The Things That Matter

Intro: Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

My great grandfather started practicing medicine in Brooklyn at the beginning of the 20th century. In his early years, he traveled by horse and carriage to see his patients. Before he died, in his nineties, he got to witness not only the moon landing, but also the deployment of our first orbiting space station, Skylab. That’s a hell of a lot of change in one lifetime. I feel old when I think about watching filmstrips in school and using a rotary telephone attached to the wall by a cord. I’ve got nothing on my Grandpa Dave.

When everything is changing and everyone is obsessing over the new and the shiny, my curmudgeonly side starts pushing back and telling things like AI and Gamification to get off my lawn (even though I have actively worked on products using both of those things). Part of me embraces the new and the cool, but part of me wonders just how much, or how long, the new and cool really matter.

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We love talking about “game changers,” but the teaching game hasn’t changed all that much in over a hundred years. I used to think that was a Very Bad Thing—that teaching was terribly conservative and resistant to change. But maybe it’s a good thing! Maybe there are some parts of teaching that actually shouldn’t change—approaches to education that just plain matter and shouldn’t be messed with too much.

If so…what are those things? What must a good education provide, regardless of what new tech or technique we use to deliver it? Here are my thoughts. What are yours?

Build Schema

We spend a lot of time teaching facts, but not as much time as we should providing context for those facts and helping children develop schema, those mental models we use to organize and arrange discrete facts and put them together into ideas and concepts. We learn facts in order to build schema, and while we often forget a lot of facts once we leave school, we tend to walk away with some Big Ideas about the world and how it works. We have an understanding of the Civil War—why it started, what it meant, and what it changed—even if we’ve forgotten a ton of details about it. But if the way the subject is presented is all factual detail and no Big Ideas, our minds aren’t well equipped to organize and store things in long-term memory.

What’s New?

Can new and cool technology play a role in developing schema? Why not? We’ve relied on paper graphic organizers for years to help students organize information, and putting those same charts and graphs in PDF format is only a baby step forward. I think we have a wide range of opportunities in front of us to use online annotation, organization, and collaboration tools to help students access, manage, and process information in radically more efficient ways—not only during the school year, but also across school years, throughout their K-12 journey. We’ve barely scratched the surface.

Build Skills

Part of what matters in education is methodical, planful training in the skills we will need for adult life: reading skills; writing skills; the ability to speak in public; the ability to manipulate numbers and perform calculations; the ability to break down a problem, organize important information, and make a plan towards solving that problem. This may not be the most engaging or creative aspect of schooling, but it’s critical. Part of what we want from schools is to make young people capable.

What’s New?

Anyone learning a new skill, whether it’s multiplying fractions or shooting a layup or playing the piano, needs ongoing, timely, and relevant feedback. A coach or mentor needs to watch the learner’s performance carefully, provide support and encouragement, and intervene when necessary to tweak and improve the learner’s performance. Imagine how proficient a basketball player would be if he had to practice drills for two to three weeks by himself before receiving any feedback from a coach. That’s what happens far too often in our classrooms, especially as students get older. A high school student may have to wait a week or longer (sometimes far longer) to get an essay back from a teacher, and in many cases, all they get back is a grade. Even if a paper is marked up with red ink, it may be far too much feedback, coming far too late, to be of any real use.

This is where technology may be able to help—especially tools making use of generative AI. We are already seeing math and writing tools coming to market, promising to give personalized and timely feedback to an entire classroom simultaneously, providing instructional support at a scale and a pace that no single teacher could hope to do.

Build Habits

Related to skills but slightly different is the idea of habits of mind—the ways in which we perform skills. In the working world, how you do a thing is often as important as whether you can do it (if not more important). Many people have tried to organize and systematize lists of these crucial habits for use in schools, starting with Arthur Costa and Bena Kallick, but extending to things like 21st Century Skills or Common Core’s standards of mathematical practice. You’ll see a lot of the same ideas popping up in these different lists: being resilient and persistent; working methodically and carefully; communicating clearly; thinking critically and analytically; taking calculated risks; questioning and experimenting; working collaboratively; and so on. Other than the math practice standards, few of these show up explicitly in state learning standards or in school curriculum frameworks, but they’re implicit in what most schools and teachers consider to be “good work.” Which means these things may be expected far more than they’re being taught.

What’s New?

Can gamification help students feel more engaged and motivated, not only to practice key skills, but also to develop habits like resilience, precision, and thoughtful risk-taking? Perhaps. Recent research produced as part of the Responsible Innovation in Technology for Children (RITEC) project, funded by UNICEF and the LEGO Group, found that:

Digital games, when designed well, can allow children to experience a sense of control, have freedom of choice, experience mastery and feelings of achievement, experience and regulate emotions, feel connected to others and manage those social connections, imagine different possibilities, act on original ideas, make things, and explore, construct and express facets of themselves and others.

But gamification does not have mean only “playing a character-based video game,” or something that formal and structured. It can also mean any activity that allows students to be playful and experimental with the content they are learning—to stretch and pull at it like Silly Putty, to see what it’s made of and what it can do. I wrote about that here in a recent blog post:

As the historian, Johan Huizinga, writes, everything we think of as culture originates in some form of play. We are homo ludens—a species that learns through play. The statistician and author, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, says much the same thing in his book, Antifragile: our understanding of the world comes first from tinkering, and only later from scholarship. For us as educators, a text can be more than a thing to read and respond to; it can be a playground for students to mess about in.

While technology can help us provide structured games as supplements to the curriculum, it can also afford a myriad of opportunities for students to experiment, mess with, and play with the concepts and information they are learning, rather than simply learning X, writing down X, practicing X, and then writing down X on a test.

Find Joy

This one goes beyond having fun playing games or messing about with one’s learning. Joy is a thing you won’t find in any set of state learning standards or adjacent “habits of mind” schemes, and it’s a shame. If you speak to professionals and practitioners—actual mathematicians, scientists, historians, artists, or writers, joy lies at the heart of what they do. It’s what motivates them to do the work; it’s what they find in the daily practice of the work. It’s why they chose their profession. It’s why they bother. And yet, seeking out joyfulness—figuring out what resonates with you, what makes your heart sing and your mind race—is not considered a priority or a goal of our K-12 schooling. It think that’s foolish, and maybe even dangerous. Education should not be focused solely on teaching children how to do things that will someday make them money; it should also be focused on preparing young people to have rich and deep and joyful and rewarding lives in a rich and deep and complex world. So I’m putting “Joy” here as one of my essentials, even if the rest of the world doesn’t.

What’s New?

Can new tools in the classroom, whether technology-based or not, enhance a student’s joy in learning? I have no idea. Maybe—but not unless joy is something the teacher cares about first. A teacher can light a fire of curiosity within the souls of her students, or she can snuff out the fire that’s already burning. So, while some piece of new or shiny technology might help enhance the former, I doubt very much that it could mitigate the damage of the latter. But I could be wrong. Tell me if I’m wrong.

Outro: Things Change…or Maybe Not

All right—those are my four non-negotiables, my four must-do categories for any education system: Schema, Skills, Habits, Joy. What does your list boil down to?

To wrap this up, here are two slightly different, but equally beloved, takes on our theme of change and persistence.

Dylan’s Take:

Tennyson’s Take:

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

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