What We All Want

(cross-posted at TechLearning.com)

Over the past two weeks, I’ve been having my students (and staff) complete the online NetDay Survey by “Speak Up,” a national research project conducted by “Project Tomorrow.” They’ve put together free surveys for Parents, Teachers, and Students. The student surveys are broken down into different flavors, two of which I used: group survey (which I used with my 1st and 2nd graders) and individual survey (which I had my 3rd and 4th graders take with me reading the questions to them). The data will be summarized and shared with national and state policy makers, but each participating district is able to receive their own aggregated data. Unfortunately, I am posting this blog post the day before the survey closes (December 21st), but I definitely commend it for your district next year if you haven’t already taken advantage of this excellent resource.

The survey is really incredible, asking pertinent questions about attitudes and use of technology in schools and outside of school. The questions themselves have led to further discussions and examinations in each of my classes. For instance, in one of the questions, students are asked how they would use cellphones for schoolwork. After the survey was complete, this brought about discussions and awareness that cellphones could actually be used in school as a tool. Many of my students have not yet been exposed to this idea.

In another question about cellphones, my preconceived notions were also challenged as I found out that many of my elementary students actually use cellphones (from as young as first graders), and a small number of my older students (3rd and 4th grade) actually own cellphones.

Many of the answers to the survey were “eye-opening,” but the question that resonated with me the most was the last question in which students were asked: “Pretend that you are the school principal and you want to make sure every student feels important. What would you do?” The answers were astounding from all grades. Sure, you had the “give them candy” and “longer recesses” responses, but these were in the minority. Most of the responses fell into three main categories: Safety, Inclusion, and Contribution.

In the younger grades, I typed up the responses from the group, and many older students wanted to share their responses with me and allowed me to take notes, so I will share some of them here, grouped by those 3 main categories:

For the “Safety” responses:

“Make the school more fun and safe.” “Make sure they’re safe.” “I would make sure every kid was in the school if it started to pour.” “I would make sure there was a storm cellar in Kansas.” “Make sure they’re not too sick or anything.” “Make sure they don’t get hurt.” “If someone got tired, they could rest.” “I would make sure that everybody feels safe.”

For the “Inclusion” responses:

“Give them a friend.” “I would make them feel as comfortable as they ever could in the world and I would respect them so that they would feel special about themselves.” “Make sure that you love them and care about them.” ” Make sure they feel comfortable.” “Take care of smaller people.” “If they feel left out or something, tell people to let them in.” “Make sure they feel just like at home.” “Make sure you care about them.” “Make sure that every student is included by others.” “Every student would get a turn to say what they would want to say.” “Make sure every kid would be included in every game.” “I would make sure the kids would get a chance to do the things that they could do.” “Make sure that people would share and take turns in everything they do.”

For the “Contribution” responses:

“Give every student something to do that is important.” “I would make sure every student has a choice in what to do to help.” “I would give everybody a job that’s important and fun.” “I would make sure that everyone helped out in a way.” “Let them help the teacher sometimes.” “I would make sure that they could do stuff that they believed in.”

Wow… quite a list. But really: is any of it a surprise? These three categories are basic human needs, aren’t they? Aren’t they what we all want?

The responses have been resonating with me and following me home every day since we started the surveys. I’ve shared them with my wife and daughter at the dinner table. Each night, my wife and I usually continued on with the conversation while my daughter finished before us and went off to play with her PlayMobil people, only to come back into the conversation later after processing her responses. And while watching her play one of those evenings, this simple statement popped into my head:

“If we want to know how to engage a kid, just watch a kid.”

Everything we need to do and know about helping students become successful learners is in the above comments as well as knowing one more important thing about kids: that they like to play. In fact they need to play —a concept that is still barely understood.

We live in a time where there is less value on “play” in school, and more emphasis on “Standards Accountability”, which is, I believe, to our children’s detriment. In Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind he makes the argument that “play” is essential in developing “right brain” thinking necessary for what he calls the “Conceptual Age.” He provides a great quote from Albert Einstein in the chapter called “Play:”

“Games are the most elevated form of Investigation.”

This concept has been taken to heart by Mitch Resnick at MIT, in his work with his group perfectly named, “Lifelong Kindergarten.” The name is to remind us of the importance of play and exploration that should be central to all learning, and usually gets left behind in Kindergarten, or worse these days, not even allowed at that stage in many schools.

