Confession time. I suppose it’s okay now that I’m in my thirties to admit this deep secret I’ve been carrying for years. Once, when I was a kid, I waited until my parents went out to the store and opened up a couple of my Christmas gifts early. I remember one of them was an amazing Alf computer game, the kind on a 5.25″ Floppy disk. I’d been dying for. I was so excited, but I replaced the paper and the tape and put everything back, just like it was. The magical wait for Christmas morning had now changed. I can remember being really disappointed, because every time I passed by the tree in the days leading up to Christmas, the wonder was gone. I knew what was in the package. I no longer thought about what it might be, tried to guess what was in the package, or even had to pick it up and shake it about to try to guess.
That sense of wonder? It’s what a kid’s world is built on. Exploration, thinking, connecting ideas to figure things out.
I think about this a lot when it comes to learning targets. I know there is the trend to ‘tell kids what they are going to learn.’ Telling kids what facts they’ll know, then teaching them, supposedly leads to improved test scores. But so does writing answers on the board. Telling kids what they are going to learn is taking the real thinking out of learning. It’s taking the tape off the gift of wonder.
Why don’t we post essential questions? Open ended thoughts that will get kids thinking. Keep kids thinking. Questions that will stoke the fires of learning. Ideas that will encourage them to have conversations with each other. The kind of conversations where new ideas are built. The real gift in learning. It’s not in what you know or what you are going to know. It’s in the wonder. Please don’t take the tape off for them.
