Lost in Our Work

March has come and while the snow hasn't yet completely melted through the Chicago area, it is the season of standardized testing for the State. A principal called the other day and shared a story of one of his students who's parent wished to have the child opt out of the standardized test. This was a high achieving student who does well on many things. It was a caring child whom he described as knowingly choosing to pause and suspend our Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA) Measurement of Annual Progress (MAP) test three or four times during the testing sessions, doing a little bit each day so the child could be fully aware of the assessment experience and perform at top capacity. It was a child who sets goals and wants to do well. The parent's simple reasons for wanting to opt out was why should the child go through the artificial stress and anxiety of the test for the State when we have accurate data, we won't be receiving the data from this test in a meaningful time to impact learning, and the test would only show a minimal estimate of the child's knowledge because it would not allow the child to perform in an optimal situation. Great questions and great reasoning for which many educators would have no reasonable answers.

The interesting turn of the story is that neither the child nor the parent is against the concept of standardized testing. In fact, they find data and accountability meaningful and want to use it to impact their goals and learning. Simply, the family wants the opportunity to invest powerfully in the assessment situation and be able use that information to move forward. This is a child willing to spend 3 or 4 days taking a reading assessment in small chunks in order to provide an accurate assessment of their learning.

This idea of investment spurs a question, how often do we allow our children and ourselves to operate in situations that allow us to become so invested that we are lost in our work. At Sunday School, we have begun our study of Modern Israel. The children pick a city in Israel, develop a tour guide for their city, and create a visual representation for their city. This learning experience, designed by my wife, allows children to develop knowledge and interest in a place that we hope they may want to visit later in life. In creating the visual representation for the city, children have the option to create a float (a shoebox upside down with pictures & 3d artifacts on top), a poster presentation, a slide presentation (Keynote, Powerpoint, Prezi, etc.) or build their city in Minecraft. The work frequently starts slowly, with 10 and 11 year olds learning to scour the Internet for meaningful information about a location. However, after a couple of sessions, the work speeds up, the children find many of the key data points and start to create the visual product. When they start the product, children frequently become lost in the work. They search out images of their cities, agonizing over the right pictures, deciding what they should and should not choose. Those who opt for Minecraft start to share their worlds and help each other build structures and buildings representing vast layouts. The work moves from the Sunday School classroom to the car ride home, the halls of the house, and in our house, our eldest child who also is in our class this year has dragged his younger brother into helping him build Tel Aviv. Simply the children become so invested in their work that it leaves the confines of the classroom and engages the child to explore more.

Yesterday at our instructional coach's meeting, one of our coach's shared a story of a second grade learning lab. The children, who were participating in a three-week trial of 1-1 devices using iPad minis, were learning about the nutritional value of a variety of different common foods. Typically each year the children would be asked to go home, look through their refrigerator and write down about the foods they have inside and their nutritional value. This year, using the devices, students went home and created a wide-variety of products demonstrating the food they had and explaining why it was nutritious. What had once been a five-minute scramble and get it done homework assignment had become elaborate videos with parents and children advertising different household foods. The children and families developed an excitement for the learning and the work and turned a simple assignment into one in which they could become lost in the work.

In each lesson, we have the opportunity to decide the level of meaning and interest that we will allow our students to have. We can choose whether the activity is simply to transfer content knowledge or to have the children seek out and discover information on their own. As classroom leaders we have the choice to decide who owns the learning experience and what diversity of products we will accept. Finally, we can choose if children have the space and opportunity to own the learning or if the parameters of the experience will be teacher-centered. Like the two different standardized testing situations, in each lesson we decide who owns the experience and whether the product outcome will be a minimal estimate of a child's capacity or one which expands their world.

Back to the Future - Time Machine