Begin the Year by Dreaming

I’ve decided that I’m going to begin this school year with my stu­dents by let­ting them dream. I have sev­eral rea­sons for doing it, not the least of which is that it gives me a chance to get to know a lit­tle more about each of them and what makes them tick. Mostly, though, it will be a reminder for me of who I’m doing this for and what my focus needs to be. It’s a way of stay­ing cen­tered on the students—instead of being cen­tered on the cur­ricu­lum or my inter­ests or the dis­trict assess­ment plan.

There are many ways I could go about find­ing out my stu­dents’ dreams: I could ask them about their goals in life, for exam­ple, or places they’d like to visit. An inter­est­ing idea occurred to me, though, when I started think­ing about my district’s plan to build sev­eral new ele­men­tary schools.

What if, I thought, the plan­ning process were to begin with the dreams of stu­dents? What if we asked stu­dents to imag­ine the per­fect school? No pre­con­cep­tions, no “can’ts” or “won’ts,” just the unhin­dered imag­i­na­tions of the peo­ple for whom the build­ing is being designed?

So that’s just what I’m going to ask my stu­dents next week when they return to school:

I will find out a lot about my stu­dents this way, much of which I will be able to use when I’m design­ing learn­ing expe­ri­ences for them. It occurs to me, though, that we might gain a lot of valu­able insights if we started every instruc­tional design process this way, whether it’s con­struct­ing a new multi-​​million dol­lar school or plan­ning next week’s math unit. I’m not sug­gest­ing that we respond to every whim and fan­tasy they come up with, but just to take them all seri­ously. Just because a seven-​​year-​​old asks for pony rides dur­ing recess or a fourteen-​​year-​​old wants video games in the cafe­te­ria doesn’t mean there isn’t some legit­i­mate need that we need to con­sider when plan­ning the space. If most of the stu­dents say there should be less (or even no) home­work, we shouldn’t sim­ply dis­miss it as ado­les­cent whin­ing, we should look hard at our poli­cies and the ratio­nale behind them.

I know that I will take every response I get from stu­dents in my sur­vey seri­ously, and may even con­sider send­ing them on to the com­mit­tee that is plan­ning the new schools.

What if we began every­thing we did in edu­ca­tion with the dreams of the stu­dents? It won’t solve all of our prob­lems, but we might learn some­thing that would help. Why not start your year by find­ing out what your stu­dents want? Share what you learn in the comments.