My young teenage son is obsessed with Pink Floyd. He learned to play “Wish You Were Here” on his guitar and we finally allowed him to see The Wall. We spent our snow day morning talking about the movie, well, more like me listening as he explained and analyzed the movie. He liked how the images in the movie had a double meaning. The hammers built things, but they also destroyed them. The wall protected, but it also was a symbol of isolation. His analysis of the movie was a synthesis of several days’ research . He found sites and interviews and experts who had their own opinion of the music and movie. He is our 21st century learner.
I appreciate how he takes responsibility for his learning. He finds information from all sorts of different venues: books, magazines, his teachers, his friends and, of course, the web. He knows that there is a wealth of information at his finger tips, and he seems to know how to get to it. (Just for the record, I spend my fair share of time worrying about what he might run across.) However, what struck me after our conversation about The Wall was that he needed to do something with this information in order to process it. He needed to talk to someone about how the images and the music worked well together, but how the images, by themselves, were sometimes just creepy. He still isn’t sure what parts of the story are the protagonist’s hallucinations and which parts really occurred. He still is unsure of what to make of the last scene when the wall comes down, anarchy or liberation?
So that leads me to think about the figurative walls in my classroom. How do I get my students to be so interested in Spanish, that they will be motivated to seek out what they need to make their learning relative and productive? How can I shift my lesson plans, so that I am a facilitator and not a dictator of curriculum? What walls need to come down? What systems and processes need to be built up to make it the best learning environment? As teachers and learners we have some very powerful tools on the web. How can we make the most effective use of them? How can our students pursue their individual interests while the course objectives are still met?
Being on the edge of this shift has been very energizing for me, but it has also been very frustrating. Many times, I have more questions than answers. I’ve never been a “think-outside-the-box” kind of person, yet I find that I have to continue to push myself to see how my classroom may benefit from changes in procedure. I will need to change the way I assess my students to something that is unfamiliar, but that will still make them accountable. I don’t even know what that looks like yet. So, I too, am doing what my son does. I’m gathering information from blogs, from my Twitter network and my Ning colleagues. I’m processing the sample lesson plans and assessment options available to me in the hope that I may also be able to give back and share ideas with others, who are also trying to build new procedures that make sense for our time, and replace systems that no longer work in the 21st century.
