Today our group presented a mini-lesson. We had to incorporate a cognitive tool (jokes/puzzles) and present it in a way that would ensure assessment quality (taken from the article “Assessment for Learning – Ch. 3, “Rethinking Classroom Assessment with Purpose in Mind”). We used prompts to help “our class” understand and find the joke meaningful and funny. Our prompts were essentially clues to filling in more information of the joke so that it eventually made sense.
Another group had us play Kahoot – a multiple choice game played using i-phones. The questions were about formative assessment and we worked in teams to answer them. During the debrief, the game was criticized because people felt stressed and didn’t like the competition. Our discussion lead to the idea that ultimately we should create learning opportunities that didn’t stress students out and addressed their own individual learning needs – making sure that we stayed within comfort levels.
Maybe that conclusion was a bit harsh and skewed, but I disagreed with it philosophically. Without some healthy stress and new, challenging situations, students will not grow. Vygotsky talks about the zone of proximal development. In this zone, student learning is scaffolded, so that they are slowly pushed forward into new learning situations. With prompts and support, students become confident and finally comfortable in that new space – indicating that it’s time to be uncomfortable again.
Falling forward. That’s how we learn and grow. The key is not to keep students safe by creating learning situations that only address their comfortable learning style. The key is to create a safe learning environment that supports change, exposure to a variety of learning situations and the assumption that it is OK and perhaps even beneficial to work outside our perceived boxes.