To be honest, this didn’t start out to be it’s own article…. It’s actually the second half of this one which sets up everything you’ll read here. But when that article approached the irretrievable tl;dr limit of 4,000 words, I was wisely advised to split it up. If you find yourself wanting more setup, a quick trip there will help. Don’t worry; I promise not to go anywhere while you check it out. If you already read that or don’t feel a trip back there is necessary, great. Let’s get on with the show….
If you’ve arrived here, it’s hopefully because you’re either a fan of learning-by-making or are learning-by-making curious. As I’ve written previously, this approach is an important antidote for the stultifying and toxic mix that passes as ‘standardized learning.’ However, despite a raft of research and supports for integrating challenge-based, service, and maker learning, many teachers and schools are hesitant to incorporate these approaches — at least for most learners. Perhaps those in elite schools or ‘accelerated’ programs will get a chance to experience learning-by-making, but most learners simply won’t.
That’s a shame.
When it comes down to it, this isn’t because most teachers are uncertain of the benefits of learning-by-making or haven’t heard colleagues sing its praises at conferences. It’s because they just don’t have the time necessary to develop and integrate projects in an already overflowing schedule. And the pressure of standardized exams makes adopting this approach seem even less advisable. Giving learners information to memorize for the test seems so much more expedient.
But it’s also less likely to ‘stick’ — and it takes dramatically more energy from teachers to keep the wheels turning. Schools that have embraced project- and challenge-based learning, on the other hand, have seen dramatic improvements in almost every measure — often to their own surprise. If schools can just overcome the initial friction, learning-by-making proves itself every time.
You’re a teacher. Or a parent. Or a school leader. Or just a person. Given the perilous state of the world, currently hosting a global pandemic as a warm-up act for … well, a catastrophic global warm-up, you’ve perhaps begun to recognize the burdens this next generation will have to carry. They won’t be able to let anything slide. The challenges they’ll have to solveare arguably more complicated than any in human history, and the choices they make will largely determine whether or not humanity survives. Plus, to put a cherry on top, despite the best efforts and labor of many teachers, most of this generation have a Covid-shaped hole right in the middle of their education.
However, they don’t really need what many educators are prepared to offer. They certainly don’t need fill-in-the blank worksheets, fill-in-the-bubble standardized exams, or fill-in-the-seat lectures. Far too many folks love to trot out the dubious old saw about “jobs that don’t exist yet,” but regardless of whether that’s true, it should be obvious that this generation won’t be prepared for any of what’s coming by marching through a bunch of lock-step, ‘school-that-exists-now’ exercises. There’s simply no way that regurgitating those pre-digested facts or replicating those canned-formula procedures is going to prepare them even for today’s challenges — let alone tomorrow’s.
As lots of us have been saying, we’ve got to build something better.
Pink Floyd’s 1979 The Wall presented a harrowing vision of the “educational industrial complex”
In my last article, I described two kinds of educational approach: the “Platonic,” that prizes “pure” abstract or conceptual information, and the “Aristotelian,” that focuses on embodiment and application of knowledge in learning-by-making and real-world contexts. In other words, it’s the difference between instruction and construction as teaching strategies. As I discussed, these approaches represent a dichotomy in today’s educational practice. However, they’re not evenly distributed. Despite copious evidence to support a more “Aristotelian” approach, the “Platonic” approach prevails in schools throughout much of the world. Instruction has eclipsed construction. And this poses a profound challenge for our collective future that most educators haven’t even considered….
In a previous edition of my career, when I was a professor of literature and literary theory, I used to tell my students that much of literary history could effectively be seen as an argument between Plato and Aristotle….
