In the documentary film Sketches of Frank Gehry, he and his fellow architects are considering how to improve a cardboard mock-up of a building they're designing. Gehry unhappily stares at the model and gruffly declares, "Well, let's look at it for a while. Be irritated by it. Then we'll figure out what to do." He feels that something is just not right. He explains, "I don't like this side. This [wall] just has to get crankier." He and his partner fiddle around with some paper, bending and crumpling it, trying it out. Then finally he exclaims, "That is so stupid looking it's great."
Gehry, in the stages of early planning, demonstrates a fussiness with the process. For each project he takes on, he is known for constructing at least two early models out of blocks, one large and one small. He explains, "You have to force yourself to change scale and go back and forth. It keeps you honest."
We as teachers, much like Frank Gehry, design our classroom spaces before we begin teaching. In the best classrooms, teachers consider what materials to make available, how to organize tables and chairs into various workstations, and perhaps how to create nested areas, little nooks and crannies for student to tuck themselves away in to escape the hustle and bustle of the classroom when, for that child, it all gets to be too much. A teacher who considers deeply the design of the physical classroom space typically thinks beyond rows of students arranged facing forward to coldly receive the teacher's daily lecture. Rather this teacher is considering how to make the classroom one of making and creating, a space for students to work on projects collaboratively or independently.
Teachers also think of design in linear terms, conceiving of the narrative flow of the class from the opening to the closing. This is what I wrote about in my last post about lesson planning. One of my great colleagues, John Hanlon, has taught literature and history for over twenty years. Now, a very experienced teacher, he wrote,
And with regard to your blog post on lesson planning, I have become less structured. More and more, I walk into a class with maybe three balls that I want the students to juggle with, but how and when each ball gets introduced is not planned in advance. Nonetheless, by the end of the class, each of those balls will be deployed.
Lesson planning certainly isn't the same for all teachers. We all have our unique styles, and, as John notes, what is particularly important is our level of experience teaching in the classroom. John (teaching an advanced high school humanities class) knows that he has three essential ideas, questions, or topics that he would like to explore. For him this is a narrative thread. John's experience allows him to support the distinct ideas that will emerge from the students. Other teachers might want, or need, a more detailed lesson plan.
One of the reasons Frank Gehry's process appeals to me is that I see designing classroom environments, both in terms of time and space, as inherently creative processes. In 1940 Ralph W. Tyler published a book called Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction where he laid out the idea of "learning objectives." This was a radical departure from the notion that teaching is determined only by content. He wrote that regarding the student, ""It is what he does that he learns, not what the teacher does." In the 1980s this model was developed by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe into a system called "Understanding by Design" or UBD—a more general term is "backwards planning." The idea is that the teacher begins with the larger objectives and then figures out what activities are needed to help students reach those final goals. Certainly not a bad idea overall, and at the time, this was considered a radical departure from the textbook driven way of teaching content, moving from chapter to chapter until reaching the end. Even in 1949 Tyler's book was a bestseller!
Fast forward to today. Now teachers are often required to write daily "learning objectives" or "standards" on the board of the classroom. These objectives are determined by school districts, states, or today, on a national level, from a document called the "Common Core." Teachers all naturally teach with a set of objectives in mind. In a classroom for teaching English Language Learners the objective obviously is for the students to learn to communicate in English. A quote often attributed to Antoine de Saint Exupéry notes the power of focusing on the bigger picture rather than only the details,
If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.
One of the problems in educational reform are the lists and lists of learning objectives we give to teachers. I'm not sure why this has always been a part of education policy making. In the twenty-three years I've been involved in education, I've seen a steady stream of binders delivered in boxes to schools. I suppose it makes committees and administrators feel like they're doing something. I've often written here about the school administrators who perform "walk throughs" of their school where they stop in a classroom for a couple of minutes to ask students "What standard are you working on?" Classroom teaching today is envisioned by policy makers as a clean process: 1) state the objective; 2) plan the learning activities to meet the objective; 3) test the students on whether they have achieved the objective. 4) repeat said process for all given objectives.
As Gehry notes, the creative process is much messier than that. Right now I'm planning a workshop for teachers. I think I'm going to use the amazing book by Jimmy Liao, The Sound of Colors, but at the moment that's all I'm sure of. Like Frank Gehry I need to stand back from it awhile and get irritated. I'm not sure what the real objective of the workshop will be, what we'll create together, or whether I'll focus it on performance, writing, or visual art. The ideas will come, but I need to give them time to percolate.
The best educational programs I've ever seen are ones without explicit objectives. Class doesn't start with the teacher explaining "what you will learn today." Rather, in my experience, the most effective learning spaces are ones where students are deeply engaged in making things and then sharing them in public settings. But ultimately, the student is on his or her own journey. Teachers might have a sense of the broad goals and ideas—loving to read, learning how to express oneself in writing, or thinking like a scientist—but the meandering paths students take to reach these goals are really up to them.
Teachers need to have the creative freedom necessary to design teaching experiences and our students need the same freedom to create, spaces where they have the opportunity to develop original work, step back from it, get irritated, and then return working with a fresh perspective. Learning objectives and documents like the Common Core are not allowing us to see what is truly in front of us: young people, of every age, who want to be given the space and responsibility to make new things, to wrestle with big ideas, to contribute to the larger community, and most importantly, to have a great deal of fun along the way.