Forever Young: Why I Love Teaching So Much

Have you ever heard of the Blue Man Group? Chances are you've seen this rather odd threesome on a television commercial or even in person at one of their live performances. They're the ones who can drum up a melody by striking instruments made out of PVC pipes.

I've always found their antics quite entertaining; enough to catch one of their shows the last time I was in Vegas. That was several years ago and lately my interest in them has been renewed through a project that my students will be working on next week. To end our unit on sound--a unit where students learn about how frequency and pitch are related--my students will be building an instrument out of PVC pipes. I introduced the idea to them a few weeks ago and they have been anxiously waiting to get started ever since.

I'm convinced of the benefits my students will reap from the project. In addition to learning about sound, they'll have the pleasure of building and testing an instrument that provides them with some application of their learning. As I have been preparing the kids for the project, I've also realized how satisfying it has been and will be for me. I've been building my own instruments at home so that the kids could have some examples to work from. Let me tell you, building these instruments is a lot of fun! And I feel like the only reason I can build them is because I'm a teacher. Surely, my wife would never allow me to spend the time and money that I have working on them if I was just doing it for fun! Teaching fifth grade allows me to play, to stay young (forever a ten year-old). That is what these kids need. They don't need desks in rows, worksheets, and constant read-alouds from textbooks. They need playful projects like this to engage them.

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A Whole New Classroom: Bringing Right Brain Aptitudes to the Classroom

One of the most influential books I have read since becoming an educator is A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink. In fact, I have to admit that the books that influence my teaching the most are books that are not really for teachers at all; rather they are books targeted to the business crowd. With so many changes taking place in the world today, I feel that it is more important to know more about the world in which my students will work than to learn about yet another teaching strategy or technique to get more kids to pass a test.

What I like so much about Pink's book is that it not only describes the present and future world, but it also explains what skills workers will need to prosper in it. Pink's hypothesis is that they will need to develop right brain skills--design, story, symphony, empathy, play, and meaning--to be successful.

What I'd like to do in this space is to explain how I have tried--knowingly and unknowingly--to cultivate these aptitudes in my classroom and what my efforts will be to do so this school year. One of my favorite right-brain skills to work on is design. Being a science teacher, it's easy for me to end most of my units with a project-based assessment--an assignment that requires my students to create an artifact that displays their knowledge of concepts learned in the unit. Most often this takes the form of a gadget. For instance, this past school year I had my students use their knowledge of open and closed circuits to create electric gadgets. Their task was to make the gadget work by creatively finding a way to complete a circuit to perform some kind of task. Batteries were the only power source they were allowed to use. With a little direction from me, and multiple examples from a book called Electric Mischief: Battery Powered Gadgets Kids Can Build by Alan Bartholomew, my students built incredible creations--cars, dice spinners, stop lights--that not only displayed their knowledge, but also often required a great deal of problem-solving and further learning to complete.

This project also required students to use the right-brain skills of symphony (combine their knowledge to form new product), and, I'm guessing, play (no test to assess their knowledge, but a fun project). I have planned similar projects for the coming school year. The one I'm most excited about is the Blue Man Group project--an assignment I will use to assess student learning of the properties of sound. I'm always looking for classes to collaborate with...


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Wow!

I read the following from the 21st Century Collaborative blog. It discusses the thoughts of Ken Kay, president of the Partnership of 21st Century Skills:

"...the amount of information is doubling every 24 months and that by 2020 the amount of information will double in every 72 days. What this means is content memorization will simply not work anymore. It is currently impossible; especially at the rate knowledge is changing, to master it all. And even if you did, the content that you learn in your freshman year of college would be outdated by the time you graduate. Literacy in the 21st Century is not based on do you know it- rather, can you find it, analyze it, adapt it, and synthesize it? John Tao says as we move out of the information age into this new era of creativity an individual’s value will not be based on what he knows, but what he can create."

Wow...does this resonate with me! When reading it, I immediately thought of:

• The first question on the Social Studies Ohio Achievement Test, which asked who Garret Morgan was. To prove how trivial this knowledge is, type this man's name into Google and you'll know the answer in less than a second. How cool would it be if students were allowed to have a laptop on their desks during the test that they could use to search for basic knowledge like this. Instead of assessing the most basic of knowledge, the question would then actually assess something useful, like information literacy.
  
• Daniel Pink's book, A Whole New Mind. You really need to read this book if you haven't yet.
  

Reading this stuff about 21st Century Skills gets me fired up for next school year. I have so many collaborative projects planned that I can barely wait to start them!


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Learning in the 21st Century

I've been reading quite a bit about the type of skills that our kids are going to need to succeed in the 21st Century and I find myself particularly interested in one of them, self-directed learning. Steve over at Teach42 had a post the other day called Book Learning or DIY Education that got me thinking about it even more. In his post, he states :

Let’s face it, at the end of the day our current testing system tells us precious little about how ready students really are going to be for life beyond the school building. And there’s so much that students learn in schools that just doesn’t get tested. What grade did each of you get in “Ability to find new solutions to unexpected problems?” I don’t remember that being on my school’s report cards.

What I have realized lately is that my state test only assesses content knowledge. So that is the only thing that most teachers teach--content. What it does not assess is critical thinking skills, innovation and creativity, collaboration skills, and problem-solving ability. So, guess what, in most classrooms these skills don't get taught. This runs counter to the thoughts of corporate leaders, authors, and organizations focused on infusing 21st century skills into the classroom.

Unfortunately, preparing for the state test often leads to a traditional, teacher-centered approach. Kids learn that their teachers are the source of knowledge instead of becoming self-directed learners--learners who see themselves as active participants in the creation of their own knowledge.

In preparing for a presentation that I gave this past Tuesday, I reflected on the work my kids have done this year, researched the possibilities of Web 2.0, and found other examples of best practices with the Read/Write Web. What I discovered is how well a project-based approach centered around technology helps develop the skill of self-directed learning. In creating a multimedia blog entry or wiki page, students are forced to look for resources that best serve their needs. By linking to another page, they must make sure that the page has accurate information that, once again, supports their needs. All of this helps them develop critical skills that will stay with them long after they have forgotten the content.



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