Plato believed in an absolute “reality” that exists outside of human perspective and experience — a perfect realm of universal “forms” that shape and give meaning to everything. He believed that the physical universe around us is an inferior, decaying shadow of these forms — nothing but a poor copy. Since only a few “elect” people can see beyond the distracting surface of the material universe, most people don’t really understand what’s important. And what’s important is not the concrete, physical world, but only the “abstract” one that hides beyond it in the perfect, ethereal plane. Human creation (whether by art, skill, or application) is merely another distraction associated with the inferiority of this material world: it’s okay for the “lesser” people, but not appropriate for those “elites” who know what’s what.
This post is the third in a series using “engagement and learning multiplier” (ELM) assessments to examine some common teaching and learning methods. If you’d like to (re)familiarize yourself with how these assessments work, you can refer to this post. If you’d like to compare this current post’s ELM assessment with others I’ve done, you can find the assessment of a laboratory course here, and you can find the rest of the “cubic” assessments in the sidebar (which may be at the bottom of this screen if you’re reading this on a mobile device).
For each of these assessments, I’ll set the learning scenario and then present analysis about why that approach has a given “cubic” shape and why it receives a particular ELM score. These posts are designed to provide useful examples and guidance as you evaluate your own learning approaches and as you make your own teaching and technology choices.
A problem-based learning course
Description
This middle-school social studies course is organized around a single major concept: building a human colony on Mars. Learners work through three separate phases of this concept over the course of the year: 1) the initial planning and colonization — deciding what would be needed to establish a colony and who should be invited as initial settlers; 2) the running of the colony — deciding what system of laws and government should characterize the settled colony; and 3) the expansion of the colony — deciding how to attract new settlers from earth to come and expand the colony’s capabilities. While the teacher has determined this overall structure, the details of what learners plan, what they make to demonstrate their plan (to both peers and parents), and how they present their work are all entirely left up to the learners. The teacher begins the course by introducing learners to Scrum, the collaboration method originally developed to help software developers work more productively together (see this helpful post by Bea Leiderman about Scrum in school). All work in the course is developed by learners using this method, with the teacher serving as the “Product Owner.”
Learners form their own teams of three to five members whom they choose based on a “skills résumé” (accompanied by examples where appropriate) that each learner prepares and presents to the class: descriptions of drawing or artistic ability, experience making movies, writing or math skills, knowledge of particular software or apps, etc. These teams will stay together throughout the year — though learners are also encouraged to “cross-pollinate” by seeking help from other teams if they need something no one on their own team can provide. Cross-pollination works by means of barter: teams have to negotiate, with one team offering services the other team wants in exchange for the services the first one needs. Any team that finishes a project before the other teams is signified a “consulting group”: its members are expected to split up and serve the other groups by helping with whatever they need. If a team experiences any interpersonal difficulties, its members are responsible for working those difficulties out themselves (though the teacher offers guidance and resources if the team members request help). The role of Scrum Master rotates through all of the team’s members during the first unit, with every member serving as Scrum Master at least once. After that, team members are allowed to choose their own roles based on their abilities and their team’s collective sense of how they can serve best.
Every class day begins with a “Stand-Up,” during which learners show the products of their work to one another, deal with delays or impediments, and decide what their work for the day will involve. Following this initial meeting, the teacher might briefly present relevant materials, involve students in a mini-project, or ask one of the teams to present some of their recent discoveries or work. She also provides materials on the class blog with the understanding that learners will use these as a starting point for their own explorations and creations. As learners develop their projects, they conduct research, develop media, and share results, all facilitated by the tablet devices the school provides for each learner. Teams present the results of the first two project phases in December and March during evening assemblies open to the public. Each team posts its assembled materials on the course blog for “public review” one week prior to the assembly, and is expected to use feedback gathered from this review period and from the public forum to revise their work. Each group gives a 10-minute presentation followed by 10 minutes of public Q&A. At the end of each forum, the assembled audience votes on which group presented the most compelling plan, which produced the best presentation, and which demonstrated the best responses to the audience’s questions. Many former class members participate in these public reviews “just for fun,” though the top team from the previous year serves as a formal “review committee” — service they perform both for the honor of the position and for the pizza party they get during final reviews. The “review committee” provides specific observations about what each group has done well and what each group needs to improve. In late May, learners present the results of the final project phase to the entire school, and the assembled school votes on which settlement they’d most like to join — and why. These three public forums (and the materials prepared for them) take the place of course exams.
