Making Learning Whole - Gaming Education

I'm reading a very interesting book called Making Learning Whole by David Perkins, Senior Professor of Education at Harvard Graduate School of Education. It centers on the idea that effective learning is done by approaching complexity as if we're playing the 'whole game'.

Too often, we ask our students to focus on the elements of a problem without helping them understand how those elements fit together. Also too often, we teach about things like revolutions, chemistry, and so on without trying to understand how to do those things. Perkins calls these two realities elementitis and aboutitis.

As an English teacher for many years, I struggled constantly with the grammar question. I certainly knew how important it was to arm my students with the tools they would need to ensure their writing could become technically correct, but I also knew that unless they had a sense of purpose as to what they were putting on paper, they'd be learning the elements of writing without really understanding the whole process. I really tried hard to create a studio environment in my classes where each of my students were treated like real live authors. I wanted them to be engaged with their writing so deeply that their lives depended on it. Isolated lessons on grammar were important, but only as part of a much more holistic process. Knowing what a gerund phrase is will not likely improve student writing.

(For all of you who enjoyed my little grammar joke just now, thank you).

Of course, we learned about good writing by reading it and talking about it, and we spent the requisite time improving discrete skills like finding the gerund phrase within the sentence. (Thanks again - ;) ). But, the lights only really came on when I asked them to write. Often, I wouldn't assign topics, I wouldn't provide due dates (other than: 'it's due when you've finished it'), and the grades assigned would correspond to growth in areas in need of attention. The importance of understanding that each of my students came to my class with their own particular history, their own particular way of seeing things, and their own particular strengths cannot be overemphasized.

There is no 'one size fits all' approach to teaching that makes sense and more important, the idea that there might be is damaging and, at its core, unethical.

We need to take the time to let our students own the process of their education. School should be a place where we all have 'skin in the game'; where we get to try things out, not because we are going to become professional physicists or NBA All Stars, but because by doing them we become better and we make a difference for those around us.

David Perkins puts it rather well:

"Much of the rhetoric around education emphasizes excellence, and indeed excellence is a fine grail to seek. However, imagine a world where almost any adult had a kind of energetic if simple sense of civic engagement or ecological responsibility or avoidance of prejudice. Starting from the baseline of today's indifference and neglect, these 'games' do not have to be played in very sophisticated ways to do substantial good! The world would be a better place if in areas like these most people achieved active mediocrity rather than passive erudition." (Perkins, Pg. 23)