#rhizo15 week 1: How do we design our own or others learning when we don’t know where we are going? How does that free us up? What can we get done with subjectives that can’t be done with objectives?
The word that stuck out for me in Dave’s initial question was ‘design’. How do we design the learning when we don’t know where we’re going?
I’ve struggled with this question since I started teaching four years ago. I came out of teachers’ college with the idea of backwards design drilled into me. ‘Planning with the end in mind’ is how I approached all my units, but I quickly started rebelling against this notion. It wasn’t working for me. My visions of motivated, engaged students following my unit plan weren’t materializing.
The problem was that it was my plan. If I wanted the students to own their learning, they had to be part of the designing and planning. And that planning will look different for different students. And that means I don’t necessarily know where we are going.
I think the context is important when we are designing this unpredictable learning. Sometimes the context is just the people (the community is the curriculum) and an initial stimulus (‘this week’s questions is…’). I’m part of a book club-type thing that meets every week, and the directions our conversations take that I could never have predicted always amaze me. An initial question will take us in some direction, and I often sit there thinking of all the possible ways the conversation could have gone. If there had been one more or one fewer person, or if someone else had made the first comment. It’s our wonderfully complex brains sitting there and responding to each other. One person’s story reminds me of my own, and my story sparks a connection in someone else.
If we’re designing unpredictable, rhizomatic learning experiences, maybe what we’re actually designing is the context. You design the setting, the platform for the discussion, or the initial stimulus and the learning happens – reflect on or assign the subjectives at the end.
An example of my experimenting with designing without knowing where we’re going…
I teach grade 8 science, which includes a unit on water systems. The unit has no less than 19 different content-related learning outcomes ranging from water pollution to riparian zone erosion to heat capacity and water currents. A ton of topics that you could each spend a year studying--you get the idea.
I decided to throw the idea of ‘covering’ all these outcomes out the window, and instead have students enter a local competition called Caring for Our Watersheds. The idea was simple, identify a water-related problem or issue in your watershed and come up with a proposal to help fix the problem. (As a bonus, a number of the ideas actually get funded and the students get money to carry their ideas out).
The students now play a role in designing their own learning. They have to pick their own problem to focus on and research--hopefully one they are actually interested in. The stimulus was provided by looking at a variety of news articles and videos on current water-related issues. Each one stimulated good classroom discussion, and after two weeks everyone had picked something to focus on.
I was happy with how things turned out. In a reversal of roles, the students were teaching me about topics such as why the piping plover is going extinct, why students at our school don’t use re-usable water bottles, and how we could save hundreds of thousands of liters of water every year at our school simply by a cheap retrofit on our toilets (this idea won 3rd place out of 258 entries!).
In the end, I could probably go back through all the projects and assign the learning objectives that we ‘covered’ as a class as we shared with each other. Do I care to? No. I’m confident that subjective learning happened.
Sheldon Hiebert @sheldon_hiebertThanks to colleague/friend Barry Dyck for pushing me to start writing my thoughts and experiences and start connecting with the online community.