UNDERSTANDING THE NEW CULTURE OF LEARNING

Walking into my classroom on a typical day often makes the uninitiated do a double-take. Kids are up and roaming. Everyone is talking and no one is getting told to be quiet or to keep it down. "Today's Hits" are playing in the background as students make their way from driving the Spheros to creating in the Minecraft station or the "Maker Space" table. Some are building robots using LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3, while others have advanced to creating battlebots with VEX. Others are coding on Scratch or CodeHS.

This is the STEM LAB at Burnet Middle School. This is Mr. Long's room.

I hail from the "Core Curriculum" of folk; teachers hellbent on increasing test scores in order to meet state standards so as to keep the doors open. I did this for 10 years, teaching both english and history, and I was rather good at it. But there was a significant problem: it wasn't authentic.

And more importantly, it wasn't fun.

Enter 2016, when the new administration is wanting to commit more resources to STEAM education and an opening comes available at my school. I am hesitant to accept their offer at first, but eventually concede, finding it intriguing to be able to build something from the ground up. The problem, though, was that I was still of the "Core" mindset. I immediately put my room into rows, sharpened my pencils, and prepared my trusty PPTs. I'm a good teacher so I made it work, but I immediately knew it wasn't what it should be. The kids didn't seem engaged.

And more importantly, it wasn't fun.

Flash-forward to 2020. After many trainings, many experimentations and a lot of soul-searching, I have totally embraced Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown's 'New Culture of Learning,' where "old ways of learning can't keep up with our rapidly changing world" and that "new-media forms are making peer-to-peer learning easier and more natural".

Enter my class and it's a bustle of activity. The kids are talking, moving, and collaborating. More importantly, they're having fun. Tiered-learning stations based on Gardner's 9 Multiple Intelligences are key to my classroom design. There are some students building while some are coding; there are some designing while others are testing. Student phones are out, but you'll be hard-pressed to find anyone using them inappropriately. These wunderkinds of technology are not shunned in my class; instead, students are using them as remote extensions of their learning through our district's blended learning CANVAS app, where course materials and anchors help guide their learning.