Today’s students are not necessarily different learners but the way that they learn is making a dramatic shift from the way that we learned. Currently, our educational system believes that teaching is necessary in order for learning to occur. Education has been seen as the process of transferring information from the teacher to the student where the teacher is viewed as the constant. Today’s learners use multiple contexts to learn such as, social media, Google, blogs, Youtube, etc., and are constantly updating their thinking and how they apply what they learn to their lives (Brown & Thomas, 2011). They simply view the teacher as another context rather than a constant (A New Culture of Learning, Douglas Thomas at TEDxUFM, 2012). In the 20th century, learners got their information from printed sources such as books, newspapers, magazines, and encyclopedias. These sources were not updated frequently or very easily. In the 21st century, information changes so quickly that perhaps “It’s time to shift our thinking from the old model of teaching to a new model of learning” (Brown & Thomas, 2011, 34). Our current educational system needs to dramatically shift and accommodate our learners and embrace a new culture of learning that will enhance their way of learning. “The 21st century is about embracing change not fighting it” (Brown & Thomas, 2011, 43).
In the book, A New Culture of Learning, authors Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown (2011), explain that in the new culture of learning, people learn through their interaction and participation with one another (Brown & Thomas, 2011, 50). They shared how gamers use a collective to develop their gaming skills. A collective is a group or community that shares the same passion, learns from each other’s feedback, and develops their learning skills from each other. Why can’t a collective be used in the classroom? When students are encouraged to turn to each other to make course material meaningful and relevant to their lives, they are taking ownership of their learning through interaction and participation with one another rather than passively being taught by a teacher. As educators, our goal should be to create significant learning environments and opportunities for our students to engage in interactive and collaborative situations where meaningful learning can occur through collectives. To encourage this type of learning, educators should focus on inquiry-based learning where students are presented with the answer or end result and required to investigate the solution by asking in-depth questions that will help support the answer. Allowing students to explore various contexts and their collectives, will help them to develop critical thinking skills and guide them to become self-directed learners.
In A New Culture of Learning TED Talk video, Douglas Thomas addressed some fundamental problems that he and John Seely Brown saw were happening in education. He discussed how they came up with the idea of A New Culture of Learning based on three different areas: Passion, Imagination, and Constraint. The primary ingredient for creating A New Culture of Learning, they decided, was play. According to Thomas, their definition of play is that it is an emergent property of the application of rules to the imagination (A New Culture of Learning, Douglas Thomas at TEDxUFM, 2012). By applying the constraint of rules, the imagination ignites creativity and joy that can lead to innovative ideas. In the book, the authors make the connection to online gaming communities and how deep learning takes place as gamers work collaboratively to create solutions to the game challenges within their collectives. In the TED Talk, Thomas focuses on passion, imagination, and constraint where play and imagination work together to foster creativity and learning.
As I seek to implement and create a significant learning environment where passion, imagination, and constraint can foster creativity and learning through the use of play and imagination, I have been using Breakout EDU to create constructive challenges for my GT students. These challenges are standards-aligned games that allow my students to work collaboratively, think conceptually, and utilize prior knowledge as they solve problems to complete a challenge. With Breakout EDU, my students have the opportunity to become immersed in the game by asking questions, solving problems, and participating in deep group discussions within their collectives. They are given the opportunity to work together and rely on one another to solve challenges in a given time period constraint. I also give my students opportunities to create their own challenges to share with their classmates and other students in the district. This is a great opportunity to enhance critical thinking skills and implement their creativity fostering those innovative ideas that are driven by passion, imagination, and constraints as Thomas mentioned in the TED Talk video and were referred to in the book.
I have also implemented COVA and CSLE in my GT classroom by providing my students with opportunities to work on Project-Based Learning by using a Blended Learning model as in my proposed Innovation Plan. By creating an environment where they have choice, ownership, and voice in an authentic learning environment, my students have the opportunity to interact with digital rich sources and learn through engagement within that world. My goal is to be a facilitator and create experiences by building a holistic student-centered learning environment for my students where they can embrace what they don’t know about a topic and come up with better questions that will allow them to dig deeper in order to learn more and use that knowledge and passion to create innovative ideas of their own. I try to create a space for them to engage in authentic learning that will inspire them to take ownership of their learning to new levels.
