When I was in elementary school we used to get assigned to make a couple of dioramas each year. My dad loved building my dioramas. He would take me to the hobby store where he would purchase supplies to “help” me build one and work on it long after I went to bed. I would wake up in the morning to these awesome displays inside an old shoebox that demonstrated everything I had learned about the Navajo People, the Serfs of medieval times, and many other periods throughout history. We would talk about them at length when they were done so when I went to class I could speak articulately on why our shoebox really exemplified what I knew about history. There would be rows of them across the windowsills of our classroom like we had grown our own diorama farm. On the last day of the presentations, the shoeboxes would all be taken home and as if nothing happened we would be back in desks and rows diagramming sentences. Don’t get me wrong, I loved my time building dioramas mostly because I loved spending that time with my dad discussing why he thought the moss should go up the walls of the shoebox and where the trees should be glued down. It was a great effort by my teachers at that time to let us get creative in demonstrating our learning through a different product than our usual test or paper.
In my current work, I try to help our teachers and leaders understand why we don’t want to stop at building diorama farms. The one and done approach to learning with no meaningful connection to the process of that learning is the issue. I could not tell you what I learned about the evolution of my thoughts about a particular time period in history from building those dioramas, or that I did anything with my knowledge after that moment in time. What I can remember vividly was the time spent with my dad and his enthusiasm for the project. The development of a different kind of product helped me to develop a closer relationship with my dad, which certainly had an immense value. We can never underestimate the power of building relationships with others, but as teachers we need to be able to leverage those relationships with learners so that they feel a sense of belonging and want to work hard at things they are passionate about. We want our teachers and leaders to iterate beyond short-term products to really understanding the process of learning that is embedded in true Project Based Learning. Our learners should have the opportunity to demonstrate their skills in communication, collaboration, problem solving, and content mastery around multiple iterations of an idea that may finally lead to producing a product. We need learners to live and breathe in their work- both their great ideas and the ones that didn’t work. Our best ideas often come to us from failed attempts to accomplish a task or learn something new. We don’t want our learners to take their shoebox home at the end of the project and throw it away. Instead, we want them to take small ideas and make them big by reflecting on their work over time and growing from it. No one should beat themselves up for what they did not know when they tried something new or a failed idea, but we should see those attempts and be proud of the process we used to shift our thinking over time. We have to provide enough time for our learners to reflect on that process, document their thinking, and see it evolve or be something completely new.
One of my favorite parts of my job is planning meaningful professional development opportunities both in district and out of district for our teachers and leaders to know how to do this work and feel supported to try new things. We need to be able to give educators permission to try, get out of their way while they do, and then support them when it doesn’t go exactly as expected or celebrate with them when it does. Teachers need to feel that support from our entire administrative team with a framework and tools that keep them pushing for high levels of academic achievement, personal growth and inspiration in every classroom. We want to move beyond occasional creation of a product to a shift of how we learn together every day in every class. Our teachers need to feel good about that work with the support so they inspire learners to do the same.
Frequently when teachers begin to move to a project based approach they start by asking learners what they are interested in learning. A teacher once shared with me that he always starts with, “What makes you mad?” The responses he hears are passionate and powerful. I use that now when I do interviews with our learners and my team uses that question to guide professional learning for our educators. It is amazing to watch people’s faces light up when they tell what about their lives, our community, or our world makes them mad. When we create classrooms and schools where everyone’s job is to create solutions to what makes them mad, we will have ignited our learners to be future leaders who will work hard, are connected to their communities, push themselves to learn academic content, are assessment capable to show what they know when they are asked (even if it is on a standardized test), and are great problem solvers. We are trying to prepare learners for jobs that have not yet been created in a world that evolves by the minute. I want to be sure we are creating consistent learning opportunities in every classroom to ensure our learners have the skills necessary to face those challenges with enthusiasm and continually grow from them as they go out into the world. It is exciting to think about what problems they will solve or what products they will create through the process that we don’t even know that we need yet, even if where that starts is with a diorama.
Leverage Points 