Month: May 2021

When the game doesn’t work

A couple weeks ago, I wrote a post called Practice (you can see that post here). The gist of the post was based on a quote I saw in the book The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. Here’s that quote again:

The gist of the entire post revolved around building in more opportunities for “game day” experiences for our students. I had a really interesting follow up about that post with a person who works at our school. The question was about how the the “game day” experiences impact the painfully shy or anxious student.

I think those of us in education just had a current or former student come to mind. That kid who never wants to talk in class. Who would never want to share a presentation. Who would never read their writing no matter how good you tell them it is. I definitely have that student in my mind!

This is such a great point. As this person shared with me, no matter our experiences, we probably all know people who are really good at the day to day tasks of their life, but the moment that they have to be “on stage” they just fall apart.

Now, I have to admit, when I wrote this post, I hadn’t read all of The Power of Moments, but what I later came to realize is that maybe it isn’t about creating huge “game day” type experiences, but rather we want to think about ways we can create more peak experiences.

The following pair of graphs come from The Power of Moments, and depict a student’s experience. The graph on the left might represent a typical student’s day-to-day emotions at school. What do you notice? Pretty flat, right? But the graph on the right represents the day-to-day emotions of a student who gets to participate in a bigger experience. This one represents a student who participated in a project called The Trial of Human Nature (I’m not going to go into the details of that experience here, if you want to know more you’ll have to read the book).

What I think I was trying to say in the previous post on this topic was that we need to create more of these peak moments for our students. But as I look back at the post, most of the ideas I suggested involve tasks that border on performance. Not all our students are completely ready for that. Now, there is an argument here to be made for pushing kids outside of their comfort zone, but I also think there’s an argument for letting students work to their strengths. When we have those painfully shy students, asking them to share their invention at the convention or speak about an area of study with adults they don’t know may generate a level or stress in our students that prevent learning. Think about it, stress is a reaction of our lower brain, and when we are living in survival mode, we can’t access the prefrontal cortex. In other words, when you’re stressed out, you don’t learn very much!

This is where some student agency might come into play for these peak moments. What if our students are working in groups and decide that they want to create an informational video about their research. If there’s a shy student in the group, they can still help with the research, be the person behind the camera or directing the action, and then become the master at iMovie to edit the video together. When the video is shared, they get to take just as much pride in the performance as the students who are front and center while not moving too far out of their comfort zone.

Or maybe your class is doing a wax museum project (always a crowd favorite for parents!), and there’s a student who can’t manage the task of speaking to people he doesn’t know. Learning how to research the topic is really what you are probably looking for. Couldn’t that student do the research, then create a blog post? Maybe they then use an animation app to take a picture of their person, and then animate that picture to have their own voice reading a brief introduction. They still do all the same work, without the super stressful public performance. And the technology might act as an accelerator for kids in the learning process by increasing their effort at perfection, which in turn creates a better project.

Ultimately, what I think I was trying to get at in my previous post, was that we want to create more peak moments for our students. Those moments are exciting, which in turn activates a part of the brain that helps make memories. When we create joyful learning environments with peak moments, our students will be banging down the door to get in to school each day. As I’ve heard Dave Burgess say, would your students want to come to class if they had to buy a ticket? We want them to be begging for what we’re offering. And while we can’t offer peak moments every day, we have to be intentional about building those types of moments into the learning environment in a way that students see that what they are doing today will build to a peak moment in the future (and here’s a suggestion – our kids probably don’t see a test or a quiz as a peak moment).

What peak moments have you created for students this year? As you wrap up your school year, ask your students what are the most memorable moments of the school year. Those peak moments will give you ideas of they types of things you might want to create in the future!

Back to normal?

Back to normal?

Recently I’ve been having a LOT of conversations with a wide variety of people about what the future holds for us next school year. Parents of incoming kindergarteners want to know what their child’s kindergarten year will be like. Teachers want to plan for what the learning environment will look like. Neighbors have even stopped me while I’m out walking the dog to ask questions about what’s going to happen. The question I’ve been hearing the most is, “When will we be able to get back to normal?”

