pedagogical thoughts
what does it mean to teach and learn at the idea school?
There have been some marvelous goings-on here at the IDEA School. Lately, we have been carefully observing the work of our children and we wanted to share a bit with you about the importance of their endeavors. This might sound a bit like a broken record playing but I'd like to take this opportunity to remember together some of the values that guide our shaping of the school day and our planning before and after.
We strongly believe that children should be responsible for their own learning. Too often, we interfere with this process by telling kids what they need to learn. This devalues the learning that is most important to them. At IDEA, we do not want our children to grow up with the belief that math and reading are primary and their passions are secondary. Reading, writing, and math are just a few of the tools they will use to express and explore whatever topic(s) they choose. The work our children choose and the interests that guide them might not seem useful or practical or measurable or even very deep, but if we provide them with ample time and space to explore these passions we access the most effective way for our children to learn perseverance, problem-solving, collaboration, confidence, self-discipline, and more. These are character traits and competencies that the job market of tomorrow will require of them and will be invaluable as their work and interests grow in scope and depth. Occasionally, we hear this from parents: "My child is so happy here and we love your school but can't you also teach _________?" This discounts the time that kids need to be working on what is most important to them. This is comparable to someone telling me that I am not allowed to continue to read and research about progressive practices in education until I become more competent at pre-calculus. And, no, I'm not going to give a presentation on the last 5 articles I've read; I'm too busy applying my new learning in the classroom! Ultimately, we need to let our kids decide what they become experts in and what kind of learning and work that will require. I am reminded of the conversation I had with a parent who was lamenting over their daughter's "shallow fixation" with makeup tutorials on YouTube. This parent was discouraged that their daughter was wasting time making and recording these tutorials when instead she could be doing something so much more "useful". I reassured them that by creating these tutorials their daughter was practicing a multitude of valuable skills. She was learning the best and most engaging and effective ways of communicating from other people's videos; she was writing and revising her scripts; she was using feedback to innovate on future videos; she was learning to use a video editing tool, etc. All of these skills will prove invaluable to her as she gets older and her interests evolve. We need to remember that learning is happening to our children all the time. They practice problem solving and creativity when they think of new ball games to play on the sandpile with limited space and players. They learn about language and rhythm when they play hand-clapping games together. They practice story-telling and collaboration when they are working on a Lego stop- animation video. When it takes them 4 weeks of woodshop to build a go-cart out of a shopping cart we know that they are gaining perseverance and self-direction. The list goes on and on. Our overwhelming hope for our children is that they grow into individuals who expect that the career they choose will be purposeful and pleasurable. We want our kids to be well-rounded and capable of healthy relationships and, most importantly, we want them to feel responsibility for and ownership of who they are and who they want to become. Please join us for our Expo Night and bear witness to the many extraordinary ways our children express the many languages they are learning here. As very important people in our children's lives, it is our responsibility to lean in to listen to the things that are exciting their interests. We need to commit to spending time communicating to them how much we value their work and the learning that is important to them. As you listen to their stories about the work they do, think about how they are becoming competent in these areas: problem-solving and critical thinking; finding and evaluating information; communication; creativity and innovation; and social and emotional development. Then ask yourself this question: "Why aren't we all spending more time furthering our learning through activities that are engaging, challenging, and purposeful?"
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This post has been sitting incomplete in my draft box for awhile, but I wanted to publish it in time for summer break. I hope you enjoy these “homework” ideas and please feel free to add your own thoughts and ideas to the comment section. I am reading a fabulous book full of research to support many of the competencies we are reinforcing here at IDEA School. It’s reassuring to know that we’re getting it right and we appreciate your support. The wonderful thing about our model is that because the learning is relevant and meaningful; it’s happening all the time. We know that your child has experiences and opportunities that are enriching outside of our school walls; away from us and while they are at home and in the world with you. These are ideal opportunities to extend on the work we’re doing at the school. While we don’t assign homework, we do expect parents’ partnership and involvement in our children’s development outside of our school day. It can be hard to notice these fleeting moments and be a confident facilitator so I have highlighted a few opportunities below and outlined some strategies for you to try out. 1. Communication Asking meaningful questions at every opportunity can really give your kiddo practice articulating their ideas and can expand their vocabulary immensely. While you’re reading a book, ask “What do you think will happen next?” or “How did you feel when that happened?” When you are asking your child about their school or camp day avoid close-ended questions and instead try: “What was your favorite thing that happened today?” and “What was something challenging that happened?” There is much research to show that dinner table conversation can be so enriching for kids and while kids should be encouraged to participate, parents should also feel entitled to discuss the events of their own day. Even though it might not seem so, big kids want you to show interest in their lives too. Make sure you are taking time to thoughtfully ask questions and really listen. Also…
2. Problem Solving It is never too early or too late to do number play with your kids. When your child is ready for an allowance (more about this here) give it to them in change. My daughter loves to trade in her change for dollars, but the deal is she has to make a dollar first. With older children, open up a bank account and show them how to manage and check their account online. Include them when problem solving comes up in your own life; tax filing, shopping for credit cards, calculating mortgage tax payments, figuring area of a room. Also…
3. Focus and Self-Control When your child is engaged in something, they are practicing sustained focus and control. Turn off the T.V.! Trust me, it’s so good for your kid to be bored. Imagination, creativity, innovation are all muscles that need to be exercised. This doesn’t mean that you have to entertain or even plan activities for your kid. Simply provide some art materials: (nothing fancy needed!) paper, markers, recycling, masking tape or open-ended toys like Lego and other building materials, realistic stuffed animals and plastic animals. If you have an older child, give them a menu of creative tech tools they can use on the computer. Also, make sure they have creative materials they can tinker with on their own: drill, scrap wood, rope, old electronics, camera, fabric, stationary, etc. Ultimately, your kids need time with you to talk and snuggle and have fun. Between those times, make sure to give them the freedom to experiment, play, and discover independently. Check out this short film for inspiration and then get to work! How important is play to you? To us, it’s a very big deal. In fact, the most enriching moments at the IDEA school happen during our unstructured play times.
