An Educational Tale

I just finished watching a movie with my family that I have seen a hundred times.  It’s called Dolphin Tale and if you haven’t seen it, see it.  And if you have seen it, watch it again.  The story is about a dolphin that loses its tail and a boy who befriends him.  But watching it tonight, the story took on a whole new, and even better, meaning for me.  This is a story of inquiry learning.

You see, I had the privilege of going to #ISTE12 this summer.  There were many major themes that wove themselves throughout the conference.  I sat in sessions that helped me understand how to flip my classroom and learn new ways to use Twitter and Diigo with my students. However, the session that had the most impact on my teaching was entitled Using Technology To Build a Culture of Inquiry by Chris Lehmann of the Science Leadership Academy (SLA).

Chris shared the model they use at SLA and how they motivate students to take ownership of their learning.  He spoke about personalization and giving the students a choice.  Learning has to be meaningful for those doing it or it's really not learning, but regurgitating.  Students need to be empowered so they don’t just sit and listen, but actually doing something with it in the end.  Chris also shared, in my opinion, the most powerful question teachers can ask their students...What do you think?  Ask the kids and then take shared action.

I was excited to learn more about how the Science Leadership Academy gets students to take ownership of their learning.  I watched a TEDTalk by Chris Lehmann Education is Broken that discussed the importance of teaching to interest and passion instead of berating students with a lot of useless knowledge that most may never use.  I also watched as Diana Laufenberg Embrace Failure spoke about authentic experiences and posing problems for students to solve rather than giving them the answers and asking them to repeat it.  The other day I read a blog post Homework that Motivates by Scott Carr.  He used words like ownership, autonomy, open-ended experiences, and creating connections.

All of these have the same message.  Let’s teach kids how to learn with authentic problems that they are interested and passionate about.  Let’s make the students the center of their learning and switch the focus away from the teacher.  Teach them that it’s okay to make mistakes,  learn from those mistakes, and keep striving toward their goal.  With all the information available to us at our fingertips, we no longer have to bog our students down with memorizing trivia and information they may never use.

The message I took away from the movie tonight was one of hope.  Not only for the dolphin, but for the boy.  The boy was fatherless and failing school.  Instead of sitting through summer school to learn about all the things he wasn’t interested in learning before, he instead learns how dolphins communicate,  befriends and learns from doctors, then organizes a campaign complete with website, webcam, and festival.  Now I know that this is Hollywood and most of Hollywood is fictional, but I also know that if we give students a voice and give them authentic learning experiences, great things can happen.

This upcoming school year, I am challenging myself to make learning more authentic for the students I teach.  Maybe you can do the same.