I was recently reminded of a poem I read in a terrific
book called The Book of Hopes and Dreams for Girls and Young Women. Produced by
the wonderful Laurel School, it is a collection of thoughts from famous women
and students whose goal is to empower girls and young women. Here is a poem
from the book written by Rebecca Allen when she was in third grade:
HELP OUT!
Be the one.
Be in charge.
Take a risk.
Be a peacemaker.
Help out.
Be nice to the poor.
Because I believe in you.
You can do it.
But what about me?
Me Rebecca Allen?
Well.
I’ll be the one.
I’ll be in charge.
I’ll take a risk.
I’ll be a peacemaker.
I’ll help out.
I’ll be nice to the poor.
Because I can do it.
I believe in myself.
I’am a super helper.
And I will save the world with my super goodness.
Thinking back on it now, Rebecca Allen must be in college
or beyond and I wonder what she has done with her super goodness. I love this
poem because of the unbridled optimism of youth and the clear identification
that helping and being a part of making the world a better place is something
that is practically innate in humans. Look at how many terrific concepts we
want for our students that are built into Rebecca’s words: take a risk, be in
charge, help out. She ends stating she believes in herself and that she has
super goodness: don’t we want that for every child? Finally, she shows the
concept so relevant to design thinking and innovative thinking of bias towards
action. There is no doubt that Rebecca is ready to go and wants to approach the
problems of the world right now. I read this and wonder how well-served Rebecca
was in our current educational model and if we nourished her super goodness or
drowned it in a sea of AP classes and standardized tests.
Yong Zhao in his recent sessions at the ISACS conference
said, “the American dream keeps getting less and less interesting.” As he gave
an overview of the argument presented in his book, World Class Learners:Educating Creative and Entrepreneurial Students, he made a convincing argument
for changing how we approach education. As the theme of the conference was “Thinking
Outside the Box,” it was easy to get on the innovation bandwagon. Zhao and many
others referenced the rise of the creative class, while Zhao also supported the
entrepreneurial class as well, as proposed by Richard Florida ten years ago.
Many referenced how the jobs our students will hold have not even been created
yet. But I have heard that all before and I was keenly interested in the skills
Zhao was suggesting we should be nurturing in the classroom. We should be
helping students have a bias towards action: when they see a problem they
should not wait for others to solve it. Our students need to have the
creativity to solve the problem and simply copying someone else’s idea just won’t
work. They need the guts to put it into action and the resilience to revise and
attack the problem again when things don’t work out. This also reminded me of
Paul Tough’s work on some of the intangible qualities we should be fostering in
our students with a big one being grit.
Walking to our morning assembly the other day, my
colleague was noticeably frustrated. While not necessarily an unusual state for
a high school teacher, I asked him what the problem was and he nearly exploded
about how our students cannot think. He was working on a history unit and had
given them the opportunity to ask questions before they got started on their
work together. All he heard was crickets. “How could they have no questions?
How could they not be curious about anything?” He fumed. The simple answer is
that our students were simply waiting for the information. They are consumers,
not creators and they do not hesitate to remind us of this distinction with
their daily actions in our classrooms.
But who can blame them? We have done this to them, apologetically. Our students will not be able to learn the skills of the
entrepreneur that Zhao endorses until we exhibit and model those skills ourselves.
How often as teachers do we exhibit these characteristics: global competency,
creativity, alertness to opportunity, empathy, risk-taking, foresight, ambition,
innovation, risk-taking, persistence (Zhao 82)? If we say that collaboration is
a 21st century skill, how often do our students see their teacher’s
modeling it? If we want them to think creatively and want them to be innovative,
how often do we exhibit these qualities?
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I can certainly say for myself that while I hope to
instill these attributes and skills in my students, day in and day out, I do
not model them. There may be moments of creativity, but my concept of empathy
is asking them how their day is and moving on, not realizing the thousand
different forces that pull on them in the same number of directions. I really
don’t take risks when I rely on the same standby approach of peppering my students
with questions about Hamlet, act by act, scene by scene, line by line. As for
collaboration, teachers seem to be notoriously the worst at this in independent
schools. We claim our allegiance to it, have a meeting and then walk back into
our rooms and do as we please.
So I fully support Zhao’s call for a change that allows
our students to learn the skills of the innovator and entrepreneur while still
gaining the content knowledge necessary. His belief in project-oriented
learning makes sense and I truly value his emphasis on multiple revisions, a
sustained and disciplined process and peer review, but it will take a sustained
effort for me as an educator to keep working to change my own behaviors to not
only create this experience for my students (to help them become creators, not
consumers) but to model this concept of a teacherpreneur.
I wonder how all of the Rebecca Allens of the world are
doing. If we managed to test the risk taker right out of her, or was she able
to sustain her spirit of super goodness through her trip through our,
often-times, well-intentioned educational system. I worry we did not give her
the skills to be effective super helper, but I share her enthusiasm and her
belief in me that I can be the one, I can take a risk.
