Extracurricular Empowerment

I just finished watching the video “Extracurricular Empowerment,” a speech from Scott McLeod at TEDxDesMoines. This was an independently organized event similar to a TED talk, and Scott McLeod’s contribution here was just as inspiring as many of the TED talks I’ve seen.

Mr. McLeod started with a story about Martha Payne, an elementary-age blogger who took a simple blog with pictures focusing on the poor quality of her school lunches and leveraged it not only into social change and the eventual change of her school lunch menus to a higher quality – but also into a funded non-profit organization feeding the food insecure in Africa.

McLeod then pivoted to talk about a number of other young people who have leveraged technology in powerful ways – either for their own entrepreneurial gains or for the betterment of society.

I love it when TED talks focus on a young person’s accomplishments or abilities when they bring the power of technology to bear. No one told them they couldn’t. No one told them no. Someone showed them the basics and got out of their way.

McLeod listed a number of characteristics that apply to these powerful youth:

Curious
Confident
Enthusiastic
Passionate
Disciplined
Critical thinkers
Self-directed
Problem-solvers

Just think about that. This is an amazing set of qualities for one person to possess. And yet, when you think of successful people you know, these are the qualities that stick out – maybe not all of them, but certainly combinations of them. And the thing is – technology gives a wider array of people the ability to latch onto something and pursue these qualities in themselves and their personal projects. It empowers people to reach out and communicate their ideas to others, to show other people a different way to look at a problem.

“The challenge is taking the extracurricular and making it curricular.”

McLeod spoke that most of these children pursued this success in an extracurricular manner – that is, outside of their school environment. What if we could somehow open up our curriculum in a way that allowed for this kind of pursuit in an encouraged and supported environment? The children McLeod discussed either had incredible confidence or were supported by family or maybe even a teacher. How much more widespread would this attitude and lifestyle be if we tried to allow for it inside of our curriculum, instead of closing out the possibility for it by cramming more standards than a student could reasonably learn inside of a time frame, every time frame, and leaving no time for creative reinforcement of any standard through creative or technological means? I’d love to see more open-ended creative and critical-thinking time integrated into the curriculum.

“If we want more of these kids, we have to get rid of fear and the need for control.”

Fear and control are the keys to making the extracurricular a part of the curricular, says McLeod. Basically, we have to take our thumbs off the curriculum and the standards and open it up a bit. In a society where we feel like we need 100% control over every little element of our lives, leaving even a fraction of a percent of our children’s education up to any kind of chance feels insultingly stupid. But by boxing in all of their curricular time, you burn their brains out on the memorization of facts that are quickly becoming less and less useful as the world of technology rushes in to replace them. How much more creativity would we see if we backed off, even a little bit, from the scheduled-a-year-in-advance academic calendar and allowed a little leeway for creativity, critical thinking, and passion?

“We have to give them something meaningful to work on.”

Here’s my big takeaway. Giving a child a reason to do what you’re asking them to do seems like a no-brainer – and yet, the purpose of their daily work is rarely defined further than “this is the standard, this is what you’ll be able to do at the end of today, because yearly tests.” That is a tragedy. A good teacher will connect that standard, but often that connection is just as abstract as the standard itself.  I love problem-based learning and problem styles that connect the student to the world around them. A colleague showed me a great real-world example of this here in Loudoun County recently where at Liberty Elementary School, students learned coding skills, which they used to program actual flying drones to run obstacle courses on the fly. This is the kind of place I want to work, and the kind of problems I want my students to be working on in the classroom. A student could take that simple learned ability, interaction, and imaginative skill and develop an entire career around just one extra idea – and the thing is, a child shown this type of problem has just as much ability as an adult in solving it or using the creativity to work through or around it! That’s amazing to me! I hope I’m never so limited by the curriculum that I can’t work real-world activities and community-connected problem solving into the equation.

I want my students to shock me. I want my students to be self-confident critical thinkers that solve problems on the fly, not memorize standards for a test they won’t need ten minutes after they pass it. I want my students to change the world.

You should, too.