Primary school teacher Oliver Quinlan has written a great post about giving his eight-year-old students a half an hour of 'independence time' at the start of the day, to pursue whatever they want. His school gets a lot of visitors, here's what happened when one came in:
One day in particular a visiting teacher had been talking to one boy about the 3D buildings he was designing using Google Sketchup, she was visibly amazed by the quality of his work, but stepping back and seeing a whole class doing totally different things she asked the question;
“How do you make sure they don’t just work on the same thing every day?”
My answer? “I don’t.”. Of course I engaged with what they were doing, of course I tried to make sure they were challenging themselves and pushing their projects forward, but what I didn’t do was artificially stop something they were engaged in order to make sure they got some enforced ‘variety’.
The boy she was so impressed with spent at least 3 independence sessions a week developing building designs using Sketch Up, not for one week, or a even term, but for the whole year. He didn’t get a wide variety of experience in his ‘Independence Time’, but what he did get was the chance to nurture a talent and an interest to a level which astounded the adults who visited our class.
I read this in the midst of working on the project-based learning guide, and it really resonates with the work I've been doing.
In particular, I find it so interesting that so many of us instinctively recoil at the thought of students 'doing the same thing every day' because it's what they're excited about. That's how people become experts!
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