I want to make students feel successful, and I want them to have fun. I also want them to have authentic learning experiences that prepare them for the world. So what is our world?
Our world is a combination of seeking pleasure and enduring pain. We seek fun and make the most out of our passions, be they conversation, art, performance, relaxation, building/engineering, pleasing our senses, helping people, et. Al. But with that also comes enduring pain, from the most mundane discomforts of reading dull directions and waiting on line, to the most extreme pains of losing those we love and dealing with physical and financial hardship. But how can we create opportunities for students to experience and learn skills and facts about pleasure and pain in such an artificial environment as a school? Are there meaningful ways to do this?
Teachers want to hold students accountable for learning skills and facts, but what incentive is there to learn them? Meaningful and relevant applications for their learning should be Plan A, but there are a lot of logistical snags:
- They take time: every time I do a meaningful project, it takes a lot longer than I expected, especially when I want the product to be authentic and polished. This doesn't need to be a bad thing, but the more time students spend on a project, the less time there is for them to learn new content.
- They are hard to replicate on a large scale: class size and case load are tough for teachers when you have 100 or more students. Big projects can often overwhelm a teacher, who needs to be able to critique and evaluate each one, while having the time outside of work for family responsibilities and self-care.
- They are hard to evaluate: what makes a final product successful? Often times, this is evident in whether the project serves its intended function, but how do you determine if that function and purpose was a challenge for students? How do you design a project that is realistic, but challenges students based on everyone's current levels of performance? And if you allow students to share in the process of making a rubric or the criteria for grading, this also adds time to the project, so how can all this be done effectively?
- Some students don't have the time or skills to complete them: What do we do with a project that requires out-of-class time for students who have a long commute, or babysitting/work responsibilities, or a haphazard home life? What about students with learning disabilities or language issues who are unable to complete the project due to language barriers or difficulty with reasoning and abstract thinking? How do we modify these without, again, making our out-of-school time consumed by work?
- They may not prepare students for the realities of their academic future: I have often used really interactive ways of teaching students, and they worked well, but as students move towards college, these interactive projects don't prepare them for some of their lecture, seminar, and essay driven classes.
I have also experienced another facet of this engagement puzzle: I plan a really interactive lesson or project, and the students really like it, but they don't put 100% of their effort into it, more like 50-75%, which is enough to make the project work because they are smart and it's well-designed. But when it comes time for them to take a standardized test about the topic, they didn't learn or absorb enough. This happened with me and a 2016 election role play I did with my AP Government class. A film crew came and took footage of it, so you can see how it looks pretty solid, but the students ended up earning lackluster grades on the AP Exam, since elections aren't more than 15% of the test, and I needed to spend 6 weeks (25% of the year) on it to do it justice. Or did I? I still can't decide if I could have gotten it done in 4 weeks by assigning students more homework. Anyway, here's the video:
https://www.theguardian.com/global/video/2016/nov/06/classroom-debate-trump-clinton-video
When I watch that, I feel bittersweet. The role play was neat, but students didn't take full advantage of it, and some of them kind of phoned it in. But it still functioned well enough to work. I didn't build in as much rigor or content as I should have, and the students were very resentful of when they finished the AP Exam and realized how few questions were about elections. The role play made them very aware of politics (Clinton and Trump), which is a valuable life skill and allows them to enter political discussions, but knowing more mundane details about the Articles of Confederation and arcane vocabulary would have helped them on the test. And they knew it. But I digress.
We should all strive to make our lessons and projects interactive. We should all try to imbue purpose into our classes that engage students in their passions so they WANT to learn. But we also need to be mindful of the time these take, and if we are conditioning them to view learning as an immediately gratifying and engaging process, rather than the slow build that learning sometimes requires in real life. One of my former students, who was part of that role play, went off to college and, in mid October, posted a Facebook status asking, "You ever have that one professor that talks the whole time without asking the class anything? I have three". Can we use engaging, interactive projects to adequately prepare students for boring, lecture-driven classes? This is where I'm torn, especially as an upper-grades teacher; I want to prepare students for college without sacrificing the engagement, but how can I teach them to be engaged even when they are bored? What if we never coach them through boring learning requirements? When they have to read a mortgage contract or a long, technical document, will they just give up because they don't think they have to learn something dull?