Is school, by its very nature, boring? This is what is on my mind this afternoon as I move through my day, reflecting on the week ahead. I know that a large part of the disengagement that I see in my learners is boredom. The content. The delivery. It’s boring to them, even if it’s not boring to me. Is this something that we just say, “too bad, so sad, not everything in life is fun and games” to? Or is this a systemic, inherent problem that we need to address?
Learning isn’t boring. It’s not always exciting, but it’s always purposeful. It wasn’t exciting to learn how to replace a door knob, but I did it because I had a purpose. And there was a sense of satisfaction at the end when I had a newly replaced and functioning door knob on my garage door. This is what I think it missing in the classroom. This purposeful sense of learning — this learning as a self-driven, self-focused and yet community-based learning. I hear the refrain from my kids all the time: I don’t want to go to school. It’s boring!
Boredom, on it’s own, isn’t always a bad thing. Boredom often leads to creativity. But school boredom? What does it lead to? What is it about the way learning is conducted in school drives out the joy that students have when they first start to enter the classroom? We don’t really lose the joy of learning in our lives; we do, however, find ourselves enduring school just to get to the stuff we really want.
How do we shift? How do we recapture the joy of learning within the classroom? Is it possible? Or are we doomed to boredom by the system? What if we didn’t need to worry about student motivation, or compliance or using reward systems to engage students? What if we didn’t need to put on a show every time we get up in front of the class to get our learners attention? What might school look like then? What does this classroom look like?
I have a dream of this classroom:
This space where my learners enter. They engage in some conversation as they gather their materials, or visit the learning wall, or start posting a problem on a whiteboard space that they wish to discuss. I’m there. I weave in an out of the conversations, guiding here and there, asking questions, prompting, scaffolding as needed. Sometimes we all come together for instruction, sitting, engaging in active listening. I provide direct instruction when it’s needed, other times I provide an inquiry experience that students engage in as part of their learning journey. It’s fluid. It’s flexible. It’s learner-centric. As part of my role, I provide feedback, I provide critique, I provide steps in a journey. This is my dream classroom. Everyone has a notebook where they record their learning journey.
In reality, most of our students are bored, by the content and/or by the delivery method of that content. I believe this is something we need to push back on. It’s not something we should just accept as a necessary evil, a necessary part of the schooling experience. Be clear; I’m not talking about entertaining. We are not the circus. It doesn’t all have to be fun and games. But it does need to be purposeful, engaging, demanding of presence. Our learners should be drawn into the experience that we are building in our classrooms. It shouldn’t be a thing to be endured.
The Learning Lab 