Here is a bite sized video that highlights the importance of play narrated by psychologist Peter Grey: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YoE480mzrk0 These five principles of self-directed learning are familiar to the families at IDEA school. They are at the core of what we are trying to accomplish in our play-based kindergarten. If you have a little larger appetite for thinking about play today, I recommend you listen to the fuller version from Peter Grey’s TED talk. This one would be nice to listen to while folding two baskets of laundry or fixing a flat tire on your bike. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bg-GEzM7iTk How do these ideas jibe with your experience of learning and of school? How did you form your identity as a learner? Was it in opposition to schools or in harmony with them? I think the most important thing we can communicate to our students though the structure of our day is that we trust their curiosity to motivate their exploration. Frequently, when a kid transfers to our school they don’t want to do much of anything beyond a lot of observation and little bit of experimentation. This transitional period can last for months depending on the amount of trauma the child has felt as a result of force, coercion, manipulation, bribery, or punishment at the hands of teachers and other adults. These children don’t seem to get why they would do anything if not extrinsically motivated through the use of either reward or punishment. This time can be torture for parents and collaborators alike. It is so hard to resist even gently nudging our kids on their path to product, but here’s the thing: every time we dictate what they do, how they do it, and when they should do it by, we damage their intrinsic motivation to engage and commit deeply. While the damage may only be minimal, over time, we run the risk of damaging our children’s drive to independently seek out answers to the questions that are important to them. It can be an extremely difficult thing to watch your child stumble during a presentation because they didn’t take the time to adequately prepare or to let them fail when their hypothesis was wrong or the goal they set too general or too lofty, but these are opportunities for them to learn to self-evaluate. These are opportunities to “fail” when the stakes are low, and to learn from the authentic, real-world feedback they receive. Don’t get me wrong – there are many times in the course of a day when our kids have to do what we say in regards to health, safety, or respecting others’ right to learn.
We know that because of the agency our kids feel over their projects and other work, they feel a great satisfaction and ownership of the work they produce. Currently, all of our kids are in process. They are practicing all of the competencies, learning from each other and from the experiences we offer. They are spending time learning what it means to craft thoroughly researched, detailed, interesting work. Given the space and time to develop their own interests, self-direction, focus and control our kids will do the work they are meant to do without the need for force and coercion. As we work to keep intact their intrinsic motivation to learn, we prepare them for a world in which the most important thing is not a set of facts or formulas; it is knowing how to solve problems creatively, explore questions deeply, and share ideas passionately. For more on this topic: http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/10/23/harnessing-childrens-natural-ways-of-learning/ Jaime and David Okay, I’m just going to come out and say it. At IDEA School teachers engage, share, collaborate, facilitate, assist, encourage, but we do not teach. This single fact is the basic premise upon which our little school is built. We don’t ever force kids to do anything they don’t want to do. We don’t expect them to do anything that can’t be rationalized as useful and meaningful to them. While we don’t have a list of facts and figures that we think every kid of whatever age should learn and know, we do spend a lot of time building objectives around areas of competency that nurture independent learners. What I mean by this is, simply, that we show kids how to learn on their own, how to organize that learning, and how to share it. We know that the amount of information at all of our fingertips is limitless and one of the most important things is to know how to evaluate that information and how to use it to transform the world. We also have to nurture in children the understanding that they are responsible for their own learning. Students are given the time, space, and guidance to follow any question that comes up. Our work is to expose them to a multitude of ideas, people, and places and to provide them with the tools and resources to answer the questions they want to ask. We do know that there are foundational skills we have to provide kids with so they will be prepared for this self-directed work. These include things like reading fluency and number sense. We are constantly working on creative, engaging, and discreet ways to nurture these skills. While there is a time frame that we think is developmentally appropriate for our children to acquire these skills, we appreciate and assert the fact that every child’s process is different and kids will learn these skills in their own time if provided with gentle guidance and encouragement. It’s extremely difficult to trust in this process. We sit back while our babies learn to walk and our toddlers learn to talk, but as soon as our kids begin school, we begin to worry about benchmarks and standards. We label kids as either good or bad at regurgitating the learning we have selected for them in the time frame we choose. Some kids fall behind in school because they, for whatever reason, miss the deadline for learning a particular skill. They become lost in the tsunami of right and wrong answers and compounding expectations. Kids do not need us to force them to learn, in fact that can be extremely detrimental to their developing independence, intrinsic motivation, and agency. They need us to model curiosity, passion, and most importantly a love of learning. Anything, any of us want to learn, or make, or do can be achieved if we have the intrinsic motivation and the practice at learning independently. If your child’s intrinsic motivation is left intact; if their curiosity and inquisitiveness survives beyond their toddler years, we know that they will continue discovering, wondering, investigating the things that they are meant to. This is by far the hardest teaching gig I have ever had. There are no teaching manuals with color coded script that cue me as to what to say during an instructional time. There’s no section at the back of the manual with worksheets I can copy to keep my kids busy while I do individual conferencing. I spend countless hours planning opportunities for my kiddos; experiences I think will provoke their innate curiosity and prove engaging. It’s been challenging and I am learning how to be a thoughtful planner, how to evaluate information, and organize my learning, how to reflect on my experiences and to take risks. I’m a little behind the curve -at IDEA School the kids are already way ahead of me. |
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