Liam’s story
One of my friends has an 8th grader. I’ll call him Liam, but that’s not his real name. Liam was always a happy kid who loved school and saw relative success in class. Since the start of the pandemic, Liam’s grades and behavior really started to change. For starters, he already spent a lot of time on technology. Now, he spends almost the entire day using technology for games and at school. Also, his grades plummeted dramatically. When his grades started to tank, his parents removed all unnecessary technology. Unfortunately, he’s still not doing his work. He tells them he’s submitted it, but when they ask to see the assignment it is “magically” blank. Most worrisome are the changes in his personality. Liam doesn’t seem to have many friends. Also, he has become despondent and forgetful. For example, when his dad asked him to go get something from the kitchen, he watched Liam. Liam went into the kitchen, putzed around for fifteen minutes, and came back without the item his dad had asked for.
This is the story of so many students today.
Children look for meaning and connection and they lash out when they don’t get it. Some students lash out like Liam, exhibiting signs of apathy and depression. Still, other students exhibit straight-up aggressive behaviors, as demonstrated by the TikTok challenges. While some of these behaviors were common before the pandemic, this story has become too common. While there are a number of factors at play, I also think the pandemic woke all of us up a little to what really matters. What matters to our students? I believe that, at least in part, our students are railing against the industrial model of education. They want meaningful, authentic learning environments and experiences.
“Kids these days”
Kids today are different and have different needs than even I did not so long ago. For starters, they have access to and are inundated with information all day, every day. Because of this, they always question information – they are looking for context over answers. To our students, teachers are not experts, rather we are just another context (Thomas & Brown, 2011). Therefore, teachers can no longer look to the 20th-century classroom as a model for education. We must change.
Information in the graphic from 21st Century Education vs. 20th Century Education (Lewin, 2009). Created by Karin Stateler using Canva.
Change is hard.
On his visit to 60 schools, Lichtman (2013) learned that “we know what good learning looks like.” Schools are becoming and can become adaptive, relevant, permeable, dynamic, creative, and self-correcting (Lichtman, 2013). In fact, many schools solved problems on their own, only to be met with different problems (Lichtman, 2013). If schools work as a community, they might realize that someone else has already solved a similar problem that they have.
What’s keeping us from change?
Lichtman (2013) mentioned three factors that are keeping us from making changes in the classroom:
- Our biggest anchors are ego and control. We are anchored by time, space, and material.
- Our dams are treating content as more important than context. In this day and age, students can access information. How can we create a meaningful context?
- Finally, we work in silos. Examples include our classroom, department, or school. These silos keep us inwardly focused. They also keep us from communicating and collaborating with one another.
We do hard things.
Image from What 60 Schools Can Tell Us About Teaching 21st Century Skills (Lichtman, 2013).
What we are doing isn’t working. We are trying to put square pegs in round holes. What should we do? We need to create significant learning environments in which students have a choice, ownership, voice, and authentic projects. That is, we need to move from the industrial model to an ecosystem model of education. We can use meaningful projects to teach the difficult, unknown, and messy (Lichtman, 2013). Through this, we can create self-evolving learners (Lichtman, 2013). Finally, we teach “students to meet whatever challenges crop up in the world in the next 30-50 years of their lifetime” (Lichtman, 2013). If we do this, we and they might create “self-evolving organizations that embrace constant change and the methodology of constant change” (Lichtman, 2013).
We need to be “preparing our students for their future, not for our past” (Lichtman, 2013).
Let’s stop talking and start doing.
References
Lewin, W. (2009, April 2). 21st Century Education vs. 20th Century Education. YouTube. Retrieved April 27, 2022, from https://youtu.be/HiD1UqLPrOg
Lichtman, G. (2013, March 21). What 60 Schools Can Tell Us About Teaching 21st Century Skills: Grant Lichtman at TEDxDenverTeachers. YouTube. Retrieved April 27, 2022, from https://youtu.be/UZEZTyxSl3gThomas, D., & Brown, J. S. (2011). A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.