Flat Classrooms — Intrinsic Communicators & Influencers

A Note: I feel like apologizing for these rantings on the flat classroom. There is nothing here that is new, that you haven’t heard. I just wonder if a different context, a new story for these characters, might be useful as we continue to retool education.

David Davies commented to my original entry on Flat Classrooms that…

..to what extent do you think students in the not-so-flat classroom are not curious, not self-directed, uncommunicative, etc?

Certainly, kids are still curious and they are self-directed learners. We call it play. To them it’s work, it’s what they do. The explore their environment, which is becoming increasingly virtual, and they find interesting things to do with it. But it’s play.

Back during World War II, there was something called Yankee ingenuity. It was a characteristic of Americans, that we held for our selves, that we were creative and resourceful problem-solvers. If this was a unique quality that we had, then I have a theory as to where it came from. We were, perhaps, one of the only culture that actually gave its children an extensive childhood, and that it was through childish play, that we became resourceful problem-solvers. I don’t know if this makes sense to you, but I think that play is an important learning experience.

Davies goes on to say…

Is it the students per se that have changed or their environment? The classroom environment is ever changing is it not?

I’m not absolutely sure where the writer is coming from on this, but I’ll respond to what I’m reading, and it is undeniable that our children’s environment is different from where and when I grew up. My children’s first computer was an Apple IIe, and they learned to type using FrEdWriter (raise your hands if you remember FrEdWriter). Today, slightly more than a dozen years later, their chatting with the world, and publishing videos that they’ve produced sitting in their bedrooms.

More to the point of this title of the blog entry, they are master communicators and influencers. They write incessantly, using a language and grammar that they’ve invented. They follow and they lead through their communications. They play their video games for a week, get board, and invent new games to play in the old video game environments. Play is a flat learning engine, powered by the energy of curiosity and and the intrinsic need to communicate and influence.

Have classrooms changed? To some degree and from some perspectives, they have. But the model is still gravity driven, the heavy load of standards, being carefully directed downwardly to minds not yet full to over-brimming.

I think that the leverage point for unleashing the energy of curiosity and self-directed learning, is our children’s intrinsic need to communicate and influence. If we can make classroom learning, more of a conversation between student and teacher, learner and curriculum, classroom and the world, etc. — then perhaps we’ll have our perpetual learning engine.

Again, absolutely nothing new here. Smarter people than me have talked about it before, and good teachers understand it intuitively. But if we can couch it into a timely context, turn it into a story, then maybe we can get some traction, and start moving.