How do we encourage "good work" from our students?

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Reuven Werber on May 21, 2007 at 7:08am

Hi Ken,
First I will confess to not having read Gardners book as yet, but I would like to relate to the point you raised. I think that one way we can make school work "engaging and meaningful" to our students is to have them share it with a wide audience who is interested in what they are doing. The audience could be teachers or topic experts or peers who are following the work. If the audience will interact with the students, reviewing and commenting on the work this could bring about even greater involvement. This, if the reviewers are polite and show genuine interest in the work. One of the classes in our school has been doing a collaborative project with a Canadian class. Our students did research projects on various aspects of Jerusalem and posted them on the project wiki where the Canadian students viewed them and posted their reviews in the discussion areas of the wiki. Our students enjoyed the reviews greatly and related to the suggestions and questions that they received. Most of them incorporated the suggestions they received in subsequent revisions of their work.
A nice example of this process can be seen here: http://jerusalem.wikispaces.com/message/view/The+Nachlaot+Neighborh...

Permalink Reply by Ken Messersmith on May 21, 2007 at 7:35am

Thanks for the addition to my discussion. I read some of the interaction between your students and the students in Canada. What a great way to increase the understanding and interaction between very different cultures.

I have been thinking about how to get my students connected to people of different cultures. You have given me some great ideas.

Permalink Reply by Reuven Werber on May 21, 2007 at 9:30am

Our Collaborative Literature program. sponsored by the Israel Ministry of Education provides opportunities for this kind of cultural exchange. See: http://www.education.gov.il/ipncl

Permalink Reply by Connie Weber on May 21, 2007 at 9:36am

Make the work engaging and meaningful...a very worthy ambition. One way I try to do this is by putting the work into the hands of the kids, calling it "Week's Work," and allowing the students to go about the individualized and collaborative work on their own schedules. They have work time during class (which is almost all the time since I'm not up in front of the class for "sit and git" lectures very often) and homework is Week's Work, too, whatever the student wants to continue to work on at home. (Homework is expected to average about 45 minutes a night for these 4th/5th graders. Students often work longer--they can decide.) Students know they can add to the plans for Week's Work, designing assignments in which everyone will participate.

So I've found that empowering the kids in this way leads to them feeling the work is engaging and meaningful. Still, I have much work to do, especially in this new age of learning. Kids feel empowered, which leads to engagement, but what is truly meaningful? This is something always in flux, always changing and evolving. And the definition of meaningful is not "fun" but something much more powerful. Meaningfulness may be there at the onset, or not there until one looks back.
I love thinking about these questions.

What Reuven said adds a lot. This has been a new step for me, this year, with all the Web 2.0 stuff. Now my kids podcast and make iMovies. For whom? Answering the question of audience provides some of the essence in this question of meaningfulness.

Thank you, Ken! A great question. Let's keep thinking.

Permalink Reply by Skip Zilla on May 22, 2007 at 8:41am

Ken,

When is it that you or I or anyone has the sense about ourselves that we are doing "good work?" There's a certain measure we take of our own accomplishments when we compare them with what we see others accomplish using their abilities, but there are also senses we get, most subconsciously, of what our contributions mean to others' success and of how we're growing personally--we sense our growth in capability, skill, and self-regard and are pleasantly surprised and enlivened by it.

My Dad told and showed me as a kid how to hit a pitched baseball that curved down and away from me as a batter to right field. My initial trials in formal league play were frustrating. But, I played whiffleball games with the neighborhood kids, in which it was nearly impossible for a pitcher to throw a straight pitch. I learned to patiently watch the flight of the curving whiffle ball. Pretty soon I was hitting nearly every whiffle ball pitched. I put my informal play skills to to good use in actual baseball games. The combination of what my Dad had told me to try (mostly about repositioning myself in the batter's box and delaying my swing) and of all the whiffleball games I played gave me the opportunity to drive onbase runners across the plate in real games of baseball that counted. I became the best curve ball hitter on the team--so much so that opposing managers told their pitchers to throw high fast balls, instead of curves, to me (I could hit those, too.). I loved playing baseball with new found skills and confidence. If there was a "test" it was recorded in game scorebooks and in team statistics. As great as it was to see my name at the top of team batting averages and in newspaper write-ups, those weren't why I progressed. I progressed because I loved the game and loved being a good player of it.

I'm not going to try to present some easy translation of my youthful baseball experience to the thirst youths today have for personal learning experiences of all kinds. I do suggest that we focus on what students learn how to do (learning what they need to "know" in the process of accomplishing very real, not academic objectives) and help them measure their accomplishments in comparisons with what their peers and others are accomplishing. But the key gauge will remain an internalized one for each student, and our most important work will be to learn what that student sees of her/his own development and to nurture that personal vision.

Thanks for asking important questions,

Skip

Permalink Reply by Ken Messersmith on May 22, 2007 at 9:22am

Skip,
I liked your story about learning to hit a curve ball. It is interesting to me that we, guys especially, tend to bring up experiences in sports when we talk about something that we struggled with but eventually learned. It is more difficult for me to think of learning concepts in Math, Science, writing, etc. with the same level of clarity. In sports, it is very clear, you either hit that curve ball and got the RBI or everyone knew that you were unsuccessful.

What would we need to do to insure that our students have the same kinds of experiences with other learning situations? Would a student with an intense interest in writing or science be able to tell the same kind of story about struggling to learn something difficult and finally finding success?

