As more and more classrooms are trying to build a new “normal”(whatever that means) routine in schools and figure out ways to engage students in learning, there are all sorts of new ideas, initiatives, and demands that have not stopped piling up on the shoulders of educators.
One of these items is ensuring that what we teach is authentic and has context to the real world. Not always easy and often seen as common sense, but this is something that is easier to say than to truly create and develop with all the demands.
In my state of Iowa, we have what is called Future Ready Iowa, which has a lot of great potential opportunities with the goal of the following:
“Future Ready Iowa connects Iowans to the education and training required for good paying jobs and careers to improve people’s lives. The Future Ready Iowa goal is to have 70 percent of Iowans with education and training beyond high school by 2025. “
Part of this work is helping students being exposed to all the types of jobs and careers that exist. There are so many opportunities in our own backyards let alone the world. Part of this work is helping students see that the work being done in the classroom is building skills and interests into jobs they may not know exist or excite them.
While this post is not designed to provide a framework on how to do this, I want to touch upon something that I do believe is very important which is the title of this post.
You don’t need to wear a white lab coat to be a scientist!
For far too long there has been tremendous focus on going to college, earning a specific certificate or degree, and checking off the boxes in the game of education to have a good paying job.
What if for most of education we did not focus on that? What if grades K-8 and into high school we instead brought skills and dispositions into the classroom that lead to an increase in inquiry and wonder? What if we helped students and educators see that our entire world and living as a human being is one big science experiment? Life is full of experiments. What if we provided a safe learning environment where art, science, and all subjects for that matter had the space to be an arena for using creatives processes using whatever tools we have at hand to solve problems and develop new ideas and insights?
What if…… we did not teach for right answers, but to teach the mindset that to be successful we don’t always have to be right, but rather understand what went wrong along the way to find answers?
What if we flipped the script and looked for new ways instead of accepting the way things are? What if our classroom lessons were a series of episodes like Mythbusters, but in our arenas for what subjects and standards we need to teach? And what if along the way we brought in people who also do this work for a living so students can begin to filter out what and who they want to be?
What if schools were a series of learning spaces named What if? where we explored various alternatives to the world we are tryaing to understand just like the great Marvel show?
What if?
What if we quit worrying about all the hoops to jump through and instead placed a focus on the space, the people, and wonder of the world around us?
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