#tcdsbel

I think there’s value to reading criticisms of the work that I do.  My old boss, Jan Murphy, would say “a criticism is just a poorly worded concern.” Another perspective is that without considering the pitfalls and shortcomings of a thing, we’ll never be able to make it better.

So, yesterday I read an opinion piece that digs into Why Experiential Learning is Not As Good As Classroom Learning. There’s a lot to the article, but I think that the crux of it appears in these paragraphs:

“Almost all of us will eventually have to work for a living, and that will always require sustained ‘real-life, engaged learning.’ It will also call for immersion in interactions with average minds (like most of our own) working toward mundane ends. As educators, we should be proud that we give our students, while they are students, the opportunity to interact -- through their reading and writing, their laboratory work, and our instruction -- with what the best minds have discovered and developed within our various disciplines. This is something the ‘real world’ is unlikely to offer them regularly once they leave college.

Oscar Wilde once said (contradicting Goethe) that it is much more difficult to think than to act. The most valuable thing we can teach students is the ability to think through, with patient focus, demanding intellectual challenges. Solving a difficult linear algebra problem, working to understand an intricate passage from Descartes, figuring out how, exactly, the findings of evolutionary morphology explain the current human stride -- all these are examples of the sort of learning that we should be proud to provide our students. And not one of them features ‘real-life’ engagement.”

 I wanted to hate the post.  

I wanted to scream the message that I have privately saying for years: “School is not the best place to learn. The more we can make the learning in school match the learning that happens out of school, the better.”

 But I don’t hate the post.

I think that the author, John Kajinsky, has a great point.  There is value to pondering, to thinking, to immersing ourselves in ideas. Good Experiential Learning needs to keep that in mind. 

The draft document: Community Connected Experiential Learning really emphasizes reflection and application as key ingredients to Experiential Learning.  Without both elements, we run the risk of Experiential Learning becoming “job training” or “a fun field trip”.  It’s by transferring knowledge from the experience to larger concepts/ideas that deep learning occurs. 

Here’s an example: 

“... experiential learning in the classroom means students learn through doing, such as gardening to learn botany. But it is important to note, that experiential learning goes beyond an active methodology. Experiential learning is about cultivating a keen awareness of the lesson’s meaning and relevance to the individual… it is about bringing lessons from the abstract to the concrete.

When a child asks, “Why do I have to learn math?” They are not requesting examples of how math may be relevant to a particular future job. They are asking, “Why does this matter right now? How is this relevant to my immediate reality?” This is why a major component of bringing successful experiential learning into a classroom involves making lessons immediately relevant to the student, so that they can respect the process of learning.”

Another, example happened in my board two weeks ago.  Students used the experience of milling fallen trees to dig deeper into ideas around human interactions with the environment.

They used the day’s experience as a provocation to learn more about how human interactions affect the environment.

While I recognize that a “classroom only” approach would allow more time for deep thinking, it would also not present the rich provocation for learning that this experience provided. Perhaps this question ought to be asked before planning any Experiential Learning: “What learning will this experience help us to flesh out through deep reflection and meaningful application?”

This weekend I read a pretty great post by Max Roser. It is a thoughtful, and insightful description of this graphic that Max made:

As I read the post and stared at the map, I kept thinking about all of the different stories that this data tells. It talks about equity, about representation, about sharing. This graphic shows the reader so many things that a list of numbers simply can’t.

In Ontario, one of the areas of focus for our Math Curriculum - or as we call them, strands - is Data Management and Probability.  It’s a part of the curriculum because, we are surrounded by data; students need to learn how to interpret and understand that information:

“Graphs and statistics bombard the public in advertising, opinion polls, population trends, reliability estimates, descriptions of discoveries by scientists, and estimates of health risks, to name just a few. In this strand, students learn about different ways to gather, organize, and display data. They learn about different types of data and develop techniques for analysing the data that include determining measures of central tendency and examining the distribution of the data."

When data is represented in ways like Max's map, it’s far easier for students to see all of the stories that the numbers can tell them.  As I reflect to some Data Management work that I have done with my students, I wonder if it would have helped the kids to first, visualize what the numbers are telling them through diagrams and sketchnotes like this map.

“Most of the time, thinking is integrated with doing: We think in the context of interacting with things, playing with things, creating things. And most thinking is done in connection with other people: We share ideas, get reactions from other people, build upon one another’s ideas.”

-Mitchel Resnick

I think that this is the part of Lifelong Kindergarten that is the most relevant to the work I’m doing these days.  The language is a little vague, and the thinking is messy, but so is learning.

In the three months that I’ve been working as our board’s Leader of Experiential Learning I’ve seen students...  

“interacting with things robotics”

“playing with things rockets”

“creating things films”

I’ve also witnessed students...

“share ideas about plant/medicinal sovereignty”

“get reactions from other people about wind turbine designs”

“build upon one another’s ideas about what we can do to help each other out through high anxiety that happens at school.”

All of this learning is deeply connected to providing meaningful experiences, helping students to reflect upon these experiences, and, finally, applying that learning to other parts of their lives.

As I mentioned recently to a friend, school needs to be a place where kids can do things that they would not be able to do on their own or at home; otherwise, we have wasted an opportunity.