I ran across this video a couple of weeks ago and it has been rolling around my head ever since. I love its wordless, captivating, 75 second message - it's been the perfect accelerant to the cognitive kindling I've been trying to spark for weeks now. As summer officially draws to a close for me this week, I've been trying to light a fire under the mountain of to-do lists that I keep making for myself, and I think this might just be what the doctor ordered.
LEARN from Rick Mereki on Vimeo.
Every time I watch it, I think... "what if school was more like this?" What if?
What if every time we created an environment/opportunity for students we were guided by the desire to make magic; to create an experience our students will never forget; to create learning that is:
active
participatory
messy
inquisitive
authentic
joyful
What if?
Obviously, we can't travel the 38 thousand miles, or to the 11 countries, it took to create this video as we tackle a new year with our students. And clearly, it's tough to make magic on a fixed schedule, with no assistant, no budget and [insert obstacle here]. But, frankly, the alternative strikes me as quite a bit harder to swallow.
When I was a first year teacher, my mentor teacher asked me what I thought about giving my students the opportunity to veer away from the whole class novel in favor of choosing their own reading. I can remember distinctly sitting on the sofa in the back of my room and saying, "I don't think I can do that." Without judgement, she simply said, "Ok. Let's talk about what you can do, then." It would be years before I got to the point where I could give up a prescribed common text, but her wisdom has stuck with me.
Recently, Buffy Hamilton has been speaking and writing about enchantment as a force for learning in the library and I believe this a branch from that same tree. Her message of tapping into student passions as a means of fueling learning is one that resonates deeply with me. That said, while I may not be able to make every learning experience look like the ones in the video or fill every lesson with enchantment, I'm definitely ready to start thinking about what I can do.