The top team (and next year’s “review committee”) is chosen by combining the results of the three public forums and an end-of-year, in-class vote determining which overall project was the best researched, best supported, and best presented — a process which the previous year’s “review committee” referees.
This post is the second in a series using “engagement and learning multiplier” (ELM) assessments to examine some common teaching and learning methods. If you’d like to (re)familiarize yourself with how these assessments work, you can refer to this previous post. If you’d like to compare this current post’s ELM assessment with others I’ve done, you can find the assessment of lecture here, and you can find the rest of the “cubic” assessments in the sidebar (which may be at the bottom of this screen if you’re reading this on a mobile device).
For each of these assessments, I’ll set the learning scenario and then present analysis about why that approach has a given “cubic” shape and why it receives a particular ELM score. These posts are designed to provide useful examples and guidance as you evaluate your own learning approaches and as you make your own teaching and technology choices.
A laboratory course
Description
This secondary-level chemistry course is designed to introduce learners not only to the main concepts of general chemistry, but also to much of the basic equipment and lab protocols used in this field. Part of the standard science curriculum, all learners are expected to pass through this general education course prior to graduation. Because of its broad and introductory nature, the teacher has tried to make course concepts accessible and follows a carefully organized curriculum in which more complex concepts and skills build on the simpler ones that precede them. Each two-week unit begins with an introduction featuring a presentation by the teacher. He uses a variety of media to illustrate concepts, including videos and images made by learners in previous years, which he attributes to their authors. This begins the first phase, focusing on conceptualization. The teacher’s introduction is followed up with homework assignments and in-class scenarios designed to give learners practice in understanding and internalizing the unit’s central concepts. The teacher chooses five learners for each unit (eventually rotating through the whole class twice) who present their homework as a basis for class discussions. Their fellow learners are asked to critique and correct the work presented with the requirement that they double-check the science and also describe “something great and something that needs improvement” for each peer presenter. All learners are encouraged to find resources on the web or in the library that they find helpful, posting links to them in the course’s learning portal so others can access them for help understanding course concepts. At the next phase, focusing on experimentation, the teacher presents learners with a hypothesis that will anchor their laboratory explorations. He follows this with a brief introduction to lab and safety protocols, introducing learners to the equipment and procedures they’ll use to conduct the unit’s central experiment. Each learner is also assigned two partners for the experiment, with partners changing for every unit. The teacher has designed these rotating partnerships to help learners make more connections with their classmates as well as to distribute the “advantages” offered by high performing learners. The three-person lab teams record experimental data not only by writing results, but also by making photographs and videos. These will be used to illustrate lab reports, which are jointly authored and submitted digitally. Each partner is assigned specific parts of the lab report and is expected to identify the sections she has authored, but each must also “sign off” on the other partners’ work. During laboratory experiments, the teacher circulates to answer questions, correct improper uses of the equipment or errors in the experimental protocols, and to ensure that all teams are on task and distributing work evenly among learners. The teacher grades lab reports for scientific and experimental accuracy as well as for writing and media quality. For evaluation of the non-empirical aspects of the lab report, the teacher also follows the “something great / something that needs improvement” model, offering all comments via audio files which are delivered to each team via the learning portal. Learners receive both an individual and a team score. The teacher asks those who produce exemplary reports for permission to use them to illustrate concepts for learners in future classes. Continue reading →
In my last post, I described the ways the “cubic” model could be used to evaluate learning approaches and described a method for calculating “engagement and learning multiplier” (ELM) scores. If you aren’t familiar with these concepts, you might want to review that post before continuing…
Over the next several posts, I’ll perform cubic ELM assessments of several common learning approaches. For each, I’ll set the learning scenario and then present analysis about why that approach has a given “cubic” shape and why it receives a particular ELM score. Hopefully, these posts will provide useful examples and guidance as you evaluate your own learning approaches and as you make your own teaching and technology choices.
