Into the Dungeon: A Formula for Success

Often it's hard to let go of the way we grew up. There is a comfort to the rhythm of the experience. School was school. Home was home. All of us like patterns and predictability. Sure we want an occasional pleasant surprise, however even in those surreal moments, we are more at home within the continuity of our comfortable predictable experience. As teachers, just like any other individual we like to set up our schedule, our units, and our experiences in a predictable comfortable way.

Often if we ask a teacher what they do, they describe themselves as a science teacher, third grade teacher, or my favorite sophomore English teacher. They talk about the age of the students or content area of focus. It's an intriguing concept. The commonality of the students or the content becomes the focus rather than the mentorship and guidance. Interestingly in reflection of the long-term age, how much of the take away the is the content. Does anyone that isn't teaching it remember the skills they developed in sophomore English? Does anyone that isn't teaching it remember the definition of electronegativity? The differences between ionic and covalent bonding?

The reality is that search engines are far faster and far better at both gathering knowledge and applying algorithmic formulas than humans will ever be. Things we valued growing up, informational knowledge, math facts, and the ability to calculate using formulas, are all easily replaced by the silicon contraptions in our pockets and before our eyes.

So where is the value? The Partnership for 21st Century Learning places it in the 4 C's, communication, collaboration, creativity, and critical thinking. All skills intrinsically human dependent. Items that require us to break the individualistic focus and mold of learning in our schools and exhort us to challenge the comfortable learning patterns of the way we were raised. Our schooling focused on gathering knowledge and applying formulas. Our work lives need this at a much rarer rate. Our personal lives need it even less. However, the 4 C's, that we could use in both personal and professional lives.

If we can't teach simply age-level content and formula application, what do we teach? The challenge is not the age-level content and formula application. Rather, the challenge is how we get there. In an information distribution model that schools often are, we model a process, share specific information, and gradually release. The learning is a result of pattern recognition and then independent repetition. Lost in this process are the 4 C's. Student communication in this model is predominantly listening, collaboration is limited both in time and product, and both creativity and critical thinking are predominantly absent. If we think back to the 70's and 80's, in the era of Dungeons and Dragons, children had to use all 4 C's. There was a gradual development of challenges in which characters had to problem solve often through ridiculous situations. Players had to communicate with each other, develop collaborative plans or face failure. School is not the dungeon and teachers are not the dungeon master. However, it's pretty close. We remember the Oregon Trail simulations. Why can't the majority of Social Studies be students problem solving through life situations as a hunter or gather in early civilizations or strategizing in the cabinet meetings with FDR to move our country out of the depression and through global warfare? In math, why is it we learn the algorithm first as opposed to being presented with a situational challenge and discovering which math concepts and strategies may work for the situation. The Next Generation Science Standards explicitly want students not to learn kinetics directly, but observe situations in which different rates of reaction are occurring and discover the relationships between the reactants and the reaction.

The reality is the formulas for instruction and learning we grew up with do not necessarily result in the development of desired skills for our current and future work force. In order to be successful, we will need to release the models which we learned from and find other models from our life experiences to move us forward. The formula for success may not be Madeline Hunter anymore or gradual release. We may discover it in the unlikely dungeons of nerds gone by.

The Goldberg's Contest