Our school system’s convocation years ago featured a man who noted that within just a few short years our public schools would be rendered antiquated relics due to technology advancing so quickly that schools could not keep up with it. He was right. In my previous post, I was critical of schools going paperless with no plan. What we ended up with was taking beautiful technology and applying it in ways that were nearly inept and very boring – multiple choice assessments, electronic textbooks, forced writing about uninteresting topics, and uninviting graphics. That is exactly the opposite of our students’ technological experiences at home where they have ipads full of engaging apps, interactive video games, iphones w/ Facetime, and so much more. Their technological experience at school is quickly becoming irrelevant. And it makes me ask a tough question, “Are students learning more at home than they are at school?” Are the experiences that students get at school high quality OR are they just tolerated experiences that could be something more, something better?
There is an African proverb that says, “If you want to go fast, go by alone. If you want to go far, go with a team.” Sometimes we just need to get out of the way and let students learn. It is one of the reasons that I support the Montessori method of experiential learning. Dr Montessori was ahead of her time. She understood that children were hardwired to learn, and self directed learning wasn’t unfathomable. Students need to be set free to go it alone if they choose or to work together if they choose. But learning needed to be experiential. And given the room to learn, students would embrace that option. In education, we call Dr Montessori’s method…project based learning. (For the purpose of this post, experiential learning and project based learning are interchangeable.)
Children acquire knowledge through experience in the environment. ~Dr. Maria Montessori
Children are endowed with a power that enables them to reconstruct things which are very complex, and they do so with a great deal of pleasure. ~Dr. Maria Montessori
I am a huge fan of Steve Jobs. I have read his biography, and watched both films by his name. I use Apple products. He was cranky. He was cantankerous at times when collaborating. But….he was gifted. He completely rethought how to get technology into the hands of the common person. He was brilliant. Today, we can thank him for being able to carry computers in our pockets. We can thank him for digitized music. He wanted all of that to be found on sleek devices which could talk to each other. He probably couldn’t write the code, but he knew how networked devices should work. He could envision it. He was able to go out and find the people who could to build it. Jobs managed the design teams, and had incredibly high expectations. Everyone tolerated those expectations, because they knew the final outcome would be a giant leap forward in how personal computing and entertainment would be viewed. I imagine Steve Jobs had outdistanced his teachers. He had created an entirely new field and spearheaded the information age.
Pablo Picasso. He was one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. Along with Vincent van Gogh, M.C. Escher, they are my favorite artists. In my classroom, I had prints of paintings of both Van Gogh and Picasso hanging on the wall. I figured if my students ever got bored and stared at the walls as I did when I was a kid, I wanted them to see great art. As a child, Picasso showed promise early on. There is a story that he painted his sister’s face with egg. His mom talked to his dad about it who was perplexed. In turn, his dad took him to the beach to think and probably also to let his mom cool off a bit. Picasso, while his dad was napping, drew a beautiful sketch in the sand of a dolphin without ever lifting up the stick he drew it with. His dad awoke, and was amazed. He eventually decided to teach Picasso to paint. At some point during Picasso’s early teens, his dad gave his painting equipment to Picasso. He told Pablo that he(the dad) wouldn’t be need them anymore. Picasso could go further with that painting equipment.
What if we could develop schools that regularly produced innovators like Steve Jobs and Pablo Picasso? Now, that is a question that I would love to ponder. What if? That is the question that brings about new things. Do we have school systems, schools, and classrooms which are encouraging our students to ask, “What if?” Are we asking that question of ourselves as educators. Is what they are studying relevant? Is how we are delivering instruction relevant? Is the entire philosophy of data driven schools relevant? What if we can do better?
I don’t think Jobs or Picasso would have thrived in today’s data driven environment. In fact, they may have faded into obscurity. Cubism and iphones – poof, never existed. But what if we designed classrooms and recruited instructors who facilitated classrooms dedicated to experiential learning, I bet they would have enjoyed those places – free to learn, free to explore. Is this drive to get better test scores snuffing out real learning in exchange for nifty improvement graphs which tell an excruciatingly small part of the process of learning? I think so. When I have observed or participated in rich, experience based learning, the learning was much deeper and meaningful when compared to a data driven classroom.
If we want to create environments where children can learn to think, we need dig deep and consider experience based instruction, i.e. project based learning. The school systems which hold to data driven approaches will be the dinosaurs of education in twenty years, and their leaders will be remembered like Neville Chamberlain who just went with the flow until it was too late. They will become irrelevant, and that is happening as we speak. STEM schools are just the beginning of the movement to experiential and project based learning – and I am talking real STEM schools and not the ones with just the label. Systems which embrace and teach with methods similar to Montessori schools will be considered the innovative schools. In fact, the top K-8 private school in a local metro area utilizes a experiential learning, and has for over 50 years.
Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have. ~ Steve Jobs
Both Steve Jobs and Pablo Picasso were masters of their craft. They were innovators. And sitting in our classrooms all across America, there are young people just like them. They are found in suburban schools. They are found in urban environments. The are found on Native American reservations. They are found in rural schools. They are found in home schools. But they are there. I love the scene in Good Will Hunting where Will solves the problem in the hallway, and it blows people’s minds. Will was just a janitor at the time. While fiction, I can just about guarantee there are kids like that all across our country.
And I don’t think our schools are equipped to handled that type of brain power. I don’t think our schools have the goal of allowing students to be creative, to explore, to build experiences which will shape them and their future. Here is a great Steve Jobs qu