I understand the concept of the question. Part of our human condition is to be averse to change. Change creates dissonance, and dissonance makes us uncomfortable. But… I think it’s also worth pointing out that dissonance is where learning and growth happens. If we don’t feel a little bit uncomfortable in our learning, we aren’t stretching ourselves.

Earlier this week though, I saw this quote pop up in my Twitter feed:

I think sometimes we must take a moment to reframe the things that people are asking us. Instead of a focus on what we want to get back to, let’s take a moment to reflect on the learning and growth that has happened in this past school year. What are the things that we want to carry on? Here are a few that stand out to me:

1 – The power of the video chat. As we’ve shifted through various modes of learning here in my district, one of the things that has been a constant is the utilization of Zoom in our classrooms for both student learning events and professional learning. Think about what this technology does for us! We can reach out to anyone in the world and bring them into our classroom. Want to talk to the author of your current read-aloud? Reach out and see if you can set up a zoom. What about an astronaut while you’re studying space science? Or maybe you could hold a virtual celebration of learning where students can share their recent writing piece in the classroom while parents can watch it live from home or their work, or later on a recorded version! There are so many possibilities here!

2 – Options for flipped learning. I’ve had conversations with a couple of teachers who have leveraged the use of recorded lessons that students can watch and return to anytime to do the teaching of the minilesson, which frees up additional time in the classroom for conferring or for individual or small group support. An added benefit? Depending on how your students process information best, a live minilesson might be a challenge for some kids. They need to hear things multiple times; they need to stop and think or jot some notes. Having a video allows them to do all of this without a teacher needing to repeat themselves. Also, those videos can be used by students as a review tool later. Worried about the time it takes to record in advance? Record your minilesson live and then post to your learning management system. The benefits of going back to a recording still exist for your students!

3 – The ease of setting up parent meetings. Think back to pre-Covid times. How hard was it to set up a parent meeting? We’d have to email everyone involved to find a time that would work. Parents needed to be able to leave work or home in time to drive to school which probably added at least a half-hour of time on either side of the meeting for parents. Childcare for siblings could be an issue at times, and that would limit options for meeting times. On the other hand, with Zoom (or similar technology), I have set up meetings on the same day, or sometimes even within just a few minutes later to hold the meeting. Parents can hop on zoom from just about wherever they are.

4 – Relationships. Coming into this past school year, one of the things we were most nervous about was how to build relationships in this new environment. Our school district began the year in a virtual learning setting, and we didn’t know if it would be possible to really get to know our kids when they weren’t here at school. To help with this, we took our first two scheduled student days and set up individual zoom calls between the teacher and student. Parents were invited as well. By about lunch time on the first day, I had teacher sharing with me how powerful this was. Think about the beginning of the typical school year. When would you be able to have a 15 minute, uninterrupted conversation with any of your new students? What we have found in teaching this year is that many teachers feel that they have stronger relationships with this year’s class than any other class before. Considering that we had significant chunks of the year where all or some of our students were learning from home, this is amazing! We plan to create opportunities to build those early relationships with students again next school year even though we will hopefully be starting the year in an in-person learning model.

I am sure that other things come to mind for all of you who are reading this now. Instead of wondering so much about getting back to normal, let’s shift that thought and wonder about how we can get to our next reality!

Share with us in the comments below if you have things that you are planning to do differently moving forward. We’d love to hear your thoughts!

Practice

Practice

Over the years, I have participated in a wide variety of sports. I recall hours spent in the gym at the Boys Club for basketball, summer days on the ball field for baseball, spring and fall nights on the soccer field, and fall evenings on the football field. I also remember the ups and downs of hours of practice for each of those sports. But the best part of playing a sport was always the game. It made sweaty July days on the ball field, or two-a-days in August that much more worth it because we saw that our practice paid off in terms of performance when we were playing against the opposing team.

