Viewpoints
A picture-perfect Saturday morning, a cup of hot tea, and a drive through rural Albemarle County can take you places to think. This morning such a trip takes me to our state’s Destination Imagination (DI) Tournament, aka DIVa, being held at a local school. I find myself caught in the vision and mission “thing” associated with this non-profit program in which over 100,000 students in our country participate. Several hundred of those young people attend schools in my school division. DI, a non-profit organization, builds its vision upon three premises:
· Creativity has the power to change the world.
· Becoming a team is a life changing experience.
· Our world’s future depends upon extraordinary problem-solvers.
The DI tournament delights everyone who comes to see these teams at work. And, on this Saturday morning, if there‘s one thing all of the young people wandering halls seem to have in common, it’s their enthusiasm. In fact, these wanderers- from second graders to college students- remind me of the recent BMW commercials proclaiming a goal to not just build cars, but to create joy. It strikes me that many teachers would “die for” this Saturday morning’s hallway “feel” every day of the school week.
I come home to work on taxes (no joy, no creativity, no team, but definitely using Reading, wRiting, and aRithemetic) and watch twitter verse unfold in the right-hand corner of my tablet screen. Why would anyone question reading as a learning goal? Or writing? Or numeracy? Learners who gain competency in these basics are given the gift of forever-learning power. Beyond my sliding door, blue-sky sunshine entices me to leave the kitchen table, the calculator, and spreadsheets of essential tax data. I wonder how the DI teams are doing and what they would say about learning goals. I know mine for today- get done and escape from the IRS for another year. I wonder why @irasocol blogs that reading is not the goal.
DI kids and the BMW commercials also remind me that the endgame of learning is more than reading, writing and doing math proficiently, with or without use of adaptive tools such as my calculator and laptop. The issues of today’s classrooms are far greater than the instructional failures that result from an inherent mismatch of traditional teaching to the variance in brain “wireframes” of children who learn differently. As I see it, the biggest problem we educators need to address is the dearth of joyful learning in our schools. We all can recite stories of dropouts who once carried gifted labels, bored mathematical thinkers waiting with patience for engineering schools, sensitive writers and artists who see school as “killing them softly,” and learners who yearn to graduate so they can end doing “school” time. The magnitude of the resultant learning loss is unconscionable.
Providing each learner with any tool s/he needs to access learning code should be a 21st century educator’s basic; indeed, a learning non-negotiable. We educators should be embarrassed to have tools that create pathways to learning and not make them available to any learner who needs them. But, beyond this, we need to take a lesson from both DI and BMW. The DI basics of creativity, teamwork, and problem-solving are essential to our young people’s success in college, the workforce, and as citizens and family members. They shouldn’t have to sign up for a DI team to get access to these basics. When a teacher integrates DI “basics” in the classroom for learning pretty much everything, s/he becomes a teacher who is not just teaching kids, but creating joy.
Joy powers commitment and passion. It renews energy. It excites It creates a sense that we can accomplish anything. It is an essential human learning element. Think how different our school-day hallways would be if we loaded as many joy-laden learning tools as possible into our educational toolkit and then used them well. Think how much more pleasure we would all derive from our day jobs- adults and learners alike. Most importantly, think how the gift of joy, the result of learners who routinely create, problem-solve and work as valued members of diverse teams, would lead them to success beyond our wildest dreams.
Pam,
This reminds me of a difficult conversation I had recently with some high school teachers around reading and choice novels. They were dead set on continuing to use To Kill A Mockingbird but were struggling to understand why students didn't enjoy it.
Because we were in the context of curriculum mapping, which is standards based, I asked them where in the curriculum standards the novel was. Of course, it wasn't there. It was just so ingrained in the way that things have always been done that it was hard to see the forest for the trees.
I asked them what there objective was and they told me that they wanted to inspire a love of reading. We articulated what they did when they read a book for pleasure. Did they always finish it? Did they really get into it and not want to put it down? Did someone tell them that they had to read it? (And would they have read if they were told to?)
The conversation got very interesting as we uncovered the root of discovering, through their own joy with reading, how they might inspire that joy in their students. Guess what they discovered? That it's about CHOICE. A love of reading comes from options, not from dictatorial resources.
Now, I'm not saying we went from the wrong way to the right way in one fell swoop--but it opened some doors to change--well, growth, really. To Kill A Mockingbird is still there, but so are 3 other novels--the discussions made richer and the teaching more integrated based on thematic elements and common threads. I'd like to see total choice eventually, but that's still a risky zone for some. I'm happy with "inch-pebbles," they lead to "mile-stones."
Great post!
