Learning Now via Passionate Teaching

Image by Old Shoe Woman via Flickr

“The Game of School is very pervasive, and its rituals are deeply entrenched in the actions and expectations of students and teachers. But it is not immutable. It can and must be changed.” – Robert Fried in The Passionate Teacher

Fried also suggests we can ‘stimulate the students’ imaginations and mental energy’, ‘to do ourselves [exactly] what we ask the students to do’, and ‘a teacher who anticipates creativity and hidden talents in the students will greet the class quite differently to one who looks for deficits and defects.’

An opening routine starting the day, something engaging the mind and sending the message how we are serious and excited about learning. Calling it “LEARNING NOW”, it’s a way I coach teachers to start each day, setting the stage for the rest of the day, and engages the whole classroom as a community of learners.

As students walk into the classroom, the following opening question is posted:

What have you learned since yesterday?

Students write, sketch, or draw and label a diagram in their thinking notebooks or even blog about their recent learning. We spend the next few minutes sharing what we have learned, discovered, read, seen, heard, viewed in the last 24 hours of our learning lives. During the Learning Now Daily Opening, students share learning like:

1. Tonight, if the New York Yankees win, they will win their 27th World Championship!
2. Did you know that if you put your jack-o-lantern outside, bugs live in it? 
3. I learned that metal is edible while reading Ripley’s Believe It or Not.

We know that by the time you read this, none of this will be “new” to you. In fact, few things on the list may be new at all, but what the LEARNING NOW opening clearly illustrates is how much there is to know and how much the world is changing and will continue to change. And the world will change a whole lot more by the time you finish reading this post.

Why do we start the day with this routine? Learning is not an endeavor just for school. It is learning that fuels our lives. It brings the outside to the inside of the classroom and vice versa. Learning is perpetual, continuous, and requires us to be active. Learning – as we know it, and as we wish our students to know it - is infectious and contagious. It is PASSION-DRIVEN!  Passion-driven learning is not contained in boxes, covered in textbooks and will not be reduced to checks on a list. It must be experienced.

The LEARNING NOW daily opening does more than allow students a context to share tidbits of cool information. It’s all about the inquiry and conversation. LEARNING NOW also:

• models the changing nature of information landscape. Students see that every day something new is discovered, uncovered, and created.
• positions us in the role we strive for; master learner. As Chief learning officer of the classroom, we have a responsibility to show students that we have the literacies and fortitude to continuously pursue learning. 
• Ignites critical Inquiry. The morning sharing inevitably leads to follow-up questions like…

• How/Where did you find that?
• Who told you?
• How do you know it is true?
• Could we do that too?
• What if?
• Is that really true?
• What do we need to know to do that???
• leading us into demonstrations of how we sift, sort, prioritize, and take action on knowledge
• Highlights the capacity of the community and the power of global networks of committed people working together to solve the worlds problems
• Showcase the extraordinary power of technology to make real things once only imagined become reality.
  

The Learning Now opening not only lights a spark of excitement and energy, it sets the tone, the expectation, and it extends the invitation to “Join the Learning Club, ‘ which is how we frame the rest of the day as we spend our time together figuring out how to make sense of this amazing world and the people that inhabit it. How far can we take it?