play | it's about learning

During my life, I have participated pretty heavily in sports. Play is fun and a great way to learn. I have dabbled in all kinds of sports. As I grew up, I played a lot of soccer. Not surprisingly, preparing to play soccer involved a great deal of playing the actual game. Sure, we drilled, but the drills were just micro-parts of the whole game. In late high school, I migrated to triathlon. While I certainly lifted weights and participated in stretching and plyometrics, most of my training involved actually doing long hours of swimming, biking, and running. Practicing was direct application and immersion in the sports. On “brick” days, I actually combined two, and sometimes all three, of the sub-sports with transitions so that practice immitated an actual triathlon. Practice was a virtual mimic of the game/event for which I was preparing. Is school, in its traditional format, a virtual mimic of the game/event for which we are preparing students?

My school’s mission states that we are preparing students for college and for life. I have a pretty good idea of what college is like. I have been to several as an undergrad, a post-grad, and a graduate student. My experiences at those colleges was fairly similar to my experiences as a student in K-12 school. The formats, structures, and cultures were similar. By “life” I think we mean “work” to a considerable degree. For many of one’s waking hours of life are spent working. During the past 20 years, I have spent my career working in schools, but I have never really worked in the “business” world. As an undergrad, I trained as an economist and as a marketing-management scientist. But that’s not the same as really living the business-world life that most of our students will enter after college. How do we know that we are preparing students for the “life” part of our mission? Are you reading as much as I am that business leaders indicate that students are not so well-prepared for the work-life realities? Could it be that the the practice is not a close enough mimic of the game? Is this why UVa Med School is striving to make practice more like the actual game?

In the past three days at Unboundary, I believe I have been given a rare gift as an educator. I have immersed myself in the “business world.” I will continue to do so for several weeks. While one, short sortee into the business world makes me no expert, I do have a new perspective than many career educators don’t really get to experience. I feel like I have been able to discern another data point on the life-education graph, and doing so allows me potentially to draw a line of better fit from school to college to life.

Moreover, in the past three days, I have seen in my mind’s eye the replaying of several influencial videos that I have written about and shared in previous blog posts. Sir Ken Robinson’s RSA video has come to mind countless times. The Buck Institute videos about project-based learning, and the ongoing conversation that Jonathan Martin and I are having, come to mind. Steve Johnson’s “Where Good Ideas Come From” – both the TED talk and the RSA video – come to mind. Kiran Bir Sethi’s Riverside School comes to mind. Edutopia’s videos on High Tech High and other immersive learning environments come to mind.

Maybe more than anything, I feel empowered to continue refining and revising the Synergy 8 course. For those who are new to this blog, Synergy 8 is a new course that Jill Gough and I co-facilitate for 8th graders at Westminster. This fall, Synergy 8 experienced it’s pilot semester. In short, the course is…

Based on The Falconer by Grant Lichtman
Non-departmentalized and integrated in nature (we combine content and skills from the various departmental domains)
Project-based and problem-based
Steeped in high-level communication and presentation
Focused on community issue identification and solution
Learner-centered

Watching a team of three Unboundary pros working on a pitch, presentation and workshop design has been like watching the game or event that we are preparing Synergy 8 students to play in our practice sessions. It has been like looking in a mirror to study our form and muscle memory. It has been like preparing for life. Not “like”…it has been preparing for life.

For the past two mornings, I have taken my 6-year old son to school. So, of course, my 4-year old son wanted me to drive him to school one morning. Today was the morning. But my youngest doesn’t have to be at preschool until 8:45, so we played!

As I finished dressing, JT asked if we could play pirates with his Fisher-Price Imaginext. He loves to play pirates with this set of toys. At first, we were very historically pure. Then, a problem arose for JT, and he must have reasoned that Spiderman was the right tool for the issue. Without missing a beat, Spiderman entered the scene. Then, air travel became a necessity for the scenario. No problem. JT requisitioned a modern-day airplane from another Imaginext set. Of course, he saw no problem with this mix-it-up mentality.