-Mike
I think it's about sharing and creating. We humans love to share and create. I like showing kids how to use computers because when they know how to use computers they can share and create more easily. Earlier this morning, I read a very nice thoughtful piece of writing about teaching editing skills to kids http://www.choiceliteracy.com/public/1005.cfm I wanted to comment on that piece but couldn't find a way to do that on the page. It felt like the old days when I was would be reading something in the library while doing research for this or that - I would run across something interesting (often not even on the topic which I was researching) I think, "I'll examine this more some day," or " I'd like to know more about this. And, yeah, if I took the time to write down the number on the book or the title and issue of the periodical, there was a chance that I might look it up again sometime, but a slim one. Today, I click Diigo or paste the link into one of the many tools at my fingertips that will allow me to find the piece again - the note will even be in a category with similar stuff , (Whoah, Grad school would've been a whole new game if I'd been able to be that organized.) Better yet, usually today I can make a few click at the bottom of the piece and start writing and my thoughts will be instantly shared with the author and the other readers of the piece. Now, that's sharing ideas, and I like the way that feels.
So, I don't ever again want to have teach a nine year old boy how to revise a piece of writing without a using a computer. Putting any color of pencil marking all over a piece of paper is way less cool than highlighting - and using a pencil is way more time consuming, especially if you're using nine year old male fingers. Revising and editing on a computer is a totally different experience that revising on paper. In grad school, I had the great pleasure of spending three hours (more if I hitched a ride back to Sioux Falls with him when he was driving back to Blue Mounds) every week with Fred Manfred listening and talking (mostly listening whenever Fred was in a room.) Now Fred extolled the virtues of editing and writing, 'Kill the the little darlings' is the phrase I think he stole from someone; it was rapturous for me to hear him retell the way he revised this story or scene, but Fred dreamed of having a tool that could do what needed to be done faster. After all he was a very practical Frisian farmer (his parents did much better with Rock County soil than my Irish grandparents) and Fred was all about getting the story out so others could know what was in his head. He loved books and paper and pencils and pens and everything to do with the process of making a book - well, he wasn't all that fond of some New York editors; he thought they should spend a little time on an Iowa farm and get some shit under their fingernails, and don't try to tell Fred that you should call it something else, as a NY editor might have- but getting the story into the heads of others was the whole point. Getting the story into the heads of others who aren't even born yet, "God, what a miracle that is" he would say as he spread his arms out nine feet or so, fingers twitching.
So, if the calendar says it's 2010 and you're telling me about the beauties of teaching editing to 3rd graders and you don't give me a comment link, well, I think you need to take a ride with me down to Siouxland and get some shit under your finger nails. Let's get real.
PS, I'm guessing there's a few farmers in Abermarle Co, VA and at least one school administrator, thank God, who know what I'm talking about.
This reminds me of a conversation that I had with my learning community on the heels of reading Changing the Way You Teach, Improving the Way Students Learn, by Giselle Martin-Kneip and Joanne Picone-Zocchia. This is one of the best books I've read in my nearly twenty years in the field, and one of the more powerful take-aways from that reading had everything to do with providing students engaging and relevant learning experiences. When young people are engaged, they are invested in solving real problems that really matter TO THEM and to others in the world. Kids who are engaged are more than enthralled or entertained. They are learning with purpose, and those purposes are guided by their vision of who they long to be and the difference they hope to make in the world. You've made me realize that joy has everything to do with this. In fact, I'm wondering if it is possible to experience joy as a learner without true engagement.
Dan's comment is a great example of what can happen when we aren't able to engage as learners...regardless of how old we are....and how important choice and connection are to engagement. I would also like to be able to comment and engage within the Choice Literacy site far better than I'm able to now--that is an excellent point. For each post that is shared there, others might have greater expertise or other perspectives to add, and we could all learn much more. I also wish that most of the writers and teachers that I coach on a daily basis had access to computers. Writing well is nearly impossible without them--particularly for students and teachers who struggle as writers and are easily discouraged. A good deal of the work that I do is about supporting teachers in sharing writing as a process and transitioning toward real writing as opposed to simply "assigning tasks." Encouraging multiple revisions of choice-based and passion-driven pieces is critical to this work, and without computers, it's far too easy to revert back to writing instruction that is harried and revision that looks more like quick editing. My greatest challenge is infrastructure in so many places. Most of the kids that I work with do not have access to their own computers yet. In fact, most of them learn inside of classrooms where there are less than 2 or 3 functional computers and a good number of their teachers are just beginning to find their way around the web. Social bookmarking, blogging, writing in the ways that I am comfortable online--these are new experiences for many that I know still. We have a long way to go.......but I'm glad to be a part of the journey, at least locally.
It gives me great pleasure to see educators emphasizing the importance of joy in school. I teach at the first Glasser Quality Public High School, based on William Glasser's Choice Theory, Reality Therapy, and Lead Management. He encourages educators to emphasize the joy of learning. In fact, he says that Fun is a genetic need that is the reward for learning. He says that if we have forgotten this as educators and have classrooms that are not joyful places, that are based on what he calls "schooling" and not true education, then all we need do is remember the joy of childhood before entering school. He reminds us of our play lives and of our imaginative flights of fancy. These are amazing memories for me and I still love teaching after 32 years because I have a high need for fun. I figure that if I'm bored, my students probably are, too. So I like lots of discussions and lots of projects that we can accomplish together and feel proud of when they're done. Projects take more time to organize, like field trips, for instance, or the school yearbook. But years later, they're what we all remember as important achievements.
Love, Charlotte Wellen
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