A traditional lecture course
Description
In this course, the teacher presents information most days through a combination of lectures and presentations — some conducted using an “interactive” white board. The teacher also incorporates materials from the course textbook in her lectures, highlighting the points learners will have to know for exams. Learners are expected to take careful notes, and exams and other assessments come largely from material the teacher has covered in lecture, though some also comes from exercises and readings in the course text. During class, learners are encouraged to ask questions if they don’t understand a concept, and the teacher organizes weekly discussions where she probes learners’ understanding of course topics. In addition to homework exercises, learners are expected to complete a major research project. This project is designed to introduce learners to important books and journals in the discipline, and they must use materials from the school’s library, including the library’s online, full-text database, to complete it successfully. Learners choose from a list of topics furnished by the teacher, who has ensured that library holdings are adequate to support each topic. Assessment of these projects (as with exams and homework) is completed by the teacher, who writes comments designed to correct errors, to help learners acquire disciplinary literacies and conform to disciplinary norms, and to praise particularly insightful or advanced responses. The teacher periodically presents exceptional or noteworthy homework exercises, exam responses, and final projects to the class, being careful to protect the authors’ anonymity, in order to encourage dedicated, thoughtful work. She makes herself readily available outside of class to discuss course concepts and encourages learners to come by her office or contact her by email if they have questions or difficulties. Continue reading →
In my preceding posts, I’ve described the dimensional levels of each facet of our “cubic” learning model: content, community, and context. This post (and the next several) will incorporate and build on content from those posts, so if you haven’t yet seen them, you might want to review them before continuing here.
In “cubic” learning, each element’s “dimensionality” increases as the learner becomes more engaged and plays a more central role. The increasing agency, skills, and responsibility learners must demonstrate at each progressive level also means that more and more, they need support rather than direction, individual resources rather than a one-size-fits-all recipe, and companions and partners rather than controllers. More dimensionality means more learner-centered — and learner-driven — learning.
As we’ve seen previously, the dimensional levels of the “cubic” model look like this, with the higher levels increasing the volume of the cube they generate:
While “volume” in this model is something of a metaphor, it’s one backed up by research. For example, as both Anderson and Krathwohl’s revision of Bloom’s taxonomy and Webb’s “depth of knowledge” (DOK) argue, creating content not only requires more ability from learners than recalling, it also increases their learning potential: the deeper level of engagement makes learning more likely to take hold. In other words, moving from recall to creation increases the potential “volume” for learning — and therefore makes a bigger cube in this model.
In my preceding two posts, I’ve described the levels of two facets of a multidimensional learning model comprised of three: content, community, and context. If you haven’t yet seen those previous posts, you might want to review them before continuing here.
However, even though I’ve split this discussion across three posts, this model does not describe three elements that function independently; all three combine to create a single “cubic” learning experience. They’re parts of the same basic entity, facets of a single prism. Splitting them apart, as some learning models do, ignores the influences each dimension has on the others and elides the important ways they cocreate an environment for learning.
In this final post examining each facet’s structural progression, I’ll explore the levels associated with context. Then, in my next post, I’ll map specific teaching approaches onto these three dimensions, offering examples of how this “cubic” model can be used to assess and rate the efficacy of particular learning constructs. Finally, I’ll conclude this series by connecting our “cubic” model to other existing learning models and taxonomies.
