In the third section of the book, Chapters 5-6, Tony Wagner gets into the meat of the argument. Basically, we need to abolish traditional modes of learning that are largely prescriptive and content-based. We need to focus more on letting kids experiment and play to learn the process of creating knowledge rather than just being able to recall knowledge.
“To be a successful science teacher, you have to make it fun, and for kids that means making it theirs--so that they have ownership over what they are learning. It’s what motivates them. The other problem is that teachers think that, in order to cover the state standards, they have to give students all the answers, instead of having students discover the answers on their own. The most important thing is allowing students to ask questions and then give them space to find the answers. They will actually retain more of the content by learning in this way.” (p. 149) This points to a truth I have been discovering my whole year of student-teaching. Students don’t want to be told to fill in a worksheet and know something for a test (most of them don’t, anyways). Still, I see a lot of educators taking the banking approach to education, wherein they are “depositing” valuable knowledge directly to students, expecting that this will prepare kids for being successful and thoughtful adults. That being said, there is so much validity in the fear that teachers will not be able to cover all of the standards of their content area in a given year. I think that to truly change the way we approach the dilemma of transmitting information as an expert vs. coaching students through the discovery of information, we need to somehow figure out how to make the systemic changes to how we measure student and teacher achievement. Until then, however, we are always going to be taking part in a tricky balancing act to be effective and engaging educators. “...you can’t manage innovators the way that you used to manage folks in manufacturing--with command and control. Innovators don’t want to be managed. They want to work with a group of people whom they respect and solve customer problems that are intrinsically interesting to them.” (p. 230) Again, I have chosen this quote because it speaks to my experience in the classroom. Students work the best, and produce the most creative results, when they are problem solving with peers about real problems. Being an English teacher, my “real” problems are never quite as concrete as I would like them to be; nonetheless, I find that students are prone to engage in deeper and more critical discussion when they can draw relations between literature and their personal lives and when they are allowed to support and build upon one another’s arguments. Final Reflection about the book: On the whole, this was an excellent and interesting read for those of us who are interested in facilitating genuine learning. I found Wagner’s arguments and anecdotes to be incredibly related to what I have observed in my classrooms. The youth he describes in this book are the same youth that I see coming in and out of my classroom every day. This book has certainly gotten me thinking about what kinds of changes and experiences I need to implement/facilitate within my classroom.
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Chapters 3-4 of the book give us some insight into what kinds of thinkers innovators truly are. What is more important to these people than what they are doing is how they are doing things. The thought processes they have and the values they ascribe to their life experiences tell me much more about how to create and foster optimum learning environments than their achievements and accolades. The former set is the desired product, while the latter is only a side-effect.
“...So I decided to stay in china for a little while longer, because I didnt know what else to do. The husband and wife who ran the shoe factory were like my family and let me watch and learn from them and try things.” (pp.91-92) This excerpt is from a story about Jamien, who started a shoe company out of college only to have his partners make some bad choices and bankrupt the company. He got stranded in china, but it kind of worked out for him. I just thought that this part of Jamien’s story was so cool because he took a failure and then turned it into an impromptu internship. From the way that he tells the story, it really doesn’t seem like he consciously knew what he was setting up for himself, either. He just had a very creative and productive mindset that he would continue to learn about what he cared about although things hadn’t gone the way he planned. This anecdote really stood out to me because it’s the mindset that I hope to instill in my students. “... And she brings me inside and she starts telling me about sea turtles. And she’s not yelling at me. She’s just educating me about these endangered animals. What I was doing with those fireworks was impeding a creature that’s been on the earth for sixty-five million years, and they are integral parts of the coral system which they inhabit.” (P.130) This quote, which is part of a short story explaining one teen’s experience with finding passion, is so exemplary of how teachers can help students become responsible and productive adults through their everyday interactions. Oftentimes, we are so concerned (especially in our schools) with how to correctly “punish” a student, that we don’t consider the possibility of a student not knowing the full impact of how their actions affect the environment around them. If we are truly trying to provide an environment that incubates good, educated citizens who interact critically with the world around them, shouldn’t we be providing them with chances to think critically about their own contributions to environments? Truthfully, I am not a fan of most “innovation” or “reform” texts, because they usually seem to miss the point of education and reek of privilege and naivete. This is not that kind of book though. This author (at least so far) has been genuine in his research and interview process and really done a nice job of presenting an argument that is critical of our current education system without being ignorant of real-world scenarios. So often, reformers propose “solutions” that could only be possible in perfect, upwardly-mobile, charter school settings. Tony Wagner has gone through his points very carefully to acknowledge and begin to approach the class issues present in our education system. I think that the most efficient format I can use for critically reflecting on this book in a way that allows me to apply the content to my life is to pull out snippets that resonated with me and provide some explanation.
“Going forward, we are convinced, the world increasingly will be divided between high imagination enabling countries, which encourage and enable the imagination and extras of their people an low imagination countries, which suppress or simply fail to develop their people’s creative capacities and abilities to spark new ideas.” (p.3) This quote resonated with because of how present this gap is in my classroom. The quote originally comes from a Thomas Friedman book, so I can only assume that it refers to global politics and economics, but I can see a lot of my students already falling into the latter category. This, I believe is through no fault of their own, but is a product of their schooling. Often, it is hard to encourage students to be creative and also encourage students to be “right”. The follow-up question to that though is, of course, should we even be encouraging students to be “right”? I think that, the more I consider the concept of “rightness”, the more I realize the answer is no...with a little bit of yes. Later on, in the same chapter (p.24), Wagner characterizes creativity as being the intersection of expertise, motivation and creative thinking skills. My experience and research over the past year tells me that educators are responsible for holding students accountable for “rightness” in the area of expertise and allowing students more flexibility in the areas of motivation and creative thinking skills. “Conflict resolution is fundamental to what it meands to do good product. A lot of companies that are supposedly innovative still dont make great products. It’s because they believe that in order to create new products, you have to remove constraints.” (P. 44) This has been a hard-earned lesson in my classroom this semester. I have been experimenting with the ideas of student empowerment and intrinsic motivation a lot. I have had projects where I essentially tell students: “Ok, go!”. Those don’t work out so well. Students often become overwheled with the sheer amount of options given to them, or they become angry at the indefinite nature (and the subsequent lack of relevancy) of the goal set before them. The projects that work the best for students, in my experience, are the projects that give students a definite set of parameters and a tangible goal to approach an issue, and then allow the students the flexibility to customize and adapt their approach within those parameters as they work. |
AuthorTrevor Rawlings is an educator at Pinacate Middle School in Perris, CA. Archives
April 2018
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