Last week we discussed how to move beyond the siloes of our classroom, and move inquiry into the real-world.
Utilizing expertise from other subjects, real professions, co-collaborators and the community.
What about the work students produce? What if it moved beyond fill in the blank worksheets to real world, interest based work?
Here’s what one of my favourite student-centered practitioners of all time Ron Berger has to say about that…
“We rush kids through work. They’re turning in final assignments every day, 2,030 assignments in a week. It can never be high quality because they’re always rushing, and we’re always rushing to cover.
It’s a very different thing that when you think of how in adult life, if you work for an architecture firm or a business firm, you spend weeks preparing a report, and you go over it, and you do draft after draft after draft. Well, what if school were that way? Like, what if school was about producing high quality things?
If I want to contribute and build something of quality, then the next step is to ask, what’s the genre or format I’m working in.
It could be a scientific report, a blueprint, or it could be a physical thing. You’re building a model. It could be an engineering design, novel, memoir, or it could be a podcast. What does a professional high-quality one actually look like? What are we aspiring toward— to make a high-quality version of a scientific paper or a landscape design?
And so kids, at any age, kids can think, oh, that’s what we are aiming for. And then connecting them with people in the professional world who do that work, who are engineers, who are scientists, who are authors, who are politicians, who are engineers, who do that work. When you start working on yours with your students, you bring in experts to critique their work, and the expert isn’t a teacher from across the hall, it’s the engineer from a firm. Architect. Professional Author. It’s somebody who works in the field.
Then letting kids go through multiple drafts where their friends are critiquing it, teachers are critiquing it, and outside experts are critiquing it. And finally, polishing that work until it makes a contribution to the world or to their community in some way.”
In a world of generative AI that can write a 5 paragraph essay in 5 seconds, we can’t afford not to provide learners the opportunity to produce this kind of work.
What might this look like in your context? What might happen if you give students multiple opportunities to produce something of great significance that lived beyond the classroom?
It could be podcast, scientific journal, video series, documentary, field guide, or youtube video series.
As student-centered practitioners, this is the opportunity we provide our learners when we shift from work submitted for a teacher ——> work based on interest or a real-world need.
Get Help With Shift #5/6: Worksheets – – – – > Real World, Interest-Based Work
The excerpt above is from Chapter 6 of my new book, ‘Where is the Teacher: 12 Shifts for Student-Centered Environments’ scheduled for release in Early August.
- Pre-Order here and gain more stories of inspiration, and strategies for immediate use: https://tinyurl.com/12shiftspreorder
- Attend the Launch Party and connect with more student-centered practitioners! tinyurl.com/12shiftslaunchparty
Now, time to return to that podcast series you never had time for during the school year. :-)
Enjoy your time off!
Your [co] learning experience designer,
