The most effective learning experience I have had a chance to participate in as an educator involved taking my students to northern Wisconsin for a four-day immersion experience to study ecology and resource management principles. Students had the opportunity to learn as field biologists and study concepts in a wide variety of settings. During this experience over the years, there were numerous memorable moments, from seeing flying squirrels to chewing on wintergreen leaves (and tasting the flavor) to investigating streams and bogs, to sitting quietly in a red pine forest reading a passage from A Sand County Almanac, as the wind moved through the canopy.
The kids learned more in four days than they learned during the rest of the year. The reason: the four-day experience was about the most authentic learning experience you could imagine. The authenticity of the learning experience was unquestionable.
As a biology teacher, my belief was that students learned biology by doing biology. I was always most successful as a teacher when I could engage my students in real experiences (labs, field trips) where they were biologists and actually did biology.
Creating these moments were always a challenge, time-consuming, and sometimes exhaustive. Over my career inside of education and as a consultant, I have seen schools struggle with creating the conditions that are necessary for truly authentic learning. I think most teachers and schools truly desire learning to be as authentic as possible but it’s an elusive target for most and there are a number of reasons for it. I’ll get to that in a second.
So, when I saw that the focus of the Educon Conference in Philadelphia, I proposed a session entitled Exploring a Broader Context for Developing Authentic Learning Experiences. If you are familiar with the conference, the intent of a session is to focus on a conversation rather than a presentation. With that in mind, I have a number of provocations that I will pose to the audience (they are a start-these will probably be revised) for discussion, but they are suggestive of the reasons why I think schools struggle with authenticity. Here are the provocations at this point that I will challenge the audience to make sense of and respond to in the context of an expansion of authentic learning environments:
Schools can develop authentic conditions for learning by being isolated from their communities.
A focus on traditional outcomes for the school experience (such as college and career readiness, workplace readiness) limits the development of authentic learning experiences.
A focus on increased authenticity can occur within the context of most schools’ current curriculum and instructional methodologies.
The most impactful learning occurs when students are placed in unfamiliar situations and asked to use unanticipated skills and behaviors.
Current professional learning models support the development of authentic learning environments.
Current school designs (physical and digital) are capable of supporting authentic learning.
As you read these questions, you can probably imagine what I think are the issues associated with developing authentic opportunities for learning. Most likely, there will be varied interpretations of these questions (intentional on my part) that will provoke interesting conversation. However, it is my belief that the questions posed here reflect the significant challenges that schools must address and solve. Relevancy hangs in the balance.
If you are at Educon in Philadelphia, please consider joining me in what promises to be an invigorating conversation where we seek to develop some solutions to these challenges.