Aiming for Messy?

I follow an Instagram account called TeachersThings that often has funny or inspiring posts for those who serve as educators. This morning in my Instafeed, I saw this one:

A screenshot from TeachersThings on Instragram.

My immediate reaction was, "YES!"

But the more I thought about this, I'm not so sure that is the right response.

The Value of Struggle

We are ready for the maze!
(We ambitiously took this picture before getting started.)

My daughter and I recently visited the corn maze at a nearby farm. (Yes, I live in Iowa. This is a thing here...) I had gone with her older brother in past years; this was her first time trying out the maze.

A corn maze is very much what it sounds like: a farmer carves a path through a cornfield, creating a maze among the 8-foot tall cornstalks that are beginning to dry out as we head into fall. This particular place always cuts the maze into an interesting shape that must look very impressive when viewed from the air--this year, the image was a train on a track, engine puffing smoke, with trees and hills in the background.

From our vantage point, of course, it looked more like this:

Our view, traveling through the maze. (Remember too
that I am well over 6 feet tall, and this corn is far taller!)

Before entering the maze, we received a map to help us discern our way, which showed the entrance and exit, and every line on the map indicated the dirt path through the tall corn.

And the fun: hidden throughout the twisting path were six waypoints. At each waypoint, a different shaped hole-punch to record our visit. If we could make our way through the maze and find each of the six punches, we would win a prize! Of course we were up for this challenge!

And so, we plunged in.

Getting Beyond Low-Level Tasks

Let's be honest: much of what passes for learning in many schools today is relatively low-level tasks that don't require too much on the part of students.

Curriculum developers don't help this situation, and tend to try and pre-package easily-digestible bits for the students.

Teachers (pointing the finger at myself here, at least early in my teaching career) are all too willing to follow the canned teacher's manual or pacing guide to move students through the steps.

We must provide them with practice to ensure that they remember the key facts and ideas! Worksheets galore!

How will we know if they have learned it? If they can appropriately regurgitate cut-and-dried responses to questions on tests, they must have learned it, right?

You may be getting a sense of my cynicism about this kind of teaching. My fear is that this approach continues to minimize the role of the teacher to a mere technician: get the kids to jump through the right hoops, press the right buttons, fill in the right bubbles on the sheet, and you've done your job, right teacher?

Let's commit to moving beyond just going through the motions to actually engage our students. Real learning is messy, complex, and multi-faceted. Let's ask our students to do work that gets beyond simple low-level tasks.

How shall we do this?

Why Can't School Be Like This?

I am teaching a couple of courses at a summer camp for middle schoolers this week: "Engineering for Speed" (building solar cars, Lego contraptions, and designing and constructing our own electric cars) and "Geek Squad" (all things geeky, including junkbots, mini-catapults, marble roller coasters, and straw rockets.) I love this stuff--it's fun for me to connect with middle schoolers and help them learn more about things that they are already excited about.

But it happened again.

In the middle of our work, one of my engineers-in-training looked up from his soldering iron and wistfully said,

"Why can't school be like this?"

Yes, sixth graders can learn to safely use a soldering iron!

I'm asking the same question. Why can't learning in school be more like learning at summer camp?

The More Things Change...

We had a family gathering yesterday, and I wound up talking with my wife's 90+ year-old grandfather for at least an hour or so. I think my wife felt a little sorry that I was "stuck" with Grandpa for so long, but it was actually really, really great: he was sharing memories from his childhood and adolescence growing up in the ranchlands of the Great Plains.

He told great stories: a train ride from Chicago he remembers well. Breaking horses when he was a hired hand on a ranch. The amazing amount of dust that would seep in through through the cracks of the house during the years of the Dust Bowl. Grasshoppers and locust that would strip the wheat fields of anything green. Hitch-hiking 400 miles when he left home to move to Minnesota at age 16. His first paying job, where he worked for three dollars a day, and felt good about the money he made.

And--very interesting to me--he told about the country school he attended from grades 1-8.

There were about 30 students in the school at a time. Teachers rarely lasted for more than one year. He was humble about his academic work--didn't want to brag--but he completed the first and second grade in one year's time, and skipped the fifth grade entirely, because he would have been the only student...and the teacher asked his parents if they would be all right with him moving on to sixth grade early, so he would have classmates studying the same material.

Image by bdinphoenix [CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]

Questions are Good!

I am a fan of questions.

Questions are good. When people are asking questions, you know they are thinking.

I much prefer that students ask questions in class than that they just nod along with whatever the teacher is saying. In fact, I get more worried when no one is asking questions.