Recently, I’ve been reading the book The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. While I’m not finished with the book yet, the main idea that I’m getting so far is that our most memorable positive moments are all made up out of the same elements – elevation, insight, pride, and connection. If we are intentional in what we do and how we design experiences, we can create more of those powerful moments for ourselves and others. This seems to have some pretty obvious translation to the classroom setting.

One of the chapters is titled Build Peaks, and is all about creating experiences that rise above others. Several of the stories that are shared focus on classroom experiences that build peaks for students. In one high school, the teachers wanted to create a peak experience for their seniors, and created what’s called “Senior Exhibition,” which asked students to do what many of us might call a passion project or genius hour activity. Students were able to pick anything they wanted, it did not have to tie directly to curriculum. On the day of the exhibition, students gave an oral defense of their project, which many parents attended. In a normal school setting, parents are not able to see the outcome of student learning in person. Typically, the only outcome of learning that parents see is grades in the gradebook, or maybe an assignment that has been returned with feedback. This experience was different. Jeff Gilbert, one of the creators of the senior exhibition, and now a high school principal, shared:

All this talk about practice has me thinking about one of my all time favorite press conference rants by an athlete.

Now, I’m going to be really honest, I wasn’t a huge fan of Allen Iverson. As an Indiana kid, my heart was with Reggie Miller and the Pacers. But I still use phrases from this clip in everyday conversation. And in this clip, Iverson shares his passion for the game of basketball. In case you need a reminder, that passion isn’t about the practice. It’s about the game.

Going back to the quote above from The Power of Moments, when I read that passage, I had to put the book down for a moment. How do we go about making the experiences in our classrooms feel less like practices, and more like a game?

Let’s pause here for a moment. Grab a piece of scrap paper, or a post-it note, or go to the notes app on your phone. Make a quick list of the peak moments you remember from your schooling experiences? I’m going to focus on elementary since that’s the grade level that I’m working with. Go ahead, stop reading for a moment, jot some notes, and I’ll be here when you come back.

Here are a few of the moments that I recall: In third grade our class made bread – some of the moms came in and as groups we made the dough. Then they took it home, baked it, and brought it back in the afternoon. I can still remember the feeling of getting to take a bite of that warm, soft bread that I had helped to make. In fifth grade, we did an invention convention. Each student was asked to create a new invention. I built a desk that you could remove the back panel from and put on the other side so that it could work for either a right-handed or left-handed person. As a lefty, I was tired of my arm hanging off the side of my desk anytime that I was trying to write. The day of the convention, we presented to classmates and students in the other fifth grade class. That night we came back to school and got to present to parents who came to learn about our various inventions. I had one parent tell me he was a lefty and would buy a desk like that. Many more that were right-handed said they never would have noticed the problem. In sixth grade we researched a foreign country. I worked with a partner to learn as much as I could about Belgium. We took some of our combined kitchen skills and made snacks from Belgium to share with our visitors. We also had a presentation board with pictures and interesting facts. During the day, students from all over the school came to visit our presentations in the gym, and that night we came back and presented to our parents. I was able to share all that I had learned, and found out that the family of one of my good friends had ancestral roots in Belgium. It was an instant connection and conversation piece that night.

What do all of those memories have in common? They weren’t practice. They were the game. If we want students fired up about school and about learning, we’ve got to be intentional about finding opportunities to create more games for students. Could you invite parents to come in so students can share their learning? Could you do a video chat with an expert in the field you’ve been studying? Could you try to connect with the author of the book you’ve been reading in class?

Take a moment to reflect on what some of the favorite things you’ve done with your students. What were the elements that made them a peak moment for your kids? Possibly, one of the indicators is that there were some elements that took the learning beyond the practice phase, and into a realm where it felt more like a game or performance.

What are your thoughts? Do you have any activities that you’ve done in the past that you could make a bit more game like? Or do you have an idea of a way to make learning less like practice and more like a game that I haven’t shared already? Share your thoughts in the comments below!