Category Archives: Messy Learning

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Your Child’s Dream Best School Day – What Does It Look Like? What Should It Be?

There is much rumination in the edblogosphere about what education and schools should look like in this way or that. Kids should be blogging, using web 2.0 applications (Wikis, podcasts, Flickr, the flavor-of-the-week app), in conjuction with project-based, problem-based learning. The reality in the elementary classroom however is not a blank slate that you can manipulate any way you want.

But let’s say it was a blank slate – and not only is it a blank slate, but YOUR child is in this class. What would you want your child to be doing in this classroom? They can’t just sit and blog all day. This is an elementary school classroom – what things would you want to hear your child saying they were doing in that classroom? Remember, there are usually mandatory minutes that must be spent on reading, language and math (and yes the other subjects too, but take my word, somehow the minutes of science, social studies, art, PE, etc. are not watched over in quite the same way).

So, what’s your child’s (or grandcild’s) ultimate learning day look like? I’d love to hear your ideas. If you are reading this you probably have some opinions, probably strong opinions about this, but have you ever thought about or planned a whole “typical” day? Here’s your challenge. Take your thoughts and biases and ideas and opinions and learning and experience and conversations and put them all together. Make it a comment here, or make it a post on your blog.

Don’t make this a minute by minute, long, drawn out thing (unless you want to), just a rough outline of what a great learning day would include.

I think this would help many people get a handle on what is being advocated on ed blogs, and give us all a chance to put our plan where our advocacy is. Any takers?
Learning is messy!

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Messy Learning Examples

I mentioned in an earlier post that some of the most important learning that happens isn’t part of your lesson plan because you can’t account for everything that MIGHT happen during a project. Here are some recent examples from our most recent video project.

One group needed some pictures of what living stickleback fish look like (the fossils we found were of extinct fish). The group searched the net and found some good examples and were just going to use them. From that a copyright discussion ensued – so we ended up emailing photographers to get permission. Since the pictures the students wanted to use were all from university web sites that got the professors interested in what the students were doing and they want copies of the video.

At one point the transition scenes with titles had no sound associated with them, and the students felt that was fine. They thought it was fine until about the third time they watched it – then it was boring and they decided they needed to do voiceovers on at least some of them – so we did.

Of course in their excitement to have a video on the internet each group wanted their scene to be as long as possible – but 5 out of 7 groups ended up deciding to edit their scenes considerably to make them more understandable and less boring.

Students were very reluctant to do the voiceover work (with a few exceptions, there are hams in every group) it was embarrassing or scary… and you might make a mistake… oh my gosh! After a few brave souls did theirs … and made mistakes … and they weren’t laughing stocks, it became more and more acceptable. In fact my students with the least English experience were some of the most likely to “volunteer” from their group. This is great because then the whole group gets involved helping them learn to pronounce the words correctly and clearly.

One of the “messy” learning pieces that came out was students wanting to re-write script pieces because “the wording is so important.” They would come to this on their own, especially when they would do final practicing before doing a voiceover. Is it OK if we re-write this part Mr. Crosby, we think we can make it better.” Great stuff! Like you’re going to say “No guys – don’t want you to think about improving your work on your own – let’s just use it as is.”

Learning is messy!

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No Time For… _________________ ?

Wes Fryer’s post “No Time For Technology In High Schools” follows up other tirades he has made about no time for recess and other areas now deemed “less important.” He states:

NO TIME. No time for projects, no time for fun activities, no time for in-depth learning because there is too much curriculum to cover.

He goes on to say that the major problem is the quantity of standards needing to be met.

I vehemently agree. So how did we get there?

If Wes was having this conversation with a supporter of NCLB he would be told rather abruptly that teachers and administrators were involved in writing and adopting the standards at each state – so go cry to them. And they would be right… sort of. Teachers were involved – but which teachers and how and why did they make the decisions they made? I know at the elementary level in my state the teachers that were picked for each subject were teachers that were award winning teachers for the subject they were chosen to work on. But ask those teachers about their typical classroom day and here is what you will generally find. They give more time to that subject.

I took over a class from an award winning elementary teacher who was a great math teacher – she told me that she was glad I was getting her class because I was stronger at language arts than she was. She was wrong. When I talked to the students she had them doing great language arts activities – but the typical day they described had a constant math focus.

They started the day with a math problem “sponge” activity, then corrected math homework and did a quick review for students that didn’t do well, while others did math explorations. But that wasn’t math class – that came later in the day. She also would do oral math drill during transition times during the day, and would spend more time occasionally doing large math explorations as a project outside of their usual math time. Now this is great math teaching and I don’t fault her for it except – guess what the great elementary language arts teachers do? Science teachers? – get it? Pretty much all of them give that subject extra time and attention. So they can get through more curriculum and they are more successful at covering more material. Math (or whichever subject) is their life so they don’t see a standard they don’t think is important.

Now I’m generalizing here a bit, but that is one way we get over exuberant standards. Then how do you argue with those standards without being labeled as someone who wants to “dumb down” the standards? I constantly hear parents question why their son or daughter needs to know how to do this or that, but they won’t question the standards for various reasons.

I agree with Wes, we need to revisit the standards. Not to “dumb them down,” but to make them relevant and meaningful. Then we might have time for the important things.

Learning is messy!