Permalink Reply by Skip Zilla on May 22, 2007 at 12:22pm

Ken,

You gave a clue to the question of "clarity" when you wrote earlier about the obfuscation of math you faced as an entering college student. I can envision a student using progressively more analytical math in applied science projects grouped by readiness, not age, in which students collaborated to identify needs in their neighborhoods and then developed useful "solutions" to meet those needs. Local officials and business people might learn to see the value of engaging with students in these collaborative community initiatives. I see an adult version of one those (fortunate) students telling her personal learning story that led to how she eventually was able to work on hydrogen fuel-celled cars as an engineer or mechanic.

Educators need to take the monkey off their backs. A society of parents (and non-parents) is responsible for educating its young. When that society does not honestly try to help each kid grow up to be able to tell a personal story of learning success, it is not educators who should be blamed. That very old transfer of blame to a scapegoat has got to stop.

Perhaps educators can learn to better promote to the wider public the need for classroom and school reforms. The message to send is clear, too, in a way that must not be obfuscated by unnecessary erudition. It is best delivered by children themselves, in a non-Madison-Avenue style, voiced in their own words in their stories of learning success in a wider context of children's educational disappointments. All in (American, especially, but also in other) society can better reckon how we only diminish our lives by shortchanging kids--and not only in the long run.

We'll know we've gotten somewhere when it is a common occurrence for an inner-city kid to tell us his story: how he was part of a mixed-aged group, when an elementary student, that studied how to cleanup a nearby polluted river and to grow vegetable gardens in his neighborhood; how he was able to develop his interest in biology and computer science in high school and college; and how he was now a microbiologist sequencing the genome of a new life form discovered at the bottom of the Pacific (that may even be Martian in origin!), when he wasn't bike-riding with his kids to a museum of art on his side of town.

Help a kid envision her/his future by an engagement with the world outside of classroom walls, then come back to the classroom as a lab for building the learning around that vision.

Skip

Permalink Reply by Connie Weber on May 22, 2007 at 4:19pm

Ok, that second to last paragraph, Skip, about the inner-city kid becoming a microbiologist, yes, that satisfies me as a very pure and perfect example of "meaningful." Wow. I'm going to read that a number of times. Education doesn't get any better than that. What I also like about your example (besides its depth and beauty) is that it could easily switch into any number of life-filled examples: some home-schooled kid notices a robin nest in a tree by his house every year, googles robins and finds Journey North, joins the community of data reporters and discoverers who investigate the birds together, and this kid ends up at Cornell teaching migratory patterns to college students, some of whom work at Journey North. Or the kid who watched ants on the suburban sidewalk and by luck found a community of naturalists who traveled the world with him, who ended up becoming the naturalist E.O. Wilson, who's starting the Encyclopedia of Life. That's meaningful.
But I don't think any of this could be planned out. I think a common denominator here, getting back to Ken's question about engagement and meaning, is that when learning is "real," it's powerful. So what's REAL? I think maybe it's learning in settings or situations in which we feel we can make a difference.

Permalink Reply by Skip Zilla on May 22, 2007 at 7:51pm

I'm not convinced that "real" learning, as you call it Connie, is ever engaged in, knowing in advance what actual differences it may make to us and others, although we may anticipate feeling elated by what we may learn. Well in advance, we may say our long-range goal is to be a naturalist or President and say our short-range objective is to identify as many wildflowers as possible along a country road or read Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, but when we're actually engaged with something in an almost altered state of mind, all other preoccupations are suspended. It is important to let kids know that it's not misbehavior to absorb themselves in learning at the expense of social attentiveness--at least for reasonable periods of time.

Permalink Reply by Skip Zilla on May 22, 2007 at 6:28pm

Ken,

I re-read "everyone knew that you were unsuccessful" and realized that succeeding only 40 percent of the time as a batter, even failing to hit when runners were in scoring position, was part of the game I loved to play. Failure wasn't a debilitating end of the meta-game of baseball, and another chance for a game-winning hit might present itself at the next game a few days away. Besides, one who loves the game appreciates the opponent's good play as well as his own--if he skillfully fooled you by pitching a good change-up or fielded a difficult ground ball to get you out, it actually made the game more compelling and worth playing.

My point is this: playing the game of baseball with enjoyment and self-confidence even when "failure" has such a large probability of happening in its play is immeasurably different than being a dead-ended student whose experience in a classroom is not as a real "player" who can be engaged in the "play," but a body that's taking up space and is acknowledged only as part of a head count by administrators and teachers. I grieve for that kid. We will never know what might have become of him had we (the society) wanted him to succeed personally as a well-educated individual.

If we (as citizens) become capable of prioritizing our social goals and enterprises so that all students are known as and nurtured to become the individuals they have the potential to be, not ignored and counted as statistics, then our lives will be more peaceable and productive and good.

Permalink Reply by Ken Messersmith on May 23, 2007 at 6:30am

I just read an article in Edutopia magazine about a whole school district that started a movement to make learning engaging and meaningful for their students. This story surely illustrates a place where students are doing "good work". Here is the link to the Edutpoia article.

Permalink Reply by Skip Zilla on May 23, 2007 at 7:28am

Great article, Ken. I'm going to send Grace Rubenstein a thank-you.
I wonder how many other localities in the country have tried "redefining learning" as those good folks in Lawrence Township have? I'm especially encouraged by the attitude of teachers to collaborate to be able to stick with the new paradigm, even though five-year long endowment funding has ended.

• ‹ Previous
• 1
• 2
• Next ›
• Page