Sometimes I think it's our fault (lumping myself in as part of the problem here), by shutting down students' questions. Maybe it's because we're afraid we won't know the answers.

But what if we would embrace questions as a key part of teaching and learning? And not just teacher questions, but students' questions?

Would school look different if teachers actively encouraged students to ask questions?

What would school be like if we expected five or ten or thirty answers every time the teacher asked a question?

What if we encouraged divergent thinking rather than convergent thinking?

What if we used students' questions and wonderings and curiosity as a launchpad for their learning?

What if we took students' thinking seriously--would they ask more questions and be more willing to express their ideas?

And what if, when students asked questions, we didn't immediately try to answer them? What if we asked questions in response? What if we would respond with, "Interesting! How could we find out? Where could we get more information about that?"

It's not that the teacher has to be the "knower-of-all-things" to transmit knowledge to the students. So often this is the way direct instruction happens. Nothing against direct instruction--there is definitely a time and a place for it. But let's also consider the value of indirect teaching methods. Maybe this would invite students to take a more active, experiential role in their own learning? Maybe we need to talk less and ask more? Maybe we need to wonder along with our students?

I challenge you (and myself!): Let's embrace questions. Let's embrace wondering. Let's embrace thinking, pondering, innovating, interacting, and creating!

On Innovation: An Idea from Piaget

The eminent developmental psychologist Jean Piaget has had a tremendous impact on teaching and learning over the past 50+ years and wrote prolifically about child development.

I recently came across this quote from his book Science of Education and the Psychology of the Child:

"Education means making creators...You have to make inventors, innovators--not conformists."

This got me thinking again about creativity and it's role in learning. And while I don't have a lot of answers, I have a lot of questions...

Jean Piaget
Public domain image via Cbl62

What would school look like if we tried to foster creativity?

What would school look like if we gave students room to invent?

What would school look like if we prized innovation over conformity?

What would school look like if we made deliberate physical and mental spaces for students to play with ideas and create contraptions and solve authentic problems?

Would students be more engaged? Would teachers be more engaged?

What structures would have to change? What policies might have to be modified?

How would we assess teaching and learning in this sort of environment?

How do content standards fit into this approach?

What would we be giving up by incorporating more innovation? What would we gain?

Are there places already creating innovative spaces like these? And if so, what are the results? What is working well? What should be modified? Can this approach be transplanted into other schools? Or is it organically situated and contextualized?

So much of contemporary school culture seems bent on conformity. If we made innovation and creativity the norm...would that be trying make everyone conform to innovation?

Experience: The Best Learning

I'm a big believer in experiential learning--experiencing things firsthand to really learn them. I'm not saying you can't learn things by reading, or by viewing. You certainly can. But often times, the actual sights, sounds, smells, and atmosphere of the experience are part of the context of the learning and you miss something by not actually being there.

My family took many road trips in my youth. We drove through every state west of the Mississippi river, and a few to the east as well. I've visited so many tourist traps and National Parks and roadside attractions in the Western U.S., I sometimes joke--like the old Johnny Cash song--"I've been everywhere." This was a blessing for me that I didn't necessarily understand or appreciate at the time. Actually stopping and visiting all these places is different than reading about them or even seeing pictures or video of them. When you experience them, you remember them differently.

And now I have the chance to take my own kids on these kinds of trips. We recently visited lots of great places around the southwestern U.S. for fantastic firsthand experiences! Here is a sampling in photos:

This is What School Should be Like!

I'm teaching a couple of courses for a summer camp this week. Every summer, the college where I teach hosts a camp for middle schoolers. Great experience for the campers: they get a sort-of feeling for college life (staying in the dorms, eating in the dining hall, etc.) and it's a great social opportunity as well. And, hopefully, they learn something too.

I teach a course called "Geek Squad." The kids sign up for the courses they are most interested in before coming to camp, so the dozen or so I had in this course are self-identifying as "geeks," which is interesting in and of itself. Yes, we played with computers. Yes, we did some science and engineering. Yes...we talked about comic books and sci-fi movies and argued whether Star Trek is actually superior to Star Wars. (C'mon...that's not even an argument! Wait...showing my geeky hand here...) In it's essence, though, the course is about exploring, and trying stuff, and collaborating, and celebrating successes. We built all sorts of contraptions: paper gliders, tiny straw rockets, marshmallow shooters, desktop catapults, junk robots with tiny motors to make the buzz across the floor, marble runs, and we captured video of the whole thing to edit and share online.