In my GT classroom, my students are encouraged to utilize technology to enhance their learning. They use their Chromebooks to access as much information as they can when researching a topic. I provide them with interactive hyperdocs that are digital targeted individual instructional plans that organize content in an engaging and relevant way for each student where inquiry, exploration, and curiosity are embedded along with opportunities for students to explain, apply, reflect, share and extend on the topic being explored. They also utilize Seesaw, a digital portfolio to document all learning, reflections, and projects that they work on or create during their time in GT. I provide enhanced academic opportunities for all GT students to accelerate at their own pace and on their own instructional path by incorporating elements of depth and complexity in all learning experiences. The students in my classroom are also given the opportunity to work collaboratively on STEAM challenges where they use the engineering design process to complete the given challenge for the day such as learning about potential and kinetic energy and applying their knowledge as they create a theme park rollercoaster ride, a catapult or a balloon-powered school bus. They use their hyperdocs to do the research and acquire the background knowledge needed for the challenge then they work collaboratively to create and construct their models. I have implemented my innovation plan of blended learning with station rotations when I need to focus on facilitating a small group of students. A hyperdoc with specific content that students will use in the work stations that they will rotate to is shared with the students through Google Classroom. This fosters independent learning and allows them to take ownership of their learning as they work at their own pace.
In my GT classroom, I incorporate play by using games to reinforce skills that are being taught in their classrooms such as math and reading skills. For example, my students practice multiplication, division, factoring, and rounding skills as they program robots to play a bowling game or review Parts of Speech by playing a Jenga game. I try to incorporate play to reinforce many skills yet still make it challenging and engaging where my students can use their imagination to extend their learning and develop their problem-solving skills.
An obstacle that we may encounter as we try to create a significant learning environment for our students, is access to powerful learning tools that many students have expressed using as they engage in learning communities outside of school. Studies have shown that students mostly use Facebook, YouTube, and their mobile devices for learning and researching outside of school (A New Culture of Learning, Douglas Thomas at TEDxUFM, 2012). Yet our students are not allowed to utilize these tools at school. These sources are currently blocked or banned from use at school. As educators, we talk about preparing our students for the 21st century and providing them with opportunities to work collaboratively, use critical-thinking skills, communicate effectively and be creative yet, our schools are preventing them from using the very tools that they need to develop those 21st-century skills. Our students are using their mobile devices outside of school to research and gather information from multiple sources and synthesizing that information to come up with their own creative and innovative ideas and then using Facebook, Youtube, and other social media to interact and share their creations with global communities. If these are the skills that we want our students to develop, then why is our educational system making it difficult for them to use these 21st-century tools to be creative and innovative while they are in our schools? Teachers no longer need to be the deliverers of content. Students have all of the information that they need at their fingertips using multiple resources and devices. Let’s allow them to utilize the tools that they need to access the vast information out there. “One can tap into and learn from the vast wealth of knowledge available in the global community” (Brown & Thomas, 2011, 32).
If we start with a student-centered approach and purposefully assemble all the key components of effective learning into a significant learning environment we can help our students to learn how to learn and grow into the people we all hope they will become.
~Dr. Harapnuik
We as educators must create the right learning environment to promote student-centered learning experiences where they can be the creative, problem-solvers that this ever-changing world is expecting them to be. Our current education system does not prepare our students for the real world. Our students are being prepared to take a test. The focus on standardized testing may be hindering our students more than preparing them to be self-motivated, individual thinkers and problem-solvers. I am fortunate that I can implement the learning environment that I know my students can thrive in but it is not so easy for the classroom teachers in my organization to do the same. Many of them are tied to their lesson plans that require the time to be focused on teaching to the test. My hope is that the leaders in my organization can recognize how my students are learning and thriving in my classroom and how much of an impact a significant learning environment has on them. I hope that they will adopt the perspective to be the change that we want our students to be by providing them with authentic learning experiences in authentic learning environments in the whole organization. Where teachers will have the flexibility to weave in develop passion, creativity, imagination, and play as they teach the required skills and strategies needed to be successful on the test. I intend to model and assist anyone interested in implementing the blended learning model and the CSLE+COVA approach with a new culture for learning in order to help our students grow and become self-motivated lifelong learners.