I am a bit saddened to think that JT will experience the departmentalization of thinking when he enters “real school.” If listening to teachers and students today is any indicator, this division of cognition may be inevitable (I hope it’s not!). I repeatedly hear students utter, “This is math class. Why do we have to write?” Or, “This isn’t English class, so does spelling and grammar count?” This happens with teachers, too. “I am just reading for content. The English teachers can deal with all that comma and semicolon stuff.” Or, “I am a math teacher. I am not a writer.” How dare we impose such boundaries on the human imagination and capacities of thinking. JT is a swashbuckler who sees no problems with inserting a 1965 Chevy Impala into a pirate scene – even if the figurines don’t stand a chance of fitting in the vehicle. And he wasted no time justifying the mashup with the excuse of time travel. He just mixed up the tools that he needed to use for the scenario that his imagination was making real.

Yesterday, I spent day 2 of my sabbatical at Unboundary, where I am interning at this amazing strategic studio. At 9:15, the Traffic Director (what a cool title!) informed me that there would be a 10:30 meeting for a project team working on a pitch proposal to a company considering three bids for brand positioning. I spent the next 4.5 hours with this swashbuckling trio, and I feel like I gained an entire semester’s worth of learning in a half a work day.

Throughout the work session, the team utilized powerful brainstorming by storyboarding on a tack-board wall. Disciplines that we would separate and segregate in schools were seemlessly engaged. No one uttered stuff like, “I am not a writer, so you’ll have to take it from here.” When drawings and sketches were needed, they were added to the cards and wall. Mistakes, errors, and failures were expected and taken for granted because they were prototyping – it’s just part of real work. No one handed them a text-book-style, neat-and-clean problem to solve. They began by defining the issue to be addressed. They identified the “problem” and worked to collectively reach a workable solution to the problem. They noted extractions they would need to make from previous and existing work – other projects. No one ever said, “that will never work.” But they did push certain ideas aside and rearrange the wall when a more exciting idea emerged. They encouraged me to participate and contribute rather than just sit, observe, and listen. They treated me like a co-pilot, not just a passenger along for the ride. They made me feel like a we. There was no sage on the stage, but there were mutual guides on the side. When creative obstacles emerged, they…joked. Metaphorically, in my opinion, they were mixing it up and mashing it up like my son JT. Consequently, new insights and possibilities emerged. When they needed to…they ate. The creative brain needs food, and there were no bells signaling that it was time for lunch. But they knew they needed brain food, as well as Brain Food. When a reasonable stopping place was located, they asked for evaluation and feedback from the Executive Director of Creative Intelligence. This trusted source never said, “Good job.” His feedback was precise, specific, detailed, and thought-provoking. There was no grade, but there was loads of assessment. Self-assessment and evaluation by the team all day long, and macro-assessment from the EDCI.

While I know I am overgeneralizing, I wonder about the gap that exists between my son’s natural mode of play and the seemingly natural way to work after college. Of course, there are parts of school that model and mimic childhood play and adult work (play?). But they are not enough. Education is about drawing out what is already there. It is like a sculptor revealing what lies within the chunk of stone. School seems too industrial, too assembly line, too departmentalized. School seems too content-delivery oriented rather than reveal-what-is-already-there oriented.

This morning, I completed my second read of Seth Godin’s Tribes. On page 137 of the hardback, Godin quotes Einstein, who said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” Godin continues:

Leaders create things that didn’t exist before. They do this by giving the tribe a vision of something that could happen, but hasn’t (yet). You can’t manage without knowledge. You can’t lead without imagination.

Creativity should not be segregated to art classes and fiction writing. Imagination should know no bounds. We need to unboundary the lines between departmentalized subjects. We need to combine pirate ships, Spiderman, 1965 Chevy Impalas, airplanes…English, math, science, and history. If it requires time travel, so be it. We need to lead. We need to close the swashbuckling gap.