After reading the introduction to The Innovator's Mindset, I was inspired to rethink how I look at teaching. I don't know that there were many concrete ideas in that section - and George Couros even said that his book was not a "how-to" playbook - but three ideas really stuck with me:
- "If students leave school less curious than when they started, we have failed them" (4).
- "We are spending so much time telling our students about what they can't do that we have lost focus on what we can do" (7).
- The concept of the "adjacent possible" (8).
So much has been written about how students are engaged in boring, meaningless tasks in school: tasks that aren't respectful, tasks that make them less curious and more compliant. We put off questions because we have to get through curriculum, and quite frankly, many students' questions can derail a discussion in less than two seconds. I try very hard to nurture individual curiosity and encourage their autonomy in selecting topics to learn about while at the same time making sure that I can assess and understand their growth. This relates to something that was brought up in Season 2, Episode 1 of the #IMMOOC discussions: research is something that kids do naturally. A two-year-old does research to figure out the world, so why have we scaffolded and complicated the subject so much? Engage their natural curiosity and give them more autonomy in their learning, and I think we will have done our job. My cooperating teacher during my student teaching experience said that our job is to make ourselves unnecessary; in other words, students should be able to seek out learning opportunities and advocate for themselves successfully. They shouldn't need us to tell them what to do every step of the way.
The second point was not so new to me, but I was struck by the change from "they" to "we" in the sentence. This was in reference to telling kids they can't use their cell phones in class even if it's a 1:1 district with laptops, iPads, Chromebooks, etc. - I like the analogy of saying that we don't spend time telling kids to NOT stab each other with pencils when they write, but we do spend time telling kids to NOT play on their iPads in class. (Notwithstanding the fact that I actually have had to tell kids to stop stabbing each other, I think the analogy works.) I don't have anything new to say about how to manage personal devices because I'm still in the "no cell phones" camp, but maybe this will give me some new thoughts about it. WE can do a lot of great things with kids if we stop focusing on DO THIS, DON'T DO THAT, but I don't know how to switch mindsets when I have seen with my own eyes that some kids will play on their district-provided iPads in class if I don't watch them. It's a mindset shift for sure that I'm still working on.
Finally, I loved the section about the "adjacent possible" - basically the idea that the more they learn or you allow kids to do, the more they CAN do. The analogy given was if you walk into a room that has four doors, opening one door will lead to even more doors, and so on until you have a palace that has hundreds of rooms. This clearly relates to the second point, and it's one of the things that I love about teaching but that also scares me: there is so much to learn and explore that I feel overwhelmed thinking about how I can reach all my students at their individual places and nurture their individual interests and curiosity in the ways that work best for them.
I'm going to stop here and make my thoughts about the two #IMMOOC sessions a new post because I'm trying to be brief(ish)!
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