In Blended Learning with Google: Your Guide to Dynamic Teaching and Learning by Kasey Bell, tackles different ways to leverage engaging technology. While the book is targeted for K-12 teachers, there are many concepts that might resonate to higher education educators.
In chapter 7, “Beyond the Due Date”, Kasey posits that we should strive to help students engage in content past the due date. Lighting a fire of interest in students. That’s hard to do for every assignment, but if we can help students fall in love with some topics, we might create a trajectory in a student’s life that otherwise would not have been there.
Kasey also gives us a cautionary tale:
I remember one student in particular. Let’s call her Mandy. Mandy didn’t get along with many students. She often didn’t fit into the status quo. She was seen as different, rough around the edges, and often as the bully. Mandy had a lot of stuff going on at home, and the stories she confided to me broke my heart.
Late in the year, Mandy immersed herself in a novel study we were doing in class. She came in every morning before school, “Miss Bell, Miss Bell, Miss Bell! I did this, this, this, and this last night on my project.” She was totally into it! She was also going above and beyond anything I had asked of her. I knew she had already met all of the required criteria for the project. But when it came time to turn it in, Mandy asked for more time. She just wanted to do one more thing—something that wasn’t even required.
I had to tell Mandy that she still had to turn it in on time so I could get my grade in the gradebook. This was before we had so many devices in our classroom, and it was a physical product that I had to have to assess her work. If this were to happen today, it is much more likely the project would be digital or have digital components that I could assess without having to take ownership of the project. Mandy had to turn it in.
But even though I promised to give it back to her the next day, I had stifled her creativity and that line of thinking. I stifled the passion she had in that project, and that broke my heart. By the time I had returned it to her she had lost interest, and in her mind, she had lost the supportive mentor I had been throughout that project. The physicality of just giving up on something can really be a detriment to our students. Now, every student with passion doesn’t have problems at home like Mandy. But for her, this wasn’t just learning she enjoyed, this was an escape AND a learning spark!
This is a bit of a blurred line – do we let the student take one or two more days (violating the due date) so they can engage their passion, or do we stick to the due date to honor punctuality, responsibility, and time management.
I’m not suggesting there is a right answer to this question, and in many situations the right answer is contextual. But this story does remind us that the pure, authentic learning experiences have many dimensions to them but if we can walk away from a semester knowing we did our best to get our students to fall in love with something, we’ve succeeded.
Photo by Jamie Street on Unsplash
