Charlie Noyes - Summer 2021 Newsletter Article

Message from the ISEEN Board Chair - Charlie Noyes

Now in my fourth decade of teaching at a well-resourced and intellectually challenging independent school, I can recall many conversations with colleagues that revolved around our concerns over what we were and were not teaching our students.  When we transcended the specifics of our respective disciplines and honestly questioned the practical depth and functional “value-added” of our classroom teaching, we wondered out loud just how effectively we were preparing our young charges to meet the demands of a rapidly evolving world.  Academically we were covering our bases quite well, but to what extent were we building in and teaching such things as common sense, reasoning & logic, tenacity, effective communication & cooperation skills, and grit – concepts now annoyingly referred to as 21st century soft skills. 

Most often, these pedagogical reflections and frustrations shifted to the back burner as soon as the next bell rang, and we were off to our next class.  But in classrooms where experiential learning is firmly embedded and regularly practiced, there is no such back burner.  Experiential education methodology demands that both students and teachers engage cooperatively in the imagining, design, execution, assessment and regular reflection of their classroom practice.  The power of this student & teacher collaborative planning and execution relationship has been flashing all over my brain as I’ve been reading Matthew B. Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft(2009).  The book may be 11 years old, but the values and concepts he explores are vitally relevant to anyone aspiring to make their teaching and learning more experiential and authentic.

Let me go back to the relationship between planning and execution.  With regard to contemporary industrialized society, Crawford’s critiques revolve around the intentional and systematized separation of executive management -- responsible for conceptualization, planning and design -- from the worker, who is increasingly forced to execute rote tasks with no understanding of or responsibility for the whole process.  Reflecting on a past where people in the trades were fully steeped in their craft, doing meaningful work and taking pride in their self-reliance, Crawford makes a powerful case for reconnecting the processes of planning and execution both in our contemporary economic/industrial model and our American educational system.

By now I trust that you can see where I’m going with this symbiosis between conceptualization and planning and the process of practice and execution. While traditional academic teaching can revolve around teacher-centered selection and delivery of content, abstract conceptualization, and summative assessment, an experiential practice involves student participation at the outset of the planning process, themes and projects that embody real world relevance, assessments that are formative and help expand on the learning (rather than simply measuring outcomes), and reflection practiced by both students and teachers, start to finish.  In other words, students in experientially driven classrooms are intimately involved throughout the planning and execution phases of their learning.  Such involvement results in deeper learning, personal commitment and sustained intrinsic motivation.  Best of all, failure on any number of levels creates positive opportunities to revise and reapply new knowledge, which is exciting rather than discouraging for student and teacher alike.  Crawford speaks to such authentic, satisfying and inspired learning when he states that “the tradesman must reckon with the infallible judgement of reality, where one’s failures or shortcomings cannot be interpreted away.  His well-founded pride is far from the gratuitous “self-esteem” that educators would impart to students, as though by magic.”

In an experientially driven school culture, students and teachers work together to develop content and drive process.  Planning and execution are shared responsibilities.  There is time and support for reasoning one’s way through the inevitable misunderstandings and missteps, and effective cooperation and communication skills are integral to any successful outcome.  And participants are more likely to demonstrate tenacity and grit in the face of setbacks because they all share a meaningful stake in the content development, the learning process and the execution of final outcome goals.  Why would we ever want to put such ideals and aspirations on the back burner?  In today’s perpetually challenging interconnected world, experiential education makes more sense than ever.

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