Creating Purpose-Driven Learning Experiences. William M. Ferriter
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• Collaboration: Flexibility and compromise, particularly when working on diverse teams, is also essential to success in the modern workplace. Students must learn to take responsibility and to value the contributions of others when working in collaborative environments. They must also learn to leverage the collective expertise of the group in order to best accomplish shared tasks.
• Critical thinking: The modern workplace values individuals who can evaluate evidence, analyze alternative points of view, make connections between arguments, and draw conclusions based on reasoned judgments. That means the students in our classrooms need to become skilled at managing information, looking at ideas in new ways, and drawing on information from multiple disciplines when solving problems.
• Creativity: Innovation in the modern workplace depends on individuals who demonstrate a willingness to think differently about the solutions to common problems. That means our students should be practicing creative thought on a regular basis in our schools—learning practices that can facilitate ideation and processes for revising, polishing, and improving on their own thinking and the thinking of others. They should also be open to suggestions, comfortable with the notion that failure and mistakes are a part of successful innovation, and ready to work within real-world limits when designing new ideas. (Partnership for 21st Century Skills, n.d.c)
And the best news for classroom teachers is that succeeding at meaningful work doesn’t mean that our students won’t meet the expectations of the increasingly demanding stakeholders that we serve. In fact, the chances are that regardless of where you live or what you teach, mastery is being redefined. Need an example? Look at the expectations laid out in documents like the Common Core State Standards or in the Next Generation Science Standards. You will see that the knowledge-driven objectives that have traditionally dominated our instruction have been pushed aside in favor of objectives that require students to do something with what they know. What’s more, students who are doing meaningful work are far more likely to see a reason for wrestling with the concepts required by state and district curriculum guides. That means that giving the kids in your classrooms chances to solve the kinds of challenging problems that Jack, Sylvia, and Martha were wrestling with will leave them even better prepared to meet your community’s expectations.
But succeeding at meaningful work isn’t something that every student is ready to do alone. While students may be comfortable with new tools and technologies, few see the opportunities that new tools and technologies make possible. Need proof? Then turn your next class loose in the computer lab for an hour or two without any kind of structured task and watch how they spend their time. If your kids are anything like mine, they are far more likely to spend their time checking their social media profiles or watching random videos on YouTube than developing tests for pancreatic cancer or drawing awareness to global food insecurity. They are kids, after all. How would you have spent two hours of unstructured time at school? Helping students to succeed at meaningful work, then, depends on our ability to build a bridge between what today’s kids can do and what they are doing with technology.
That’s what this book is all about.
Chapter 1
Here’s What I Mean by Doing Work That Matters
Are you ready for an interesting confession? Even though I make a pretty good living as a consultant to schools and districts across the world, I can be a terrible participant in traditional professional development sessions. If I wore a body camera to my next faculty meeting, district-level workshop, or school-based breakout session—and as a full-time classroom teacher I go to more than my fair share of meetings, workshops, and breakout sessions—there is a good chance you would catch me checking my email, sending tweets, or surfing the web. I’d lose track of the questions we were being asked to answer, I’d drop in and out of conversations we were asked to have, and I’d walk away having learned next to nothing that the presenter was expecting me to learn.
That doesn’t mean that I’m not learning during those meetings, workshops, and breakout sessions. In fact, if you looked through the emails, tweets, and websites I was exploring, you’d probably discover that I was involved in some pretty deep stuff. I might be having a conversation about best practice with a buddy who is integrating reading and writing into his classroom. I might be checking out a link to a science experiment I stumbled across on Twitter. I might be asking the readers of my blog for feedback on an instructional strategy that failed. While I may not be paying attention to the content being delivered by the expert in the room, it would be hard to argue that I wasn’t paying attention.
The truth is that access has changed me as a learner. In the 1990s, I tolerated (without complaint) staff development sessions that had little to do with my interests or that did little to challenge me as a practitioner simply because I didn’t have any other options. If I wanted to learn—and like most people, I do—I made the best of bad situations by looking for something worthwhile in whatever lesson the principal or professional developer in charge thought I needed to learn. Today, though, I know that ideas, individuals, and opportunities that interest and challenge me are never more than a mouse click away—and that’s made me an impatient learner. Force me to sit through training that treats me as a silent member of a passive audience, and I’ll find ways to steal minutes to study the things I really care about.
Does any of this sound familiar? Have you grown tired of professional development sessions chosen by others that are disconnected from your own needs? Are you pushing back by using your devices to seek out more relevant learning opportunities while simultaneously pretending to pay attention? If so, then congratulations: you are officially a modern learner. Now imagine how bored and frustrated students who sit in traditional classrooms must be. They too are forced to sit through countless lessons that have little direct connection with their own interests. Take the sixth graders on my learning team, for example: just yesterday, they studied the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, memorized the order of operations, learned the finer points of refraction, and practiced with adverbs. How’s that for a riveting schedule of irrelevance for you?
After twelve years of sitting through similar fact-heavy, teacher-driven lessons, University of Nebraska student Dan Brown had had enough. He shared his frustration in an insightful and poignant commentary posted to YouTube:
Two weeks ago, I dropped out of school, not because I’m a dead-beat, not because I was failing, not because I’m not just as motivated as anyone else to make a difference in this world. I dropped out of school because my schooling was interfering with my education. (Brown, 2010)
Spoken word artist Suli Breaks (2012) agrees: “All I’m saying is that if there was a family tree, hard work and education would be related, but school would probably be a distant cousin.”
Working to Engage Students
In response to these criticisms and new realities, innovative teachers are working to find ways to give students opportunities to demonstrate intellectual agency. Some have embraced 20% time, allowing their students to spend 20 percent of their school hours pursuing individual interests (Juliani, 2013). Others have created genius hours, where students study topics that drive them for one hour a day or one day a week (Carter, 2014). Innovation days ask students to master a new self-selected skill and then demonstrate their learning in front of an audience of parents and peers during the course of one school day (Stumpenhorst, 2011). Passion projects provide yearlong opportunities for every student to wrestle with a concept that is deeply personal to him or her. Regardless of title, the goal of each of these instructional models is to make sure that schooling doesn’t get in the way of learning for the kids in our classrooms. “We spend 14,256 hours in school between kindergarten and graduation,” argues A. J. Juliani (2013), a technology staff developer from Philadelphia. “If we can’t find a time for students to have some choice in their learning, then what are we doing with all those hours?”
But are strategies like 20% time, genius hours, innovation days, and passion projects the best we can do? There’s no doubt that introducing some measure of choice into our curricular decisions will resonate with students who are sick and