The road map to a high school diploma spans 13 years of very carefully identified benchmarks of skills and understandings. The real prize, of course, is not the diploma itself for the diploma is just a piece of paper (granted, it is a nice piece of card stock with a fancy seal, but it is still a piece of paper). The diploma itself is just symbolic of the real prize: academic knowledge and skills to be applied to life in the real world.

Much of School is a Simulation

Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn”

Xun Kuang

Teachers facilitate the students’ K-12 journey by delivering instruction, creating opportunities for practice, and providing feedback on each student’s demonstration and proficiency of skills. We go to great lengths to involve our students in their learning. In order to create the opportunities for students to practice and test their new knowledge and skills, teachers, curriculum developers, and test writers devise story problems and prompts such as the following:

Susana wants to buy a fish tank that costs $47. If she earns $10/weekend babysitting, after how many weeks would she be able to buy her fish tank?

Pretend you are running for president, what would you say to convince people to vote for you?

A recipe for one dozen muffins calls for 1 1/2 cups of flour. If you were going to make muffins for all 35 kids in your class plus your teacher, how much flour would you need?

Read the procedure for how to change a car tire. Then arrange the scrambled steps of the process into the correct sequence. Finally, write about what you think would happen if you left out the step of putting the lug nuts back on.

Teachers do their best to come up with stories/situations/scenarios that provide students with practice to apply their new skills, but what do all of the above examples have in common? They are hypothetical. Made-up scenarios intended to simulate real-life situations in which one would apply skills and knowledge. Words like if, would, pretend all trigger the subjunctive case and require kids to use varying degrees of abstract thinking. This is particularly challenging for elementary students because abstract thinking develops slowly and is widely considered to not be fully developed until sometime between the ages of 11-16 (https://www.goodtherapy.org/blog/psychpedia/abstract-thinking).

Teachers do their best to create realistic scenarios for their students. For elementary students this means ones which involve as much concrete thinking and as little abstract thinking as possible. When practice has to happen with paper and pencil, or an iPad, they often provide objects or, at the very least, pictures/diagrams to help make the thinking less abstract.

Real-World Learning is Best

The best way for anyone to practice new skills and knowledge is through real-life application. This is often referred to in the education world as project- or problem-based learning (PBL). Kindergarteners mixing together the ingredients, smelling, and then tasting their handmade gingerbread people makes every story about the gingerbread child more real. 2nd graders caring for live caterpillars and observing daily as the butterflies form their chrysalises (I had to look up the plural of that word!) and eventually emerge as butterflies is so much more impactful than reading 10 books and watching every video about metamorphosis. 5th graders spending two weeks learning how to safely ride their bikes through classroom instruction of transportation rules, followed by daily practice on their bikes– first on the school’s black-top, then out into the neighborhood, and eventually on a 5-mile bike ride through town–gets many more kids knowing and practicing safe bike commuting than would reading a list of rules with diagrams of the hand signals. Nothing can compare to real-world learning.

Teachers go to great lengths give their students real-world learning experiences, but even in the very best of circumstances, the ratio of real-world learning opportunities to abstract paper/pencil/iPad practice and application is low.

One of the silver linings of the very dark cloud that is the COVID 19 pandemic is the increased opportunity for kids to apply their knowledge and skills to real life, and to learn even more.

This is not a rehearsal, nor a simulation, nor a hypothetical situation. We are in the middle of a global pandemic where everyone has to stay home. Homes have become our students’ classrooms. Teachers will continue to provide very carefully crafted instruction, practice, and feedback, but I hope parents and students alike will recognize and take advantage of this rare opportunity for kids to use and expand their knowledge and skills in real-life ways.

The “Tell me…” quote is actually adapted from the following reflection by Chinese Confucian philosopher Xun Kuang in the 3rd century BC:

Not having heard something is not as good as having heard it; having heard it is not as good as having seen it; having seen it is not as good as knowing it; knowing it is not as good as putting it into practice. 

Adapted from the John Knoblock translation of Xunzi, circa 818 AD https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7565817-tell-me-and-i-forget-teach-me-and-i-may

I will be posting some of the ways that we are trying (to varying degrees of success) to put learning into practice in our home during the pandemic. It is an adventure in learning and and adventure in life for sure! (Stay tuned for the story of the day my 12-year-old announced he wanted to bake a cake…from scratch…and without a recipe–and the ensuing real-world lesson that he learned about baking soda.) I would love to hear about your experiences and ideas as well, so please put them in the comments or email them to me.