* * *
From an educational standpoint, context is at once both a simple and an incredibly complex concept. It’s simple because we’re very used to seeing our classrooms and their equipment as the “theaters” where learning happens. We even have a standard minimum expectation for such spaces: seating and work surfaces for learners, special demonstration equipment for teachers — including chalkboards or white boards, projection screens, and so forth. We know that if we want to do something special — display 3D models, organize work groups, conduct lab demonstrations or explorations, connect in real-time to far-away experts, or stage a performance — we might either need special equipment or we might need to move into some sort of special facility that makes these activities possible. But why would we want to do any of these special activities? The answer is simple: we know that they’ll amplify some portion of content or will enable some form of collaboration that we think will benefit our learners — or both.
And this is where context becomes complex. We instinctively realize that even relatively minor changes in the learning context — introducing new tools, a new space, or even a new classroom “culture” — can powerfully impact learning within our schools. But if that’s true for the few changes or additions we can make inside of a school facility, how many more contexts from outside the world of school could we leverage for learning? And what could we expect from our learners if we could integrate those contexts and opportunities every day and not just once in a while? Continue reading →
My previous post described the increasing levels of engagement and interaction in the content dimension of our “cubic” learning model. In this post, we’ll examine another facet — the levels of the community dimension — considering the different kinds of relationships learners can form as they learn.
Community is a dimension many of us think about very narrowly, if at all. We might understand that there are various people associated with the learning process — teacher, learner, co-learners — but we rarely move beyond our classrooms to consider community more broadly. True, from time to time, we might feel compelled to organize “group work” with the notion that students could benefit from working with peers. Others might feel some sort of social or institutional pressure to prepare students for the collaboration they’ll be expected to manifest “out in the real world.” But as teachers, our embracing of community often doesn’t go much beyond these limited rationales and practices.
However, as Lev Vygotsky and generations of later theorists and neuroscientists have shown, collaborators and colleagues can enhance learners’ levels of engagement, their attainment of expertise, and their resilience within a field of study. As Vygotsky argued, in contrast to Piaget, all learning is fundamentally social, and working in collaboration with others can enable learners to make important cognitive and functional leaps beyond what we might expect if they were working on their own. More recently, Henry Jenkins‘ research on “participatory culture,” extended by danah boyd, Mizuko (Mimi) Itō, and others, has shown the ways that digital communities drive engagement, learning, and expertise, fueled by new technologies and new participatory forms of media. That we should treat this critical dimension of learning so superficially is therefore surprising and unfortunate. Community deserves a more thoughtful and thorough consideration.
But where should we look as we explore the community dimension more deeply? After all, students can work with all sorts of people — those within the classroom or school, learners and teachers in other schools, interested parties in local or distant communities, experts and practitioners from around the world, and people who broadly constitute an “audience” of outsiders to whom learners can demonstrate their learning and growth. The diversity of people we might have to consider in evaluating this dimension seems so large and complex as to be completely unmanageable. However, it’s less important to consider who these others are than to explore how intensively and productively they collaborate with learners, how their collaboration impacts the agency of learners, and how that collaboration fuels learners’ discovery, internalization, and growth.
Once again, the last thing I’m trying to do by focusing on the role of these others in learning is to diminish the need for teachers. Teachers’ productive work and relationship with learners is even more necessary in this model. However, just as we saw with the content dimension, this model necessitates that teachers move beyond delivery of data and information (where many of us are most comfortable) to a construction of knowledge and wisdom that is inherently social and frequently connected beyond our classrooms. Having to adopt this uncomfortable new role can be intimidating or disorienting for some teachers, and that discomfort can discourage them from embracing community. But ignoring this vital learning dimension robs their classrooms of enormous opportunities for discovery, engagement, and growth — and often makes the work of those teachers less likely to persist and less relevant for their learners. What we really need are teachers who can not only design productive engagements with content, but also productive communities for learning both within and far beyond their classrooms. In a world where the ability to connect productively across many kinds of boundaries is an increasingly valued skill, teachers have to function as connectors and social designers, helping learners develop the network of collaborators, promoters, critics, and spectators who will undergird and extend their learning and prepare them for the world outside of school. Continue reading →
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