J was bored throughout. He was unfocused, restless. He got up several times, leaving the room and coming back, sitting on the floor, playing with his phone. He asked to leave. J doesn't need my permission to leave, no consequence will befall him if he leaves - and yet, I didn't want to endorse him leaving. I was somehow not comfortable giving him permission. Maybe he sensed my agenda and that turned him off further, I don't know.
Later it was time for our virtual trip to South Africa. Virtual trips happen once a month - we all get together, pretend to fly to a country (we watch youtube clips of airplanes touching down at each particular airport), watch videos and presentations, and then eat the food of that country for lunch. I always enjoy it, especially the lunch. But again, J complained. He didn't want to go.
J is certainly not the only student who resists certain activities. He is a relatively mild-mannered kid - if he doesn't want to do something, he protests a bit but it is hardly a big deal. But still I noticed that in these situations it was hard to get him interested.
Since coming to the Free School I have been thinking a lot about opting out - that is, what happens when kids chose not to do things. Especially things that other schools would make them do, with the belief that those learning experiences are necessary. I have a lot of questions, like, what happens if a kid always opts out of learning something that is important for them to know? Are we doing our job in educating them? Why do kids opt in or out of a particular activity? How can we create conditions that encourage kids to opt in to learning and get the most out of school, without coercing them?
First and foremost, kids opt out of things that are not interesting to them - "this is boring!" is a common refrain. But in interacting with J today, I realized that it is often not necessarily the activity itself that determines whether a kid is interested. That is, we can't just think about creating "interesting" activities. We have to ask, how to we foster kids to be "interested" in general.
The quality of being interested varies a lot by kid, not just with respect to which activities they like and dislike, but in general. Some students at our school find a million things to engage in. Some find only a few, but engage very passionately. But some kids seem a bit adrift - they are frequently bored and it is hard to get them interested in anything. And I wonder, is this okay? Should we just let it unfold? Should we let the students come to their learning completely on their own terms? Or should we try to create conditions that foster engagement?
So where does interested-ness come from? In adolescents I notice that in some cases kids who have had difficult experiences outside of school have trouble engaging in school. It might be connected to the hierarchy of needs - it's hard to focus when basic physical or emotional needs are unmet. It might also be connected to experiences of stress and trauma, since those can lead to "hypervigilance" and an inability to focus on anything in particular.
Still, some kids who are not immediately interested can be provoked if you engage with them one-on-one, talking to them about the topic at hand. Others become interested if they see peers engaged. Others respond to hands-on presentations or humor. As teachers, we think a lot about how to make the material engaging. But I also want to think in the longer term, about how to support kids so that they will engage spontaneously, without so much song and dance from their teachers. I want them to be able take on their own learning projects on topics that they care about.
At the Free School, one way we foster interested-ness is simply by letting kids run with their passions without too many interruptions. Kids get to experience what it feels like to be deeply engaged for a long period of time, and they discover that a particular topic often has surprises lurking beneath the surface. However, we haven't succeeded in getting all of our kids to really feel this thrill or seek it out.
I would welcome comments from others about what you have notice about kids who seem interested versus those that don't.
I have only fragments of ideas here, but I think this is a terrifically important question. I want to say something like, if you're a person whose attention doesn't focus easily (and I assume this trait differs strongly across people), then sustaining attention takes self discipline, and self discipline is unpleasant. You need some kind of strong motivation to overcome that unpleasantness. Some people have opportunities to do things that pull them in and so get that motivation and thus that discipline. Some people are forced to do things, another kind of motivation. But what if you're a person that has neither? Maybe the kids we see as lacking interested-ness find themselves in a trifecta of weak ability to focus, mismatch between what attracts them and what they're exposed to, and lack of sufficient social pressure to develop discipline? The mismatch idea suggests that there's SOMETHING out there that will hook Tishawn. The self-discipline idea suggests that it doesn't matter what that thing is, as long as Tishawn uses it to learn how to overcome his natural tendency to de-focus. The social pressure idea suggests that places like your old school, Amandla, don't have it all wrong. Sigh, but, as usual, I'm just making it all up as I go...
ReplyDeleteYes, and, but also, I think you're also pointing to something I see as a major insufficiency in the way we conceive of education. When teachers justify what they teach, they say it's necessary or it's useful in some distant way that hardly anyone (including themselves) can relate to. Nobody says, I'm teaching this because it's AWESOME. No utility here kids, we're just doing this because it flat out ROCKS MY SOCKS and I'm going to infect you with how much I love this. Where do kids get *models* of interested-ness? Not school, generally.
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