Find a way to connect the classroom curriculum with your students on an emotional and personal level. This engages their brains activating them for understanding. The HKIS Grade 3-4 team does the Middle East unit in simulation format having different tribes within the classrooms face obstacles and experience opportunities to learn skills that apply to their personal lives. They took the learning to a personal level by having our counselor integrate the guidance curriculum into the unit. He ran conflict resolution workshops with our students where they used newly learned skills to work through tribal difficulties as well as personal ones outside of the classroom. Kasey Perry is the teacher who connected with the counselor Trevor Cole to integrate the counseling lessons into the social studies unit.
My 4th grader son Maxwell shared a couple instances this past week that demonstrated passion for learning. Max enjoys science fiction and fantasy in his reading. He also loves to be creative and social while finding ways to add humor whenever possible. Leadership and wanting to direct his learning also come into play with Maxwell. Combining these personal attributes and interests, Max connected with a couple friends to start writing a book about fantasy creatures.
Max’s writing team is now on their third chapter and plowing ahead. Each writer brings different skills to the team according to Max. They recently searched for and found a skilled artist among their classmates to design a cover for their book. Max says that he really enjoys working with his friends. The only barrier slowing the writers down is that the Word document is on the school server. Max is now contemplating working in Google Docs to have 24/7 access for his team of writers. And by the way, this book is not a school assignment. The students are writing for the joy of being creative. My capitalist son plans to market the book to his classmates.
Max has another project going on that involves a few other classmates who are members of a club. They came up with a club name, symbol, and roles within the club. They then went to the computer to create club ID’s with photos, names, ID #s, their sex, their role, the club symbol and name and fingerprints. With no ink pads, they problem solved using magic markers to ink their thumbs that went on the printed out IDs. The next step was to laminate the IDs. Again, this effort had nothing to do with a class assignment.
So how to nurture and grow this clearly demonstrated passion? If I was to do a search for “student-centered classrooms”, “love for learning”, etc., I would come up with stories of teachers who find ways to connect the curriculum with student interests, passions, love for social interaction and enjoyment of using one’s talents. I would also find learning projects and assessments that reflect real life activities (i.e., writing memos and briefs, creating video demonstrations, designing information pamphlets, etc.) that students share with a real audience. The more we know our students and can design learning around their desires and interests where they direct the action, the better.
