and they built this fabulous playground and kids are really encouraged to play with pretty much whatever they want and disconnect. But then they only give kids 30 minutes to play. I’m not sure how much creativity can really take place in half an hour.

So I do think I think it’s valued, I think that there’s still this juncture between the philosophy and the practice.

Creativity 30 years ago was understood as you pick up a canvas and some paints. There are many different ways of being creative,  you can be a creative mechanic or whatever, but I do think that maybe practice hasn’t caught up. 

How do you feel about the Arts stopping after fifth grade?

Music is mandatory at ASM, but art is not. I guess to oblige a student to do something they don’t want to do is something I don’t agree with.

What if it was a class where the key aspects were problem solving,  figuring out what roads I can take, and also learning to not be afraid to make mistakes? 

In Lower School the way they teach is based a lot on imagination, play and creativity but as the kids grow it kind of stops, it’s more rigorous. It’s a bit because they have to comply with so many things, so it is hard to get this in.

Do you see creativity in teacher development courses?

They send teachers and encourage them to  include problem solving, imagination, and innovation in their teaching.  There are  things about TD is that is incredibly inspiring, you get these droplets of ideas and but then what’s lacking is the time to actually implement it and we do have these workshops where often some kind of game or some kind of thinking on your feet activity is Incorporated but it’s more of an Icebreaker, let’s get things started before we have to sit down and do the real work. 

I think there’s a definite stigma around that sort of freer, more open-ended, let’s see what happens, kind of activity because it’s a counterpoint to the real work: like the hard work which academics would  say would be useful for you. A

After those workshops what would you say would be useful for you to help you be able to implement those ideas,  besides time?

Primarily it’s TIME.  Teachers don’t have time to implement these innovations, classes are too short, and the grading system is time consuming. Also a more adaptable space, where several things could be going on at once. 

Time and designed spaces seem to be a frequent answer to the topic of implementing innovation. If this is happening in schools, imagine in the workplace where all that matters is productivity. This will continue until we realise that taking this time will not only result in more and improved results but in happier people. 

Directora de Diseno de Experiencia Educativa en la Universidad de Hespérides. (Design Director in educational Experience)
Director de Formacion Continua/Ongoing learning for faculty at UFM

Karen Maeyens has worked for the past 8 years at the Universidad de Francisco Marroquin as a teacher of teachers. UFM describes its mission as “to teach and disseminate the ethical, legal, and overall economic principles of a society of free and responsible persons.”  Karen moved to Guatemala 10 years ago to work there. Until recently she has been in charge of teacher training. She introduced new methodologies for teachers to improve their teaching into a more proactive and immersed way of teaching. Introducing a wide array of techniques. Design workshops, team based learning, Socratic Dialogues as well as improvisation, among other things. Today she works in Universidad de Hesperides, a new Digital University based in Canary Island. There she is helping the university and the teachers develop the curriculum using “Backward Design”. Backward Design is where you design the course backwards. You choose the learning objectives first and work yourself backwards to content design that will lead you to those objectives. She is helping train teachers  to use the above mentioned methodologies and new ones in the new digital university. 

Karen has three ways of implementing this training.

1. She invites experts in different fields to conduct her workshops,

2. She develops workshops herself in specific areas,

3. She has her teachers share experiences and conduct their own workshops. 

Suggestions of references she suggested:

• March Church from Project Zero at Harvard university. Mark Church has been studying how to change Thinking routines. How to Learn to unlearn (https://vimeo.com/97547671). He states “are the questions we are asking opening windows or closing doors?”
• “I used to think…., And now I think….” http://pzartfulthinking.org/?page_id=2
• Making thinking visible, students verbalize: I see, I think, I wonder.
• Visual Thinking – making thinking visible
• The Doodle Revolution – Sunni Brown
• Visual Doing – Willemien Brand
• Visual Thinking – Willemien Brand
• The back of the Napkin – solving problems and selling ideas with pictures
• Design for how people learn – Julie Dirksen
• The Brain that changes itself – Norman Doidge
• Brain Rules – John Medina
• Made to Stick – Chip Heath and Dan Heath
• Originals – How non-conformists move the world – Adam Grant
• Unleash your creative monster – Andy jones
• Impro – Keith Johnstone
• The Creative Contrarian – Roger Von Oech
• Creativity Inc.-  Ed Catmull

The benefits of her workshops are numerous. Teachers are invited voluntarily to assist, teachers come from different backgrounds and different fields. She is constantly checking on how to improve them through constant feedback and involves the students’ feedback into the workshops. 

Some tips and challenges she has encountered while doing the workshops:

• Open with an ice breaker or Stoke (how they are called in Stanford U), this lightens up the mood, it helps people to be more open to learning.
• Mistakes are gifts
• What they do in your time is under your control
• Give them time to work
• Have them make a verbal commitment to applying the resources
• Creates a community of teachers
• Change requires time
• Humans resist change
• Make it voluntary
• Workshops create communities, you are not alone in your challenges. They create vulnerability.
• Support them after
• Have them share how they see a particular “game” being applied to their class or business

Her biggest struggle is the level of creativity in the teachers. When asked she said what I would find most valuable is a method where I can push teachers to work the creativity muscle. 

Some teachers are keen to learn but others resist it. She states that she believes everyone has creativity, just not everyone has developed that part of the brain. “We need to give them tools to awaken their creativity, people are scared to make mistakes, scared that they are being judged therefore do not take creative risks.”

Ice Breaker Ideas:

• Musical Chairs The Big Wind https://www.group-games.com/ice-breakers/big-wind-blows-game.html
• How Wise – Fortune Cookie Wisdom

Works Cited

Big Wind Blows Game – Group Games, Team Games, Ice Breakers. www.group-games.com/ice-breakers/big-wind-blows-game.html. Accessed 27 Mar. 2023.

Borchardt, Sue. “Unlearning to Learn – Year End LILA Summit 2014.” Vimeo, 6 June 2014, vimeo.com/97547671. Accessed 27 Mar. 2023.

Project Zero. “Thinking Palette : Artful Thinking.” Pzartfulthinking.org, pzartfulthinking.org/?page_id=2.

“PZ’s Thinking Routines Toolbox | Project Zero.” Pz.harvard.edu, pz.harvard.edu/thinking-routines#ExploringArtImagesandObjects. Accessed 27 Mar. 2023.

“Universidad de Las Hespérides.” Universidad de Las Hespérides, hesperides.edu.es. Accessed 27 Mar. 2023.‌