This week, we watched a TEDX Talk by Jeff Hopkins, “Education as if People Mattered”.
He began with a quote about education not being a pail to fill but a flame to light. Admittedly, my hackles went up. Not because I disagree with these metaphors pedagogically, but because, as an elementary teacher currently trying to get 24 kids through science fair experiments and projects, it just felt like too much.
He uses the metaphor of flame and a spark to represent learning and suggests that this spark needs to be lit and nurtured. In my perfect world, I would love to believe he means they would be sparked and nurtured by the student who’s doing the learning, but recent experience is telling me that this is probably my job. So let me take the metaphor a little further to express my own frustration with our current system. I want my students to spark. I want them to light the fires of passion for subjects beyond what I can teach them about. But we’re still trying to find the lighter, locate a fuel source, put on our safety googles, and convince the students that this candle needs to be lit just to see where we are.
My own thinking isn’t so different from Jeff Hopkins’. I love competency-based instruction and assessment and the freedom that my digital portfolios give my learners to share their learning in a multitude of ways. Science fair is a perfect example of this.
First we start by asking questions, then doing some research to see what’s out there, and we move onto creating a hypothesis. We’ve identified variables and outlined procedures for experimentation. Students engaged with the class experiments we’ve done together. But the moment it came time to choose an experiment, we hit a wall. We’re three weeks into a six week scientific method unit and we are moving so slowly because kids have forgotten how to ask questions. Some are trying to google experiments they can do and others don’t know what they’re curious about. The research is exhausting because we have to teach them how to do it first, and the step where they start to do it independently is a big one. Today, as I was teaching a student how to create a graph for their data, they were floored when we got stuck and I pulled up a YouTube video on how to change the information on one of the axis. They didn’t know what to do if I couldn’t answer their question, and it never occurred to them that they had the capacity to figure it out.
How did we get here?
It would be too easy to blame the “system” and talk about how broken it is. It would be easy to listen to those who suggest that school crushes students’ natural curiosity. Tik tok has taught me how loudly these voices share. But I’m part of this system and I’m essentially a problem solver at heart so I need more.
We could blame tech.
Obviously, as someone who is studying educational technology, this view would seem contradictory. I love tech, it humbles me and shows me how much I don’t know about the world and technology in general. It is a tool I reach for time and again. But I think that’s the difference. Individual technology wasn’t a big part of my life until my 30s so I have other skills. I know how to learn and problem solve without it (but boy do I appreciate how much easier it makes these things). But I wonder if my students, who have grown up with tech that does so much for them, haven’t had a chance to develop these other strategies yet. At school, we put limitations on how they do research- so the sources are legitimate- and how they use technology- so they think for themselves- that learning under these conditions must be exhausting. I get why we do it, I’m just seeing the impact it has on my kids.
My thinking is getting messy now and I’ll save more for another post so let’s circle back to the Jeff Hopkins video. Turns out, he was the guest speaker in our class the following week. As I listened to him talk about his school and share the way they approach education, I got excited. I started to think about the ways in which I could incorporate this type of learning into my own classroom. Even when he told us that trying it in a regular school would be a difficult thing to do, I don’t think he meant for me. (You’ll notice this is an ongoing theme for me). That very night, I booked collaboration time with a colleague and we’re going to try and plan a science unit that is more student centered. We have big plans.
Charged up, I returned to my classroom the following morning only to discover that 60% of my students still haven’t done their experiment. Two changed their projects entirely and now I have five students measuring how far different types of paper airplanes can fly. So that’s…good? I don’t know. Honestly, it feels like maybe some teachers are meant to challenge their student’s thinking and light and nurture the spark of their learning while others are meant to give them the skills they need to do that learning.
Bolding chasing systemic change as an individual is both a lonely and reflective place to be.
To be continued…?
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