Messy Learning from Tidy Teaching?

As I was reread­ing Wig­gins and McTighe’s Under­stand­ing by Design recently, it occurred to me that there is a dis­con­nect between authen­tic learn­ing and the way we are required to teach today. Teach­ing is increas­ingly focused into neat lit­tle pack­ages that are eas­ily assessed and can be boiled down into a sin­gle test score for account­abil­ity and record keep­ing. Cur­ricu­lum and unit plans are struc­tured and pretty doc­u­ments, hav­ing a well-​​defined begin­ning, mid­dle and end. Lessons are lit­tle self-​​contained deals, 45-​​minutes or less, with a clear struc­ture and clo­sure and don’t nec­es­sar­ily con­nect to any­thing else.

It’s teach­ing in a Twit­ter and YouTube world where sig­nif­i­cance boils down to a 140-​​character sum­mary or a 30-​​second video clip.

But learn­ing in the real world, or at least in my real world, is messy, lumpy, and long-​​term. I was think­ing about how I per­son­ally learn almost every­thing I’ve learned in the last few years: web design, writ­ing inter­ac­tive fic­tion, cur­ricu­lum com­pact­ing, even IEP writ­ing. In most cases, I learned most of what I know sim­ply by jump­ing in with both feet, get­ting dirty, and muck­ing around with things. In a lot of cases, I learned some of the “basics” after I learned more advanced tech­niques. I learned things as I needed them. When I wanted to make a web page do what I wanted it to do, I just went in and fig­ured it out. There was very lit­tle sys­tem­atic about the process. When I ran into a road­block, I’d go look­ing for help, either from those more struc­tured resources or from my net­work of friends and colleagues.

Not that I didn’t have some struc­ture to my learn­ing. In most cases I did take the time to read tuto­ri­als, or intro­duc­tory level books about what I was learn­ing, and I tried some struc­tured activ­i­ties designed to walk me through what I needed to know. But often I didn’t know what I needed to know until I was in the midst of my own real project.

I think this is what Wig­gins and McTighe are inter­ested in get­ting at with more authen­tic ways of assess­ing stu­dents. But how to fit it into the struc­tured world of school? My own teach­ing the last few years has tended towards the messy, unstruc­tured vari­ety. Often, I’ll teach a unit by hav­ing an idea of a project I want my stu­dents to com­plete, and some spe­cific goals I want them to get out of it, and we just sort of dive in and work out most of the details as we go along. There’s some value in this, I think, and as much as I’ve crit­i­cized myself for not being orga­nized enough or plan­ning enough, when I look back I can see a lot of good learn­ing that has taken place in my stu­dents over the years. The feed­back I get from the stu­dents and their par­ents has also rein­forced this.

But to an out­sider (or an admin­is­tra­tor) look­ing on, it’s hard to explain. I don’t always have finely-​​detailed unit plans, and less often do I have well-​​structured daily les­son plans. I don’t always have the clear­est idea where some­thing is going to take us, and often the stu­dents push a project in direc­tions I couldn’t have imag­ined it going when I con­ceived it in the first place. More often than not, too, these learn­ing expe­ri­ences don’t always wrap them­selves up into a tidy pack­age with a bow that I can send home at the end of the mark­ing period. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve set up our annual end of the year open house dis­play with mul­ti­ple signs indi­cat­ing “works-​​in-​​progress”.

As a teacher of the gifted, I have much more free­dom to try these messy projects with my stu­dents. But there has to be a way to tighten things up, too. As much as authen­tic learn­ing is messy, I do want my stu­dents to be able to walk away from the year with a sense of accom­plish­ment and com­ple­tion, and I want to be able to help main­tain an appro­pri­ate focus.

So where’s the bal­ance? How do we keep things “authen­tic” (and there­fore poten­tially messy) and still have the neat, account­able pack­age that the school sys­tem demands? What are the con­flict­ing forces that pull you in two dif­fer­ent direc­tions as you teach and how do you rec­on­cile them?

(This arti­cle orig­i­nally appeared in a slightly dif­fer­ent form at Grandé With Room)