Alfie Kohn talks about how we’re experiencing school in a very different way:

“The first problem with all the people who talk about ‘tougher standards’ is that they completely misunderstand why kids learn and where motivation comes from… The kind of learning experiences that the best teachers offer sometimes make parents nervous because it’s unfamiliar. And our attitude as parents sometimes sounds almost like, ‘It was bad enough for me, it’s bad enough for my kids!’ Sometimes we seem to subscribe to the ‘Listerene Theory of Education: it taste bad, but it’s good for you. You may not like this. School may be unpleasant, but the very unpleasantness is seen on some level —unconsciously by us— as evidence of its effectiveness. However, that is essentially a lie… The [best and most recent research in cognitive science] overwhelmingly suggests… [that] the very education that turns out to be so unpalatable for us and our kids, also largely turns out to be not terribly promising or productive in terms of getting kids who really understand ideas from the ‘inside-out’.”

So the question is, why don’t we allow for learning to be more aligned with the concept of play rather than the concept of work and all the drudgery that that word connotes? I can already hear the arguments (as I’m sure you can as well): “Kids will grow up lazy.” “Real life isn’t about play.” “Anything worth while takes hard work.” And so on…

We are forcing students into a learning style that will supposedly serve them in the future rather than allow for the learning style that is their natural approach to the world now. I had a discussion with a teacher recently based on the NetDay survey, which has many questions about using games in school. This teacher could see no purpose for games in education and strongly opposed it. “So what… are we going to let them play games all day?” she asked. Well, when you put it that way, it does sound bad. However, you could counter with: “So what… are we going to have them pretend to be factory workers all day, processing facts and running them through ‘skill-drills’ that will serve our Standardized Assessments, but will do nothing to prepare our students with skills that they will need in the 21st century?” Admittedly, I didn’t have the courage or clear thought at the time of the discussion for this retort. Here is a list of articles from Social Impact Games on the benefits of using games in education (and the workplace) that I need to forward to her. Frankly, given the choice between learning with a game and learning with a “worksheet”, I’d like to give the game a try.

If we look at the quotes above, we can see that for children the act of play and doing work of importance are not mutually exclusive. The first quote in the “Contribution” section (“Give every student something to do that is important.”) is in fact from a 1st grader, who already understands that learning has to have a real purpose and has to have relevance in order for the student to “feel important.”

At the Christa McAuliffe Conference, Dr. Tim Tyson talked about the idea of “childhood” being a relatively new concept; that children used to have very little time for “play” due to demands of helping the family survive. In the past, children were first and foremost expected to make a contribution and Tyson wonders if some of the problems that ail our children these days are due to the absence of attending to this contribution need. He asks the question: how old does someone need to be before they can make a contribution? Tyson calls for allowing students to make significant contributions now rather than later in life.

Clearly, this is what kids want to do, as evidenced by the quotes above. In collecting these quotes, it was as if everything that Dr. Tyson talked about was being echoed by the students. Kids want “jobs”. They want to do something “important”. Their “work” has to have meaning for it to be worth their time, their engagement. Students are asking for a job because they want to affect their world, make change, create, influence, design… These are basic human needs and desires.

I would argue that the need for play is similar or parallel to this need to contribute. Children are equipped to naturally explore, create and “test out things” through play in order to understand their world and give it meaning. In creating change through contribution, students are able to take this to the next step and make their efforts meaningful.

Schoolwork aligned with play is engaging to children because play is important to children. Schoolwork aligned with making a contribution is engaging to children because making a contribution is important to human beings. It could be argued that not aligning schoolwork to either of these will in fact encourage students to “grow up lazy” or not commit to anything worthwhile. If the work in school is not purposeful (by not connecting it to what is important to children), then aren’t we teaching children through routine that work really is meaningless? Students will still seek out opportunities to fulfill their need for play and contribution; they will just come to learn that school is not the place for those experiences to come to fruition. School will become/remain superficial, artificial, and irrelevant.

In short, we have everything we need to engage kids and “get” them to learn what we want them to learn. Connect the lessons to that which is important to the children and you’ll have them “eating out of your hand,” banging on the doors to get into the school. We must meet their “demands”: Safety, Inclusion, and a Job that is Important. We must meet them on their developmental level and engage them in the language of play (and by the way, I don’t think the importance of play ends with childhood at all). Here’s what I believe is the “recipe for success”:

Safety + Inclusion + Meaningful Contribution + Play = Success for Our Students.

Look at how this 4th grader summed it up:

“I would make every student feel important by [having] them share their likes and dislikes of school so I could make their least favorite their favorite and also their most interesting.”

Or, as a first grader put it:

“Make sure kids are happy.”

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Image Citation:
deepsan, “Kids playing.” deepsan’s photos. 11 Mar 2005. 15 Dec 2007 <http://www.flickr.com/photos/deepsan/6300962/>.