As an educator, I know that my motivation definitely comes from my passion to create learning experiences for my students that help them to grow as individuals and become lifelong learners. As Sir Ken Robinson mentioned in the video, Bring on the Revolution, educators must be passionate about what they do to be able to do a phenomenal job as teachers (Bring on the Learning Revolution! | Sir Ken Robinson, 2010). Our educational system needs a revolution where our existing system must be transformed into a personalized system where learners are inspired and motivated to solve their own problems by contributing and participating in authentic learning environments where students are provided with experiences that promote Choice, Ownership, and Voice.
The videos by Sir Ken Robinson and Daniel Pink influenced my learning philosophy in such a way that they made me think about what I can do to motivate my students and contribute to the education revolution. As teachers, we can embrace the information revolution and our students’ needs and allow them to use technology to become inquirers and problem-solvers. Our students now need to be ready for a highly digital and connected future. They need to be connected to and be able to make an impact on the world. My goal as an educator is to use disruptive innovation to bring forth the changes needed to amplify teaching and enhance student learning in my district, and build classrooms where curiosity is center stage for our students. I can envision the kind of classrooms that use technology as a tool to enable our students to develop multiple skills, explore and fall in love with problem-solving, making meaningful decisions, and becoming self-motivated, lifelong learners. My hope is to engage my students in meaningful learning opportunities with the intent to inspire each and every one of them to discover and pursue their own passions in life.
As educators, I believe that we should design experiences that leave impressions on our students, not just create activities for them to do throughout the day (McNair, n.d.). Using the CSLE+COVA approach to create these rich learning experiences would leave a HUGE impression on our students. Teachers can now personalize instruction and empower students in ways that were unthinkable before” (Tucker et al., 2016). According to research, by providing learners with choice, ownership, and voice in an authentic learning environment learners have the opportunity to become more student-centric and as a result, more productive in their educational careers (Harapnuik, 2017).
I believe that my approach is broad enough to become a foundational perspective that will influence my organization because I believe that disruptive innovation can be a catalyst for change in education. It can transform the current factory model system into a more student-centered learning environment where students can learn at their own pace, have a choice in their own path, ownership, voice, and authentic learning opportunities that can be personalized for each student. I believe that every student deserves the opportunity to experience new learning, to pursue their passions, to learn by doing, and to have the opportunity to learn from their mistakes. I believe that by creating opportunities where students can use digital technology to solve problems that they are experiencing and even make a change in the world, students can experience authentic and meaningful learning everywhere and all of the time. As Sir Ken Robinson said, “Bring On the Revolution!”
References
Bring on the learning revolution! | Sir Ken Robinson. (2010, May 24). YouTube. Retrieved March 30, 2022, from https://youtu.be/r9LelXa3U_I
Brown, J. S., & Thomas, D. (2011). A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.
A New Culture of Learning, Douglas Thomas at TEDxUFM. (2012, September 13). YouTube. Retrieved March 26, 2022, from https://youtu.be/lM80GXlyX0U
Clark, H. (2020). The Chromebook Infused Classroom. ElevateBooksEdu.
Harapnuik, D. (2017, June 5). Why authentic learning converts into lifelong learning. It’s About Learning Creating Significant Learning Environments. https://www.harapnuik.org/?p=6921
Harapnuik, D. (2017, June 12). Do you care enough to let them take ownership of their learning? It’s About Learning Creating Significant Learning Environments. https://www.harapnuik.org/?p=6946
Harapnuik, D. (2017, December 19). Computers in schools – not working…yet. It’s About Learning Creating Significant Learning Environments. https://www.harapnuik.org/?p=7258
McNair, A. (n.d.). Designing Meaningful Learning Experiences for Gifted Learners. TAGT On Demand. Retrieved February 20, 2022, from https://tagtondemand.com/product/designing-meaningful-learning-experiences-for-gifted-learners/
RSA ANIMATE: Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us. (2010, April 1). YouTube. Retrieved March 30, 2022, from https://youtu.be/u6XAPnuFjJc
Tucker, C. R., Wycoft, T., & Green, J. T. (2016). Blended learning in action (First ed.). Corwin. October 13, 2016
Owning Your Learning 
