CREATIVE AND CRITICAL THINKING

Middle School
Challenge Week by John McKinley, 8th grade Social Studies Teacher
Stop trying to please us. You will not be
graded on your ability to tell us what we
already know. Don’t ask if this is good
enough. What does that mean anyway?
Better than the minimum? Good enough
for whom? Don’t ask us what you should
do. That’s what you’ll be telling us soon
enough.
You spent 7.5 hours at school yesterday.
What did you learn? And even more
important, why did you learn it?
Today is the day you take those 7.5 hours
back. For the equivalent of one measly
school day, you’re going to decide what
matters. You’re going to put the self back
in self-direction; the purpose back in
purposeful learning. And you’re going to
be creative. You’re going to decide what
to learn. You’re going to decide how to
learn it. And you’re going to decide when
you’ve learned enough. All we ask is a
glimpse behind the curtain - show us how
you did it.
For five days, 8th grade students were
given free reign to explore their bliss for
two class periods per day.
This is Challenge Week.
Time to waste: the roots of
Challenge Week
Giving a student a full school day to use
as he or she pleases might seem like a
recipe for wasting time, but what would
you do if you were given time away from
your typical routine? What if you were
encouraged to surrender to something
that had you intellectually preoccupied –
and then encouraged to commit to fully
exploring it?
Atlassian, a software development firm in
Australia, takes 24 hours, four times a
year, to stop doing what it does best.
During what they call FedEx Day (“for
when it absolutely, positively has to be
there overnight”), employees stop their
normal routine to re-ignite their creative
passions by doing something that is
intentionally not what they do every day.
The idea is to allow employees to explore
their interests and passions, to focus on
problems that have nagged them, and to
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basically satisfy intellectual cravings. The
day is focused on Atlassian’s widely varied
products, but the experience allows
creativity a space to exist.
At the end of 24 hours employees have
three minutes to amaze their co-workers
with the tasks they’ve chosen to tackle.
Sometimes their work is wildly successful,
and sometimes it isn’t. Regardless, the
process remains an engine for generating
creativity.
Atlassian isn’t alone in encouraging this
“off task” behavior. At Google, it’s called
“20-Percent Time” (one day every week)
and is attributed with creating half of
Google’s products, while 3M’s version is
“15% Culture.” These three companies are
among a growing cadre recognizing that
free time leads to creativity, and creativity
leads to innovation.
Is it any surprise that innovation thrives
outside of a traditionally structured
environment? Titans of innovative
industries have repeatedly found their
niche while being focused outside the
status quo. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and
Mark Zuckerberg never managed to earn
university degrees, but all had driving
intellectual passions, and developed
expertise doing what wasn’t on the
official agenda.
When the student is ready,
the teacher will appear
According to Benjamin Goering, a
software engineer at the startup, Livefyre,
“Education isn’t a four-year program, it’s a
mind-set.” Goering put on hold his pursuit
of a computer science degree from the
University of Kansas because he felt it
wasn’t quite getting him where he
wanted to be - making Web experiences
for others.
The point isn’t that seeking a degree isn’t
a worthy endeavor, rather it’s that
becoming educated needn’t necessarily
be confined to a traditional classroom or
institution. And if education can take
place outside of these confines, what
should schools be doing to remain
relevant and necessary?
According to Seth Godin, new media
ideas-man and author of the manifesto,
“Stop Stealing Dreams (what is school
for?),” if you were in school yesterday, you
likely spent much of it being prepared for
a 19 th century economy in order to meet
the needs of the industrial age.
Obedience, standardization, and learning
things that can be explicitly tested have
become hallmarks of the educational
structure. What we need to be doing
instead, he argues, is creating adaptive
and intellectually passionate kids who are
intrigued by the challenge of solving
interesting problems. Godin writes, “Here’s
the question every parent and taxpayer
needs to wrestle with: Are we going to
applaud, push, or even permit our schools
(including most of the private ones) to
continue the safe but ultimately doomed
strategy of churning out predictable,
testable, and mediocre factory workers?”
We still have traditional physical centers
of learning in place, but our libraries and
our schools are no longer isolated hubs of
knowledge. When the Internet flung
open the doors to knowledge, we began
seeing a constant barrage of people so
excited by their knowledge that they’re
giving it away by the millions on YouTube,
blogs, and any number of other new
iterations of the web. Ubiquitous access to
these resources is making our classroom
walls ever more porous as teachers and
students savvily use technology to bring
new information from the outside world
into the classroom in the quest to make
learning relevant.
