What is the Real World? (Revisiting the Beginning)
Traversing is coming up on its one year anniversary and in honor of that event, I am going to be reposting some of the first issues, as we have a lot of new readers who were not with us in the beginning. These first posts outline the foundation of the blog and the educational philosophies that guide my work and the work of City of Bridges High School.
This week I will continue with my plan to spend the first weeks of publication building off of the six components of Progressive Education outlined by Tom Little and Katherine Ellison, in their book Loving Learning: How Progressive Education can Save America’s Schools. Here is the list again with the focus of this week in bold:
1. Attention to children’s emotions as well as their intellects.
2. Reliance on student’s interests to guide their learning.
3. Curtailment or outright bans on testing, grading and ranking.
4. Involvement of students in real world endeavors.
5. The study of topics in an integrated way, from a variety of different disciplines
6. Support for children to develop a sense of social justice and become active participants in American Democracy.
If you are new to Traversing and want to read my initial thoughts on why this list matters to me you can find the first issue here. If you want to hear about Martin Buber and Attention to Children’s Emotions, you can check out the issue from three weeks ago, here, two weeks ago I discussion of Flow and Personalization here, and last week I explored Testing and the Panopticon, which you can find here.
Before I delve into the Involvement of Students in Real World Endeavors, I would like to take a moment to acknowledge all of the hard work and the emotional and physical labor that educators, students and families have put into preparing for this new school year. City of Bridges High School’s first day is Tuesday September 7th, and many schools are already back as I write this week’s issue. The first summer of the pandemic, 2020, was a very strange time in education. We didn’t know what the year would bring and we were all trying to figure out how to keep students and faculty safe, while still fostering the learning environments that we recognized that all students needed.
The 2020-2021 school year taught everyone a lot and schools and learning communities were much better prepared as we contemplated the start of this school year. Yet starting the second year of pandemic impacted learning is a weight on everyone and I know the stress of this year is very real for educators and students.
I am so grateful and honored to be part of a community that cares deeply about each other and who are striving every day to make choices that support everyone’s wellbeing. If school has started or it is starting soon, please know that I appreciate you and everything that you do.
The Real World
I am in possession of a BA, an M.Ed., a Post-Master’s Certificate and a Ph.D., these letters after my name could lead someone to believe that I am well educated. I appreciate the colleges and universities where I have acquired these degrees and they all introduced me to people and ideas that shaped my path in remarkable and important ways.
On the other hand, the vast majority of my learning has occurred not in school house as a student, but instead in the world (which in my case is often the school house) as a partner, parent, principal, teacher, professor, citizen, cook, board member, etc. I learned to teach by teaching and I learned to parent though parenting. That is not to say that school didn’t have value, in fact school provided me with the foundation and the frameworks that I applied in practice
It may come as a surprise, but the framework that I am going to consider when it comes to talking about Real World Learning comes from a class that I teach to graduate students about Data Driven Instructional Decision Making. I do want to make sure that the first thing we do in using this as an example is to separate data from test results. As you have likely figured out, I don’t believe that standardized testing, ranking and grading have a positive impact on learning. Data on the other hand has a huge impact on learning and I use it every day. For the sake of this example, I am going to define Data as; any information that can be analyzed or explored to help to understand the world around us.
Now that is out of the way, the data driven instructional cycle looks like this:
The concept is straight forward, and they cycle can start at any point, because it is continuous. Here are the components:
Action is a learning experience that a student has in a setting where they build knowledge, understanding and skills.
Assessment is a way that a student demonstrates their knowledge, understanding and skills.
Analysis is the examination of assessment to determine if the student has misunderstandings, misconceptions or missing skills or if they have successfully demonstrated their learning.
Since it is a cycle, any step can be step one, but I’ll start with an Action.
Step 1: An educator facilitates an Action, a learning experience for a student based upon their understanding of a student’s knowledge, understanding and skills from their Analysis of a student’s Assessment.
Step 2: The learning experience ends with an Assessment, where the student demonstrates their knowledge, understanding and skills.
Step 3: The educator Analyzes the assessment and determines if there are any misunderstandings, misconceptions or missing skills.
Step 4: An educator facilitates an Action, a learning experience for a student based upon their understanding of a student’s knowledge, understanding and skills from their Analysis of a student’s Assessment.
And of course, the cycle continues. This cycle is a fundamental way in which continual learning takes place. (I wish that I could say every school’s Actions are shaped by their Analysis of Assessments, but in my 20+ years in schools this is often not the case.)
Ok, as promised, this cycle can also be used to outline a framework for the Involvement of Students in Real World Endeavors. Here is the same cycle with a different focus:
In this case here are the components:
Foundational Framing is a learning process that provides students with knowledge, understanding and skills which they can then apply to Real problems and projects in their lives and in their communities.
Real World Application is the use of knowledge, understanding and skills to address a tangible problem or project.
Reflection is a process of evaluating the misconceptions, misunderstandings and missing skills that you discovered in the planning or implementation of a tangible problem or project.
As with our data driven example above the steps move in a cycle. For the sake of illustration that cycle I’ll start it in a different place.
Step 1: Students Reflect on a problem that exists in their lives based on their experience in the world. They identify the knowledge, understanding and skills that they will need in order to solve that problem.
Step 2: Educators, mentors, peers or learning resources provide students with Foundational Framingactivities that help students to build knowledge, understanding and skills.
Step 3: Student apply the knowledge, understanding and skills that they have built to a Real Worldproblem.
Step 4: Students Reflect on a problem that exists in their lives based on their experience in the world. They identify the knowledge, understanding and skills that they will need in order to solve that problem.
This cycle is also what we experience in “The Real World” of adulthood which in what we are preparing out students to enter.
Just think of the teachers who I thanked in the opening of this issue!
Teachers were presented with a problem, namely how do we continue to provide whole person learning and support to our students during a global pandemic. Teachers built new foundational knowledge, they learned from mentors such as the health department. Then they applied that foundational framing to the last school year and have been reflecting on what worked and what can be better.
Even the term “Real World Endeavors” implies that much of what goes on in schools is not part of the Real World. I personally am inclined to design schools around the Real World, because not only are young people going to live in the Real World as adults, they are in fact living in it right now as well.
People, Places and Things
In this section of the newsletter I share people, places and things that have inspired and taught me valuable lessons about rethinking learning.
As the school year begins, I decided to share a thing this week. Incidentally this thing first entered my practice as an educator when I took a course at Antioch New England in my M.Ed. program, which I discussed last week. The thing is….
A hand bound book.
In that course I learned how to make simple hand bound books using a beautiful and relatively simple technique called Japanese Stab Binding. Now in the age of the internet it is easy to find tutorials and videos that can teach you the process. These books are useful for many purposes, in fact I made a book that on the last page asked my wife if she wanted to get married. (She said that she did)
I have made books with students of all ages and the process of creating a book and then using that book in your learning is both engaging and allows the student to assert their agency in the learning process.
See you next week!