What Schools Can Learn From Summer Camps

A friend of mine (@BenrydalShapir0) passed along a short but interesting read the other day. In What Schools Can Learn From Summer Camps, Annie Murphy Paul highlights an important element inherent in most summer programs.  Paul, relying on a research study conducted by a Standford University Psychology professor, states that conflicting ideologies exist when comparing summer camps and school.  In the article Paul presents the following:

The researchers were looking at the teenagers’ “goal orientations”—were they interested in learning for learning’s sake, or in showing off their smarts? The first type of attitude, called a “mastery orientation,” has been linked to high levels of motivation and engagement, while the second, known as a “performance orientation,” has been tied to greater anxiety and less resilience in the face of failure.

 Having worked at a summer camp for a long period of time and now, watching my three daughters head off each day to camp, I can attest to the sense of intrinsic motivation natural to any camp experience.  Whether it is learning how to successfully master a swim stroke, make a left handed lay-up or pitch a tent, goals are established by the individual and not some external force.  Summer goals are about taking healthy risks and growing over time.  Failure or better yet, personal struggle is not met with punishment, but instead, viewed as an important part of the learning process. 

Unfortunately schools often fail to reflect this attitude.  Schools favor "performance orientation" as opposed to empowering learners to determine goals.  As Paul shares we need to reward intellectual risk-taking, and avoid punishing students for failed experiments. 

Creating Innovators

I wanted to share highlights from Tony Wagner's Creating Innovators: the Making of Young People Who Will Change the World.

The solution to our economic and social challenges is the same: creating a viable and sustainable economy that creates good jobs without polluting the planet. And there is general agreement as to what that new economy must be based on. One word: innovation

And 77 percent agreed, “the greatest innovations of the 21st century will be those that have helped to address human needs more than those that had created the most profit

Disruptive or transformative innovation, on the other hand, is about creating a new or fundamentally different product or service that disrupts existing markets and displaces formerly dominant technologies

Finally, Brown writes that design thinkers are, above all, collaborators: “The increasing complexity of products, services, and experiences has replaced the myth of the lone creative genius with the reality of the enthusiastic interdisciplinary collaborator.

People who are successful at Google also have a bias towards action—you see something broken and you fix it. You are smart enough to spot problems, but you don’t whine about them or wait for somebody else to fix them. You ask, ‘How can I make things better?’ And collaboration is so essential to everything that we do—we prize the ability to recognize and learn from people around you, who have very different kinds of expertise.

 Too many teachers and employers still reward the “old school” behaviors of deference to authority and striving for “success,” conventionally defined—and count on carrots and sticks for motivation. The result is that many in the Innovation Generation are skeptical of adult authority and the institutions that their elders have presided over. School is a game the Innovation Generation knows they have to play to get “credentialed,” but they do it with as little effort as possible

The sense of purpose can take many forms. But the one that emerged most frequently in my interviews and in the interviews by the authors of “the Innovator’s DNA” is the desire to somehow “make a difference” 

“To me, empowerment means students can go out and apply what they’ve learned to the problems that they’ve never seen before with parts that they’ve never used before.” 

Apple is run like a start-up. It is a company that is continuously innovating, through rapid prototyping and iterating. Rethinking what the future will be. Yes, you have to make a profit to build a successful company, but real success means putting that profit back into continuous innovation. 

The D-Lab philosophy is very much experiential—real projects for real people and real feedback on your projects. Too often students don’t get meaningful feedback on their work. In terms of design, our focus is on people who live on less than two dollars per day. We also believe in building the capacity of people we work with in the developing world—foster the belief that they are creators, designers—and that our students should value indigenous knowledge. 

Instead, we need to encourage students to give voice to their beliefs and to support their intrinsic empathy and commitment to justice 

But I don’t see these young innovators buying into being the “twice as” generation. They are defining their own, different American Dream—one that values passion and purpose, in which their priority is making a difference more than making money. As one young innovator said, “I want to live a meaningful life with just enough money to support myself and a family. 

    

Thinking About Homework

I wanted to share a recurring conversation from this past week. I am in the process of reviewing 504 Plans.  A determination has to be made as to whether or not a plan will continue into next year and if so, do we need to revise accommodations to better address needs and the academic environment.  To ensure that an informed decision is reached data is collected from various stakeholders.  Included in the data collection process is a meeting with parents and students.  We ask parents to come in and share their own observations about what transpires after the school day ends.  On several occasions the conversation drifted towards a discussion of homework.

For a variety of reasons, several students struggled to hand in homework assignments. Unfortunately, students were receiving zeros on these assignments.  Overall grades were being adversely impacted by a failure to complete homework.  What was interesting is that a majority of these students performed well on formal summative assessments. In a fair amount of cases there was disconnect between homework grades and summative assessments.

This disconnect has been a recurring theme throughout this year both in discussions about 504 Plans and with other young learners I routinely work with.  I work with bright and creative students who perform well on tests and performance-based tasks.  However, a progress or marking period report grade does not mirror this high level of academic achievement and a comment often refers to a problem with homework.

The concern I have is why, at high school, we still attach weight to the completion of homework.  I fail to see the value in assigning points to homework assignments.  It seems that weight should be directed towards measures that assess growth over an extended period of time as opposed to a quick turnaround between instructional sessions.  Moreover, homework or work completed outside of class presents an opportunity to cultivate a sense of ownership amongst students.  In contrast to dictating to students what should be accomplished, an avenue could be established where learners are making critical decisions about work flow and how to address specific needs.  The definition of homework  should change as we further distance instruction from the industrial model of schooling.

In my conversation with families from last week I tried to draw distinction between compliance and performance.  The idea is simple we should acknowledge growth and comment on performance and refrain from assigning academic rigor to compliance. For work to be meaningful there needs to be a sense of personal onwership and empowerment as well as motivation that is intrinsic and not solely extrinsic