An entrepreneurial shift in education is
already well underway, and it’s moving
away from the fringes of the educational
establishment, as opportunities for
learning become less exclusive. CS 221,
the Stanford University course on artificial
Intelligence, became one of the first
official MOOCs (massive open online
courses) when it offered the entire course,
for free, via the Internet. 160,000 users
registered for the course. 20,000
completed it. Student enrollment at
Stanford is 15,870. The desire to spread
knowledge is making gains against the
desire to merely possess it. Excuses of
lacking access and lacking experience
“I hear and I forget. I see and I remember.
I do and I understand.” - Confucius
have evaporated. The only thing
effectively standing in anyone’s way is a
lack of will.
No one can force you to learn
anything
When people talk about the value of
lifelong learning, they’re often talking
about valuing knowledge for its own sake,
continuously craving knowledge and
discovery, and somehow developing the
mindset that becoming educated is an
opportunity and not a burden. Challenge
Week is where the rubber meets the road.
It’s a student’s chance to demonstrate that
he or she values the opportunity to learn.
If this value isn’t present it serves as a
chance to develop it.
Challenge I: Learn whatever you
want
An inconceivable amount of information
is now literally seconds away. It’s no
longer enough to simply absorb the
content you’re presented –
decision-making about what to know is
itself a part of the learning process.
Somehow, this part of the process was the
most difficult for students. When you’re
so used to being instructed, having to
decide for yourself what you want to
know is fraught with complication.
Suddenly they weren’t so sure what
interested them. When it hit them that
the time they were wasting really was
their own time to learn, students became
more selective in how they spent their
time. They began seeking value in lieu of
entertainment. Some discovered that
they really were just wasting time, and set
out to actually find something worth
learning.
It was a paradigm shift. Again and again
students would ask if a topic was a good
one to study. They were really asking for
us to tell them what to know. They were
like salesmen who wouldn’t take no for
an answer, rephrasing the question in
order to gain anything other than, “Is it
something you’re interested in?” and “Will
it challenge you to learn it?” They were
forced to answer the question for
themselves: What do I want to know?
Doing that is the real key to becoming a
lifelong learner.
Most kids are taken to school where they
perform for a teacher while being told
they should value learning for its own
sake. They’re required to value what we’re
telling them rather than develop their
own sense of autonomy in deciding for
themselves.
I won’t claim that the week produced a
sea of students focused on learning in a
way I’d never seen before; but it was
different and good. For one thing,
students were engaged. Most started
class without being told and many stayed
after class to finish what they were doing,
scarcely noticing the bell they normally so
eagerly await. Students began to rely on
teachers for clarity, not instruction. Many
used YouTube tutorials (found in baffling
abundance and specificity) while others
found experts in their families or
community.
They recognized connections between
their individual challenges to create
communities of interest, collaborating
with each other and demonstrating their
progress. They monitored their progress
knowing they would need to show
classmates what they had done. Most
implausibly of all, some even gave
themselves homework – because doing
what interests you doesn’t really seem
like work at all, and you can’t always do it
in a day.
As educators we are always trying to
make connections between the real world
and our content. But when we stripped
away the content requirements, there
was only the real world left – that, and
Edgar studying science, math, and
English – while developing visual/spatial
awareness – as he investigated
something he’s always wondered about:
the internal combustion engine. In the
past this has often been a vocational
subject, but for Edgar, might it be the first
step towards mechanical engineering?
We saw Anna, Mariana and Joaquin
learning sign language, at first
independently, until they realized how
much more efficient group work could
make it. Are they fluent? Of course not.
But the seed of curiosity has been sown.
Andrea and Paola spent hours at home
identifying the underlying structure of
dress patterns, consulting experts in the
field and practicing rudimentary sewing
techniques.
Kids were learning second, third, and
Middle School
fourth languages – not because their
families had moved or enrolled them in
an institute, but because for seven and a
half hours they could choose to do so.
Kids sought clarifying materials and used
critical thinking skills. Who knew solving
a Rubik’s cube was a simple matter of
knowing and then applying a few
algorithms?
One of the most frustrating questions a
teacher hears is, “Why are we doing this?”
For one week we were able to respond:
You’re doing it because you want to learn
it.
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