First, two stories.
1. This year I decided to take advantage of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival that is two hours away in Ashland, Oregon. A Midsummer Night’s Dream presented a perfect middle school introduction to Shakespeare so we studied the play, put on the “Pyramus and Thisbe” play within the play, and then went to see the play as the culmination of the unit. The kids loved it. Their eyes shone so brightly, with such excitement the next day. One of the kids wanted to build a stage. Now that they realized how richly a story could be embroidered upon the stage, they asked if they could put on the entire play. After pointing out the challenges, I put it to a vote and they voted unanimously for staging the play. (They also voted for studying another Shakespeare play that will be presented at Ashland next spring.) Theoretically, attending that play was the culmination of that “unit”. To extend it by putting on an entire play and studying another Shakespeare play will mean not covering some other literature I had scheduled for that year. Do I run with their enthusiasm or stick to my original plan?
2. That same after-play day, I introduced the “systems thinking” concept of Feedback in my Change Class (where the subject of the class is Change). The next Monday during Field Studies, the kids were planting valley oaks as part of a riparian corridor restoration project. Later in the day we were going to measure stream depth and velocity in order to calculate stream discharge. During lunch I started balancing one of the meter sticks we were going to use. Soon I had several kids balancing meter sticks on their hands, chins, and toes. As they played with this, I said “This is a perfect example of feedback. Your eyes are watching the top of the stick. What the top of the stick is doing goes into your brain and changes how you move your hand which changes the bottom of the stick which, in turn, changes the behavior of the top of the stick which changes what we see which changes how we move our hand, etc….
And suddenly, as I watched this spontaneous lesson on feedback deepen and I thought of the enthusiasm for Shakespeare, I realized that feedback is an important concept for understanding what is happening in public education. We must understand that as people high in the educational hierarchies push for national standards and standardized tests, a system is being created that is unaffected by the feedback of student enthusiasm or boredom. “Your enthusiasm will have little shape on this class because we are going to move through this textbook at a certain rate whether you like it or not.”
One of the amazing qualities about Chrysalis is how easily the teaching responds to student interest. This increases student learning in two ways. (1). Because the learning responds to their interest, the teaching tends to be couched in a delivery that students find interesting. And (2). like modern interactive computer games, school is more interesting because it is interactive. You have more control over what happens. Becoming more excited can change the “game” in ways that makes it even more exciting. Or it’s like the difference in awareness between a person driving to work and a person riding the bus. If your attention is not needed to shape the lesson, your mind can slip off elsewhere.
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