Good learning designs
engage students in “playful” activities at the edge of their knowledge and
understanding using symbolic tools to develop and internalize meaningful
thought.
I love this principal because
out of the ones we’ve studied, it just makes the most sense on its own.
It goes back to our needs
for society: we need people to do what society needs, but also people who have
the will and ability to do so. I think the will is the more important part.
Almost anyone can learn how to do anything. I could study to be a great
historian and write lots of books, but I don’t have the will to make writing my
career. I could learn to tie balloon animals and become a clown, but I am terrified of clowns so I have no will to become one.
The focus of the fourth
design principal is play. At first I thought it meant we had to trick students
into learning by disguising a lesson as a game, but that’s not really the case.
We’re tricking teachers into creating lessons that are useful and actually make
sense for what students are trying to learn.
My classes are loud and
full of nonsense and mistakes, but it’s totally worth it to see the lightbulbs
go off. Their joy, combined with my relief that yes we can play Hot Cross Buns
and it sounds relatively recognizable, is why I love teaching. To them, they
just learned something super cool that only 15 people in the school can do. To
me, they did that but also learned how to control the muscles in their lips and
coordinate that with moving their fingers and regulating their air. We do
note-reading activities and breathing exercises, but alone those are boring and
seemingly pointless. Only when you put it together with actually playing music
that the kids understand WHY those skills are useful.
"We're tricking teachers..." Love this! I was in a classroom yesterday troubleshooting a computer while the teacher was giving a lesson on early civilizations. The wheels in mind started turning to thinking of ways to make that lesson more "playful."
ReplyDeleteI love your "We're tricking teachers..."line, too. I guess what we have to do is "trick" teachers into rethinking their activities and the ways they present old material. If we "gameify" old, dry stuff, we can make it seem more like play for kids, we can make it more compelling. I experienced this at work. First graders don't know the first thing about calculating wind speed to make sure cargo dropped from a helicopter hits its target; that's a pretty advanced concept, but we've put that into a game, and kids love the experience of simulating a helicopter cargo drop. They don't always realize it, but they're learning math!
ReplyDeleteLove this post! As the fellow music teacher, I relate to your lines about the note reading activities being boring but automatically becoming useful when the students actually get to play their instruments.
ReplyDeleteI can relate to your description of the boring nature of note-reading and breathing exercises when practiced in isolation, but having much more meaning when they are finally put together to play music. In the library, we practice doing certain skills like using the online catalog to look up a book, understanding call numbers and how they are made, using shelf markers to hold the place of a book on a shelf while we browse through it, and finding books and other resources in the different sections of the library on scavenger hunts. It may seem pointless to the students until they come to the library during open check-out and need to find a book independently because I am working with a class and the library assistant is busy checking out books to a group of kindergartners. We work on those skills so they can be independent users on the library and find the information that they need when they need it. This will be something that they can use in other locations and skills that will transfer to other areas of their lives.
ReplyDelete