It’s easy to schedule a page to read about inventors. It’s easy to know what kids have read about inventors.
It’s not easy to toss a pile of materials onto the table and predict what kids will design, create, and invent. It’s not easy to circulate the room, with kids brainstorming, struggling, and you must resist the urge to rescue them in the midst. They don’t need to be rescued. That’s hard. We are trained to be rescuers.
It’s easy to give kids a pattern, the exact materials, cut to the exact specifications, and help them make that. It’s easy to staple all 24 of the similarly designed patterns to the wall and know by looking that the goal of “copying yours” was met.
It’s not easy to step back and see what kids create when there is no pattern. It’s not easy to watch projects evolve in different directions, based on kids’ ideas, and become something that wasn’t written in a lesson plan, the way most of us were trained as teachers to do.
It’s easy to distribute 24 identical worksheets where kids will label the parts of a circuit, collect answers, and pass them in. It’s easy to look at those worksheets and see when answers are wrong.
It’s not easy to put building materials on the table, ask kids to design a game with a circuit, then build it. It’s not easy to see the cardboard flying, the wires being bent, and trusting in the process. It’s not easy to feel that uncomfortable.
Creativity at it’s best isn’t on a schedule. It isn’t predictable. It isn’t planned. It isn’t easy. But, it’s what happens when we allow time. Energy. Resources. Exploration. Freedom. Learning unleashed.
We’ve kept the tight leash on learning for far too long. It’s easier to do that. It’s easier to train kids to bubble in answers. It easier to predict and plan for regurgitation of “learning things.” It’s easier to control learning. But, setting it free? Something that you can’t even predict will happen. Something created inside the minds of your students. Something you provide the diving board for, but the jump is ALL theirs. Take the risk. Unleash the learning. Let them go.
You’ll still be there. Stoking the fire. Guiding with your questions. Modeling thinking outside the box. But, you? You’ll be in the midst of learning unleashed.
The only thing you’ll regret is that you didn’t do it sooner.
